I admitted this is the thing I don't know how to do: Live with someone. I am not sure how it happened before. As we figure it out, it is also the process of learning each other. We have our histories and I don't allow myself to get particularly hung up on them. I have decided not to get not allow myself to get in over my head. I don't know if that's a function of not completely giving myself over like before, but I think it's better this way. I am not afraid of anything because what I have to lose isn't going to wreck me so completely as before. It's like Manny told me, You always need to have an exit plan. You always need to look out for yourself. I didn't do that before. I gave myself up. So when it comes to trust, I wonder, does it matter if I trust or not? If I am willing to lose what I've offered up, then what is there to trust? It's more of a professional agreement, right? I have learned not to give anything with the expectation that I'll get something back.

So I find myself ticking off the process elements of it, of living together. Things I should put on the to-do list: Do the Laundry. Plan a date night. Hug three times a day. Make her lunch. Do the dishes. Ask how her day went. Send a text message at mid-morning. There is a layer on my mind wishing that simply doing these things will make it work, because it seems that the last women I've known needed just these small things. They didn't demand anymore. They didn't want to eat me completely. If I am considerate and honest and dependable then it will work, right? Then it won't fail, right?

It can still fail. That's why you have to be ready to lose. Enjoy what is in front of you. Stop over analyzing. We are here as long as we choose to be. Everyday there is the decision.

What do I want?

I want to raise my son well and to know him.

I want to love someone and be loved in return. I want to be known.

I want to know my friends and in turn have them know me. I want to be who I am at all times.

I want to be financially secure and to take care of my family. I want my children to have more opportunities than I did.

I want to create things that last.

I want to prepare for the future while thoroughly enjoying the present.

I want to get the most of the time I have.

I want to be good.

One side effect of having learned to plan things in the army is that I often find myself wondering what will happen to something or someone should I get whacked. I don't plan on dying, but the possibility of it happening without my consent, and thereby leaving all these things I've been working on out in limbo, is something I think about probably once a day.

I know I'm finished because I just consciously downloaded and burned The Postal Service - Give Up so I can listen in the car. Put a fork in me, baby.

Last night I finished a run of 7 miles in 45 minutes, and as I walked up and down a street near the college, looking up into cherry blossoms and green trees with my hands on my head, breathing deeply the evening air, I thought of how fortunate I am. I found myself saying: This is happiness.

Even if it doesn't last, if these moments with her don't last, right now it is the best feeling, and I'll do my best to remember.

Her daughter came into the bedroom this morning as we lay tumbled in each other, and she didn't freak out about it. In fact her littler girl climbed right into the bed and we laughed and joked until it was time to get moving and make breakfast. She had Cheerios while we made breakfast bagels together. I made the eggs and she toasted the bagels.

It was so easy. I don't know when I've been allowed to be part of something that felt so easy.

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.

His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A.

At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.

We woke sometime early this morning and lay in the covers, our first night together. After a while she said, "It's so strange. I was looking at your arm lying across mine. It seems the older I get, the more I notice contrasts. The difference between masculine and feminine. "

"I think it's the same as an artist seeing shape and color," I said. "Masculine and feminine is probably the strongest energy that runs the world. It makes sense that you would notice it."

After leaving her house I went on a bird walk, invited randomly by a friend. The guide explained how first he listens for the birds, because so often they're heard and not seen. Then he searches the distance for color, shape and movement. Then, when watching a flock feeding or flying by, he looks for the differences that separate one from another. Some species are easily apparent. Others have appeared only once in a hundred years.

Five hours later, I thought of the words: The collage of you and I.

My days have no shape outside work. I feel the need for some kind of routine but it escapes me. Last night I went to a late movie and came home to friends in the house, three cases of beer into it, yelling at the street.

In June I will be 33. I feel perpetually 22.

The redeeming thing about Colleen was that if I caught her with sadness in her face, and she saw me, she would compose herself and smile brilliantly. (She did everything with glamor.) She presented happiness even if we both knew it was bullshit. That was no good for me but it was going to get her through. Her world of surfaces began with the smile, her perfect dental assistant's teeth, the teeth that even had their own picture on her Myspace page.

It wasn't going to work for me because I was trying to get closer to what hurt me. I was no longer interested in hiding what I didn't like in myself or others. I think she believed I was going to make it possible for her to slide from one life to another, and when I realized that and broke up with her, she said, "I'm trying to figure out who you are."

Maybe I wanted to take the smile away. Making her cry was enough. Another woman told me recently that she was evil. I don't know what that means, really.

