Or maybe I confuse coherence with cohesion. The psychoanalyst once explained the danger of this mistake, of letting the left brain suppress what the right brain knows. The way we rush to make sense of things, invent airtight accounts, stories that follow. We depend on these unprovoked lies.

A cohesive story, the analyst clarified, may well lead to a desired result (we may get wrong why the bird crashed into the window, but the decals we put up save the next bird’s life).

When I was a child, I thought swooping sparrows were hunters, hoping to nest in my unkempt hair.

But coherence doesn’t come so easily, or have such immediate results. At this point in the analyst’s explanation, I began to disappear. My eyes and ears wandered, to a fly buzzing in a spiderweb strung between the radiator and the wall. A session of Anti-Love had just ended; the winter sun had dropped behind the mountain and the gas pumps; the street was empty and I was spent. I struggled to understand the challenge I felt: if cohesion was marked by false order, by a completionism that held chaotic truths at bay, then coherence (its corrective?) consisted of work I didn’t know how to do. What I recall about the distinction between cohesion and coherence is a feeling of desirous terror—or terrified desire—at the prospect of abandoning my attachment to the first before being able even to conceptualize the second.

What can be told, without inciting this terror? What kinds of stories, what narratives, invented or not?

Or are these the questions I’m training myself not to ask?

When dawn lifts itself over the corner apartment, the bodega glows. The playground waits for its portion of light. Late risers don’t know this, but there is always a moment, sometimes fleeting, when the clouds brim pink. In bed, angled toward uncurtained windows, I wait for it. When there are no clouds, the pink separates itself onto puddles, passersby.

I can’t know what has become me, what becomes.

Stack of unverifiable facts, archive of mistakes.

Some strays can attach to anyone, over and over.

WORK

This month, while work has stopped through no fault of my own, while I need to conserve what little funds I have (while I have more time than money), I will try to catch up; I will follow the syllabus of Love. I like to follow, but the syllabus has so many holes. In the beginning, I won’t try to plug them. I can’t make promises for the future—this being one of my failings, both in and out of love.

When I say work has stopped, I mean one-third of my work has stopped. I have three jobs, in two places, connected by a train. (I’m using the word place where before I used surround, though now neither term feels right.)