My life, which had once been wide, funded by rootlessness, luck, and credit, founded on worn narratives of progress and its critique (surely the very notion of apprenticing at all would imply a belief in the existence of a future), has become, suddenly, narrower. Less mobile. It occurs to me that if my apprenticeship has in fact ended, then once my obligations with the capitalist are complete, I will be handing in my notice at the shared corner apartment. I will be needing, while also perhaps wanting, to stay put in the place in which my life is, on the whole, more manageable. To stay put out of chance and necessity, but also to learn what the fact of staying put might mean.

It occurs to me that before this happens, I would like to create an opportunity to meet S in person; at the same time, I feel certain that the moment has not yet come.

For now, my week at the apartment is up and I have a shift tomorrow back at the café-bar.

It occurs to me that S knows just as little about my body, about my tangible self, as I know about theirs. Soon S will again be 150 miles away.

WHO WE ARE

Last night, in a contemplative mood, or mode, I harvested one of the mushrooms from the bin and bit off the cap.

I was hoping to find a shortcut to discovering what it is I want to tell you. About my questions and my lists, about the unsecured corporate wireframe and the terribly tender flesh.

I lay down and had a very long sentence foot under then over leg to the window where one no two trees hid a brightbright thing, starthing faraway green though up close were also a thousand-hundred or hunnerred smaller that looked the same size and the dog—did you know there was a dog, not a real—was a waggything and then, and then it became allclear, because this was mild, you see, only a smallsmall bite, and now it’s morning and I’m clever and it’s time to tell you who I am.

Or who I’m not: myself. Is that enough?