When the shells hit the zoo five hundred exotic species spurted like awkward pollen and scattered all across the tan streets and plumbing-covered roofs of Baghdad. The leopards ran for the Tigris. An elephant wandered into the middle of the intersection where I sat in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, praying to the satellite gods to show me the way to a checkpoint that appeared on the intel photo but didn't seem to exist in reality. Getting lost had been my greatest fear since we left Kuwait for the desert. Now the city held death at every corner, and none of the maps matched or made sense. I could only trust the satellites now, and they were betraying me too.

I held the green body of the GPS receiver between myself and the sun, squinting at the unchanging numerals on the gray screen, when I heard one of the crew shout, “Whoa.”

The elephant stood looking at us, trunk lifting and falling as if it wanted to sniff the hot breath of the twenty millimeter cannon swiveling its direction. I dropped the GPS to raise my short-nosed rifle into a firing position and watched the elephant slide into full view. It turned its head, which seemed the size of a small car, so that one forlorn black eye watched me from across the street.

The elephant flapped its ears against the heat, the watching eye as mysterious and innocent as that of a whale. I couldn't help but assume it judged us somehow.
“Leave it alone,” I told the crew.

“Can I touch it?” asked Bertelson, one of the gunners.

We knew how to respond to guerrilla Saddam Fedayeen and the constant spitting of artillery from random and supposedly secure portions of the city, but this was a situation I couldn't spare the mental energy to grasp.

“No,” I said. I lowered my rifle and looked back to the satellite photo under the shade of the hatch.

+

“Come on, Chris. Touch it.”

I studied the office vixen under the bar's rotating police lights and wavered, noting the Maraschino cherry waiting between her lips, stem searching up and down as she rolled her tongue. I wasn't supposed to fixate on the stem. I was supposed to be watching the nipple revealed from the loose neck of her standard-issue Sexy Professional Blouse.

Being the good public servant that I am, I reached across the table with pincering fingers, paused dramatically, and then ran an index finger over the thimble before twisting it until she squealed and dropped the cherry in her lap.

“Oh, sorry,” I said.

“That was a surprise,” she gasped. She turned her face toward where her friend was giggling uncontrollably into her shoulder.

“You’re a mean fucker,” Rob said, raising his glass.

We toasted our noose-wearing selves and then the office vixens, who had explained they were in marketing and sales, brunette and blond respectively. Jane, the blond, turned to face the dance floor and raised her blouse to show Rob the leopard tattooed across the tan small of her back, one paw raised.

+

“Shut up,” I said. “Put away the Gameboy, Hall. Let’s go.”

“What about the elephant, sir?”

"The elephant will take care of itself."

The Bradley jerked as Hall shifted gears and the track spun in place. We rumbled toward the far side of the intersection, away from the forlorn elephant. Pulling the hatch down behind me, I dropped into the cramped interior of our metal block and stumbled toward the radio terminal, where a LCD was supposed to show the location of other tracks in nearby streets. Squelch spit in my ear as I released the button on the mic.

“Is this shit working?” I asked, banging the handset on the face of the radio. “Did we drop codes again?”

“Sir,” Hall shouted from the front of the track. “Enemy emplacement ten o’clock.”

"Are you certain?"

"Sir?" he shouted, fear filling his voice.

“Engage,” I said.

The Bradley rocked with the concert percussion of the twenty millimeter canon as Bertelson ran through a belt and we all touched sweaty metal surfaces to steady ourselves. We grasped at weapons, ready to dump out the back hatch if necessary.

In the space between the wind-down and Bertelson’s practice-honed motions of reload, three forces hit the Bradley from every direction but that of the emplacement up the street. The word "pow" filled my mind, from my left, back, and right: pow, pow, pow, a concussion like hydraulics. We had entered the struggle of a massive machine. Only bigger than any sound I had ever heard, a sound that reached deep in my chest. From every direction but the emplacement up the street.

I became weightless. I felt myself rise in the vacuum.

+

The church dated from the 1880s and had a stiff bell we pulled together until it tolled. I remember watching Sarah walk toward me between the old pews, our family on either side, in a pearl gown that made her body flow. The veil lay like frost on her hair. When she made the turn into the aisle on her father’s arm and our eyes met, and she smiled such happiness, I felt filled with the confidence of a thousand lives.

At the reception, my friends, all decorated in the dress blues of new lieutenants, shoved a cigar in my mouth and slapped me on the back. We were graduated, commissioned officers. At last, Sarah and I were married.

“I’m so sick of listening to this bullshit,” Carl said. He pulled himself straighter, balancing his cup of burnt coffee. “You think you know what fucking pain is, Chris? Pain is paying child support while the bitch you loved shacks up with your ex-boss. That’s pain.”

Malcolm the facilitator fixed him with bored eyes. “It’s his turn to talk, let him talk, Carl. Who the hell are you to judge what’s painful? You cheated on her in the first place and deserved what you got.”

“I don’t deserve never getting to see my kid. Chris don’t even have kids.”

“I like AA better than this bunch,” Josh hissed in my ear. “They’re all grateful to be free over there. Here it’s like everybody’s pissed to have been kicked out of prison.”

“Go ahead, Chris,” Malcolm said, flipping a page in his Field & Stream. “What about this girl you met last week?”

“Yeah,” Carl said. “The one with the tattoo.”

“That was the other one,” I said, like it was the most important detail to remember. “Mine didn’t have a tattoo. She had blue fingernails.”

I had no reason to be here other than my mom begged me to talk to somebody: if not a veteran’s group, than this circle jerk for divorced men, where they one-up each other with support payments and what bitches their wives were, forgetting what assholes they were to begin with. Sarah never asked to be the stoic and forlorn captain’s wife in the Civil War portrait. I never thought I would trade her for a war.

+

“Oh, you want me, don’t you?” Lindsey called, falling sideways into me. Halfway between my apartment and the bar – I lived within stumbling distance of downtown for a reason – she pulled me against the side of the Aurora building and kissed me like I tasted delicious. The friendly nipple was hard in my hand as she pushed her body against me. Her mouth tasted enjoyably like appletinis.

“So,” she said, pulling back and reaching for my belt buckle, pointing her face at my crotch. “So wha-syza cock have you got in there for-mee?”

“What?” I said.

“How big’s your dick?” she enunciated.

“I didn’t ask how big your tits were,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, cupping her breasts and leaning forward like an online dating mugshot. “What I’ve got’s all out in the open.”

“That could be a pushup bra.”

“Trust me,” she affirmed. “It’s not.”

“I should tell you something,” I said, close to her ear. “Usually, I guess, this wouldn’t really come up right away.”

She said something into my neck, kissing inside my collar.

“I got hurt by a bomb in Iraq,” I said. I don’t think she heard me right away, so I said it again, and she raised her eyes to watch me through the alcohol.

“You’re saying a bomb blew your dick off?” she said.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Oh.”

“I mean. I think you should know that before we fool around. But we still can.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

+

I felt the Bradley rising and falling like a hand slapping a table, and then I was hard on the steel floor of the vehicle, gasping in the white blaze filling my eyes. The turbine was choking and it seemed the track still wanted to move, until the engine suddenly stopped and silence crackled behind the whiteness.

My mind failed to move beyond the static screen in front of my face. One side my mind screamed this is not a movie. This is not the dramatic pause. There is no distance of silence here giving you the gift of perspective. The rest of me was paralyzed. I felt the steel grating against my cheek but my body would not move.

It was an ambush. I don’t know when I realized. They had been waiting. Right now they would see the Bradley smoking, unsure of what was happening inside. The general told us in Kuwait: Do not underestimate this enemy. Doing so will mean your death.

He also said, Think two and three steps ahead. Don’t forget the second and third order effects of every decision you make.

Right now they are coming closer. Right now they are finding grenades to toss through the open turret. They initiated with their most damage-producing weapon.

They will follow with fire.

Outside the static I heard Hall’s Gameboy playing Tetris music over and over again.

They will follow with fire.

+

“There’s something you need to know about my friend Chris, here,” Rob said. It was midnight and this was his closing pitch. Although we worked in insurance claims, he could have beat any sales Vampirella any Ladies Night of the week. “He’s a war hero. He made it through the invasion.”

The vixens turned wide eyes in my direction. Lindsey squeezed my hand supportively.

“That’s why he rides a bicycle,” Rob said. “He doesn’t support oil war anymore. But,” he paused, “and this is totally fucked up.” They waited while he sipped his whiskey. Rob cleared his throat. “Listen to this: his wife left him while he was down range. He was at war and she left him.”

“Oh, that’s totally wrong,” Jane blurted.

Lindsey put her head on my shoulder. I had nothing to add. It was Rob’s fantasy. He gripped Jane’s waist and pulled her toward him as he lifted me on the pedestal that rose like the Tower of Babel every week the story repeated itself. He changed the details: I earned different awards, commanded more troops. I was gone shorter times before she left. Sarah’s name was never her own. I was the war hero who dragged two of his troops from a burning vehicle under sniper fire going plink, plink on the asphalt, to the soundtrack of Tetris.

Rob could not describe the woman with brown hair and green eyes only I had known.

+

“I don’t understand how you can do this,” she said.

“What do you think I’ve been doing the past two years?” I asked.

She looked at the table-top. The kid at the front counter said, “Whopper minus pickle extra mayo.”

“We’re going to have a baby, Chris. Doesn’t that change anything for you?”

Three months in, she liked to sit with her hips forward and her hands on her stomach, as if she could feel the baby growing whenever she sat still. Her womb had become the fulcrum of the universe. The paycheck that bought the solid oak crib, the John Lennon sheet set and matching mobile, the pregnancy library and a hundred other baby necessities she had free reign to stockpile in the last two months, was apparently not important to her new reality.

“You expect me to not go, Sarah? To be AWOL? That’s great until a cop pulls us over five years from now and I go to prison.”

She looked at the table. “Sure.”

“What about the soldiers? Do you think they deserve leadership that won’t get them killed? What about their families who want them to come home?”

“What do I deserve, Chris? I deserve a husband who stays with his wife when she needs him. We’re about to have a child.” Her eyes met mine. “You’re such a hypocrite,” she said. “You don’t even believe in this war.”

+

In the vacuum the war was finally real. I had finally experienced the pain of combat, in the form of three RPGs. All the fear before now had been wasted. My piece had finally arrived.

Anyone can be a parent but who can say they’ve been to war? Who can say they pointed a rifle at a man three hundred meters away and ended his life in a red spray against a dirty tan wall?

I had followed my commander into the Division Operations Center in the middle of the Babylonian desert, six-thousand miles from home, to behold the nexus of modern war: a great dome covered in screens and floored by terminals and workstations, busier than a stock exchange, all focused on the single purpose of exerting one nation's will upon another. From Alexander to Napoleon to this moment, how could I not feel as though I stood on the cusp of history? The greatest army in the history of the world. The intersection of technology, power and the long awaited mission.

This was the greatest trick they played on me, I realize now. As unimportant as the baby made me to her, the war made me doubly important to the Army. As she grew to want me less, the organization wanted me more.

It didn’t hurt so much, at first, making the trade.

+

I woke to my commander's sad eyes watching me. The white liner of the hospital tent stretched behind his sun-burned head.

“You can get the fuck out of here whenever you want, Chris,” he said.

“It’s quiet here,” I said.

He looked down the row of cots at bandaged, moaning soldiers. “They want to keep you," he said finally. "But I need you back.”

“Was I shot?”

“You’ve got shrapnel in your back. They say you’ll be fine.”

He blinked slowly, like his eyes didn’t want to give up sight. He was from Ohio, and had been an opinionated man before we invaded Iraq. He used to resort to quoting talk radio during arguments. He had three kids. He took every death too personally to make it through unscathed.

“You got a Red Cross message, Chris,” he said.

“From who?”

“You didn’t tell me Sarah was pregnant.”

I swallowed, and felt the pillow against my head. I could smell him from three feet away. I felt clean and separated already from his fight. Leaving the bed would involve me again.

“You should have told me, Chris.”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“But you don’t have to carry this weight alone.” He looked down at his dirty Kevlar helmet and the faded oak leaf of his rank. “You’re not the first person to go through this,” he said.

I was not special.

“The two of you can try again,” he said.

+

“Why’d you use that stupid fucking line on her?” Rob demanded by the coffee machine. “I totally had that set up for you.”

“That’s the test,” I said. “If she sticks around, I figure she deserves what she thinks she isn’t going to get.”

Rob shoved a mug at me. “It’s a guaranteed way to get the crazy,” he said. “She was a perfectly normal freak.”

“Of course. How was Jane?”

“Jane and I had a great conversation.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s all that really matters.”

+

It was unusual for a captain to lead raids and the platoon I was assigned figured I was suicidal. I should have been happy making PowerPoint slides in a Green Zone bunker. Instead I found myself shining the stark glare of a flashlight at a family comprised of a man my age who spoke the Queen’s own English, his wife and their four year-old daughter, who glared at me with such contempt that I couldn't look away from her brown eyes.

“What?” the man demanded endlessly. “We have done nothing. Please leave us. We support the United States. We want only peace.”

The little girl stood in the center of the room, soldiers milling around her, as her father and mother submitted to the ransacking of their home. My job was to tell the soldiers what to do if they encountered something outside the battle drill. It was my job to take the blame.

I watched the little girl. Sarah’s answering machine now told the world, “Chris, if this is you, I have nothing left to say to you. Please stop calling.”
The little girl did not blink under the glare of the flashlight.

Eventually her mother hissed at her and she moved slowly to press herself against her black robes, her brown eyes still judging our progress as we tore her house apart.

Here's the thing. I've felt drawn to you from the first time I met you. I wanted to be alone with you. But I don't feel I've got a lot of big romantic gestures in me right now. This might be the most of it. I don't know that's fine with you. I don't know what I've got the heart for. Sometimes I don't even know why I'm doing this, but something makes me want to, so I do. There it is.

Once upon a time I invested all my emotion in a woman, and then that relationship failed, maybe because, as she liked to say, I didn't want to share her with our son. (Now I realize that that was her looking for some way to blame it on me, but whatever.) Now, however, in the three years since I stopped being a family man, stopped convincing myself I needed to do whatever to make her happy, I have felt my love for my son grow. And now it basically fills my need to love someone. As a result, I find myself willing to invest much less in women that I was before. Sex is great, but I'm not looking to them for emotional fulfillment.

I'm not sure what this means but I felt the need to articulate it. I could feel completely different down the line.

"Did the clock keep you up all night?" she asked when it had finished chiming, surprising all of us.

"Oh, not so much," her sister said. "It wasn't that loud." She rolled over languidly in the covers. She could spend all day in bed. She said she was looking for work but was going to be teaching a class at the university for the next term. Something about research.

"But what room is above this one?" she asked.

"That's our bedroom."

They both looked at me and I was staring at the wall. I wasn't listening exactly until she said bedroom. The word bedroom immediately reminded us all that "our" was no longer her and me, but she and her new boyfriend. Bedroom is such an excellently loaded word.

Sometimes I don't know why I even walk in the door.

I do it for my son. I hope he never understands any of this.

Dear Francine,

I don't know what she will look like. For a long time I only chased women with dark hair and eyes. They were as opposite of her as I could get. Ultimately their counterpoint made them unreal. I have chased a life with no future. I don't want anything to last. I know I can't have you; this might be why I write you still. I let everyone else attainable fall away. I live in my head. I'm in a love with a girl who doesn't exist anymore.

How wonderfully self-defeating. How easy. I will never hurt again, right? I can hear you laughing at me. What if I could have you? Is that the secret epiphany I'll learn in the end? How frightening it might be to get what you want: if you don't know what you want.

Dear Francine,

You should know that I'm sitting here staring at your postcard, as I've been doing for about a week, and I still don't know how to answer. I have to write something, so I'm starting without knowing where this letter will go. Well, they've all begun that way, but this one feels more like a challenge.

"Tell me the story you have to tell."

And that's all she wrote. I like the picture of Madrid, though. Are you on vacation? I can't imagine finding anything cheap in Spain. Well, strawberries. I had some excellent strawberries in Mallorca. They were small and popping with juice like little kisses.

Going through the week with a challenge like your line floating through my head has been irritating. What is the story I have to tell? If I had a gun to my head and was about to be erased from the earth, what would I say? What mark would I leave scratched on the wall? My story, of course.

But I don't know how to arrange my life in any meaningful way. Maybe I wrote you in the first place because I thought you would point me toward a starting point, since you knew me back in the day. I don't know if there was an original moment of truth or if I'm inching my way toward one. I guess that would mean I have hope for the future, that I'm capable of learning or changing, that I can be more than a guy who approves insurance claims and wastes energy chasing the affection of a different woman a month.

However, I do have a story to tell you this week, without getting into the story I have to tell. Not yet. Or maybe this is part of that story. I don't know but I need to get your take on the situation because it's freaking me out a little bit. Well, not really, but I'm not sure how to respond to some statement that have been revealed to me.

So, I met a new girl.

About two weeks ago I was at eighties night at a local establishment I enjoy, one that has a slightly sketchy atmosphere but a good mix of people depending on whether the university students are in attendance. R and I like to check it out only every couple weeks because it's got a cover charge. However, it can sometimes be the best dance party in town.

Well, I have a few of the well drinks as toast to the DJs, who are doing an excellent job (one of whom is a friend of mine) and make my way out onto the dance floor. Not two minutes into "Pussy Control" I meet a girl who shouts her name as V, and becomes my dance partner for the next several tracks. She was curvy, with a tongue ring, and long bangs of blood-red hair she kept tucking behind an ear.

V danced in a dirty sort of way that I really appreciated, but she never let me get too close, and when we went outside for a cigarette, the first thing she told me was, "You're bad."

"As in?" I asked.

"You know what I mean," she said. She had an evil little smirk that, combined with the red hair, had a pretty strong effect on me. Or maybe it was the drinks.

Dear Francine,

I'm sitting here in my boxers getting ready to go out. I started to write you something earlier but decided to drink a few beers and watch Comedy Central instead. Oh! you gasp, you're not my first priority? Baby, until you write me a full and real reply, you'll get the after-thoughts.

Did I tell you I'm usually only interested in a female for about thirty days max? Sometimes it's as short as a week. You're reaching your expiration date, and unless you give me something more than a reflection of my own pent-up high school angst, I'm going to have to turn my wandering eye elsewhere.

No, I'm not really such a dick. You're the only person who'll ever hear the previous statement.

I'm meeting my pal Rob at Lucky's and then I'm not sure what afterward. We seem to be ending up at the Lucky Noodle a lot lately. The drinks are expensive as hell, but by the time we get down there the Carrie Bradshaw knock-offs are mumbling in their martinis and looking for a young man wearing a tie to save them, such as myself.

That melancholy crap about Sparky the Husband-bot isn't anything to get too worried about. Really, I'm not even sure why I wrote that down, since the lab assistant was the only girl to bring the protective response in a while.

Before the alcohol intervention I had planned on writing you a long and detailed account of a regular day in my life at Rothschild Insurance. Today I even got to partake in a sexy conference call with Gretchen at the home office in Frankfurt. (I'm trying to work my way into a trip to check out the headquarters, but I'm not confident at this point.) Gretchen loves correcting my grammar and I enjoy imagining what she's wearing while we compare claims payouts and balance various spreadsheets. Oh, the office life for me.

Did I tell you I'm living downtown in the High Street Tower? I doubt you remember it: I don't know if it even existed when we were in high school. But it's a posh apartment, and in easy stumbling distance of every place I might want to hang out on a Friday night.

D asked me to send you his love. I wasn't sure if you wanted everyone in the world having your address, so I haven't given it to him yet. But I can if you don't mind. He's still working in Phoenix. In fact he called from up on a billboard putting up a giant advertisement for liquor, and he said he had his hand on the crotch of a ginormous little black dress.

"People aren't meant to live in this fucking heat, man," he was saying. "It's unreal. I don't know if I can take it anymore!"
He got a new place, this little apartment that he says reeks of nicotine and cat piss. He's been dousing the walls with clorox and actually called once to ask what he should do about the chlorine smell.

I told him the females would love it.

He'll be okay. He's the most depressed optimist I've ever known.

I keep meaning to get down to Scottsdale to visit, especially since getting back to the States, but it just hasn't worked out yet. According to him it's a real scene down there.

So right now I'm imagining you reading this letter in a Manilla hotel, fanning yourself a little, business papers spread all over the bed, and you're asking yourself, when is this going to get interesting?

I'm not going to tell you what you're wearing.

So, unfortunately this is where I take my leave to go find that very "interesting" stuff. Adventure! In the Night Life! Carrie's out there somewhere waiting for me. How about you tell me the real story about you and J? That'll give you something to write about, yeah?

Take care,

Dear Francine,

I was asleep when we entered Iraqi airspace, so I don't have any momentous memories for you from that experience. C-5 Galaxies, the giant nose-opening jets the air force uses to move stuff, do two things that instantly put me to sleep: they give off a high-pitched hum, and you fly facing backwards, which just feels weird for some reason and makes most people air sick.

I woke to the crew chief working his way between the passenger seats, checking harnesses and tapping soldiers on the head while he mouthed the words: combat landing. I was wearing ear plugs, so his mouthing looked like "I like candy."

We all waited for another twenty minutes, unable to see anything since the aircraft had no windows, until the pitch of the engines dropped an octave, and I felt my stomach go free-fall as the plane abruptly dipped toward Baghdad International somewhere below.

Dear Francine,

"Wife for the Night" is a hick term I picked up somewhere. Every time I hear somebody using it, I know they mean something derogatory but to me it just sounds sad. You wouldn't hear a hick who hadn't had a wife at some point saying that.

As to why I was putting up with her crap, it wasn't to get laid but because somewhere inside me is a fully functioning little husband-bot that's been programmed over time to take care of drunk women, and it perks awake and slips into the role way too easily when I've been drinking. I start listening and nodding and holding them up when they stumble, and when they say ridiculous things my first impulse is to protect them rather than call them on their bullshit. Real intimacy and the prospect of a real future make me feel like I'm choking - but in a doomed situation the programming spits out every gesture and reply necessary to fake it for a few hours.

I don't know if it makes me feel better. It makes me feel comfortable sometimes. It brings back not any distinct memory, but a way I remember living, taking care of someone else.

But really? She had blue-green eyes and her hair smelled warm, and outside she grabbed both my hands and just looked at me. And of course it feels good to have a drunk lady rubbing up against me, whether I'm "safe" or not.

As for S, I don't know if want to get into the full S story, especially with someone who's got full rights to I Told You So, Idiot. I think you are one of the few people I really do want to talk with about it, but it's only recently that I've stopped waking up to dreams of her. It's only recently that I don't hear her voice in my head and every evil and amazing thing she used to say.

I got spit into the world in 2005. I left S and left the army, and didn't realize just how much those two institutions had comprised my life. I'm sick of telling Iraq stories at work and in the bars. I'm sick of giving my opinion on the war. I'm sick of wondering when I have to tell any prospective female about eleven years of S and how of course we're great friends now and I'm great and life is great when I don't know how to define how I feel. I don't know if I am still sad about it. I don't know if the blandness of life is something general or if it owes its dust-taste to all the leaving that's been going on. I'm trying to look inside for the "happiness" stuff but it seems like external forces have provided the stimuli for too long, and I can't find satisfaction in anything else. I can't believe how much I miss the army.

What a stupid paragraph I just wrote.

Today I bought a bamboo mat for my bedroom that was probably made by one of your suppliers in a sweatshop and I rolled it out in my bedroom and moved the bed back into place, and the only thought in my head was, "Damn, I really want to fuck somebody on this."

Is that the brain-state of a depressed man?

Do you remember when I sent you roses after we went to that dance together? You were so weirded out. I only did it because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know how to be friends with a female so it seemed like the only correct next step was to do something awkward and "romantic." You did give me a kiss after the dance, which I remember having a lot of lip and being soft and super-nice, but I should have been able to leave it that.

Why am I mentioning those uncomfortable roses? They seem fairly representative to me of all the things I have done in my life because I thought it was expected. I have very rarely been in a situation to make my own decisions. Yes, I decided or was compelled to love S, but with that one decision I readily relinquished so much other free will. I did the same thing with the army. I just gave into it all.

Once it had begun, it seemed like I had to ride it all out to the end. Pretty damn big decisions to make as a teenager. I've always been perfectly willing to do awkward and uncomfortable things because I thought it was expected of me. I'm a perfect manager. The role is provided and I fill it like silly putty.

So when some drunk office manager starts rambling at me about shit I can't even understand (how the hell did she know what my education level was, anyway?), I just fold right into it.

And to answer your last question, I pretty much spent that year alone in Germany riding the train. Every weekend I wasn't playing soldier, I rode the S-Bahn, the cheap train, from Frankfurt to wherever I could get in a day. Mannheim, Heidelberg, Darmstadt. Hameln. I don't even remember most of them now. I can get a map if you're really curious.

I liked watching the families on the train, or the drunk football fans, the old couples staring out the windows. Those enormous German windows in trains and buildings, flashing the blurring colors of their countryside and cities, all the alien geometry we only ape in the states. The idea of a double-wide trailer in a German city always cracked me up.

I always wanted to part of something bigger than myself. I wanted to have the European experience we all imagine. But trying to do it in the military, during a war, married. . . I didn't think carefully enough about what that really meant, what it would do to us. When I look back now I think the decision to go to Germany was also the decision to leave S. It just took four years to manifest itself fully.

My mind still doesn't feel very clear. I still find myself staring out the window past the computer screen for most of the day. I need to do something but I'm not sure what. I'm not sure how to get my mind out of these spirals. The bottom is always a dream of rolling in morning-warm sheets with a blonde-haired girl and how vibrant it all was at first, how amazing every second of my life felt. I keep trying to figure out when and where it changed. When I wake, I can't find her in the bed. I lay there blinking until I remember finally. Then I get up and go to work.

Take care,

Dear Francine,

I still can't believe we ran into each other in Frankfurt. I always wondered what had happened to you, and then there you were walking past the Starbucks. I used to think I saw people I knew all the time, watching crowds roll by, the same way I could sit on the S-Bahn and suddenly think I was hearing English. Always kind of drowsy, riding just to get into the city to be around people, knowing the language gap held up a distance I could never cross. Usually the double-take proved the sudden familiarity was all in my head. But that time someone I knew was really there.

It's great about your job. Traveling the world is how I always imagined you, even if it is to sell stuff made by poor people. (But they're happy to sell it, right?)

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write. I've been meaning to follow up for a long time but something always gets in the way. I haven't had the itch to write much of anything for nearly two years. Every day I don't write takes me even farther from ever calling myself a writer again. But that's fine. I just don't care to see my name on anything, even at the bottom of a letter to a friend. You said write me a letter like you used to, and here I am.

Living in the States again took adjusting. I've been back almost a year now and I still feel out of place most all the time. I'm going to more parties now, making friends finally, but I still find myself standing in the middle of a room wondering what I'm doing there, how this life can be real. I am amazed by the adaptability of life. Every day that I am not writing second-hand about living is a day I am in the first-person. Every new person helps atone for the friendships and relationships I failed.

Hah. But anyway.

I'm working in a medical insurance claims office on 11th Avenue now. All day I read treatment files and decide whether or not someone will most likely go bankrupt from the procedures the company won't cover but the doctors push. I try not to think about it too closely. Following the company's rules makes it easier. I'm a cog. I have a great view of the street from my office and spend more time watching the traffic pass than studying case files. I moved my computer so I could see the street.

Do you remember the time we skipped school and J shoplifted those CDs from Sam Goody? The weather is the same today, leaves falling everywhere. The sidewalks are carpeted in gold. You know they tore down the high school? I went down to visit my mom and drove past Taylor Street, and there was just an empty field. There's a fence around the field to keep people out. It looks like really soft grass, too, thick and dark green.

It should be against the law to tear down a high school. How many thousands of graduates now have no place to aim their anger and regret? Just this expanse of park-green grass you can't even lay on because there's a fence around it.

I always wanted to say thanks for coming to the wedding, too. I'm sure you were very aware how crazy it made S to see you there. I couldn't have imagined you any better, in your Jackie-O glasses and that leopard-skin dress like a Sixties ad. I never heard the end of it, but I wanted to invite you and I'm glad you came. I always valued your friendship. I should have known it would be trouble between S and me that she didn't want us to be friends. I think I know what she was so afraid of now, but it doesn't really matter anymore.

So a few weeks ago I was at an after hours party, standing with a woman on my arm who had somehow made herself my wife for the night (or I liked her, I think, but I never saw her again) when she took my face in her hands and pulled me close and whispered a little desperately: "Will you recognize that I'm more educated than you are? Please?"

The more I consider the statement, the more I think I was someone else for her right then. I would like to know what I looked like. I wonder what my response was. I gave her a ride home and she kept asking if I was safe. But I think she was talking about her own safety.

This isn't very important. I only think about these interactions because I am striving to live without expectation, to never take anything for granted, and in that frame of mind everything is absolutely important until another experience comes along to place it in further context. I'm as grateful for a kiss as I am for sex, or even meeting someone's eyes from across a room. I don't have to want any more than that.

So life is going well, and I hope I will have more interesting things to report. We both wanted to get as far away from this city as possible and all the reasons that brought me back don't seem so pressing anymore. I'm glad to be here, though. I've been amazed by the old friends who still have room in their hearts for me, and the generosity of all the new friends.

I hope this letter finds you smiling. It was great to share a beer in the Romerplatz ("What the fuck are you doing drinking at a Starbucks in Germany?" Heh) even if it was touristy and the waitress had funky hands.

I may be starting to feel the itch to write again, now that I think about it. I have something to confess but I can't say it yet. I feel like there's a word I haven't learned.

Yeah. So don't let me get too dramatic. You remember the false intimacy of letters.

Take care,

The night air was like warm water. David left the red light alley and turned back toward downtown. In a minute he found another British pub, this one full of adults and cigarette smoke. It was noisy. He ordered a Stella at the bar, turning to watch a football game underway on one of the five televisions peering down on the room.

“Who are you in for?” the man sitting next to him asked, nodding toward the figures running on the screen.

“I don’t really follow it,” David said.

“Ah, American. I’ll forgive you that, then. Where you from?”

The Stella was smooth as water. “Seattle. You?”

“Norfolk.”

“I’ve been there.”

“You have?”

“I spent some time at Feltwell.”

“You were military then. You’ve been to Iraq? I was in Basrah in 2003.” He pulled back his right sleeve to reveal a crest tattooed on his forearm.

David nodded. “I was there.”

Then man extended his hand. “Rory.”

“David. Good to meet you. What do you think of Spain?”

“Nice place for a holiday.”

He tripped over trying to order a Bloody Mary. When he said Bloody Mary the waiter stared at him, so he tried “Vodka und tomaten – shorle? Juice?” Finally the waiter smiled and brought him back a small can of V8 and a shot of some unknown vodka. David poured them both in his empty water glass and used his butter knife to mix the drink. When that was gone he ordered a bottle of champagne, apparently no problem at six in the morning. He mixed bites of egg with swigs of ice-cold wine. By the time he had finished the bottle, his head was swimming and he had to hold the sides of the table to steady himself as he stood.

David tossed three euros on the table – unnecessary, he knew, but he was playing the part of the ignorant American – and focused on the doorway. He nodded to the host as he walked into the hotel lobby. Blinking in the morning sun, he oriented himself on the beach and turned toward the strip, where he had seen several convenience shops on his run.

There were few families out at this time of morning. Those crossing the street came from the cheaper hotels without direct beach access. They had to stake out real estate on the sand early. He looked at them and almost imagined them American until a husband said something to his wife in Dutch. David nodded at a boy carrying a blue inflatable boat and crossed the street for the line of stores with banks of sunglasses at their doors. Inside he found the back cooler and pulled out a case of German beer. He passed an aisle of tinned things for the Brits, and then a display of Alpine chocolates.

In his room, he carefully loaded as many of the beers as he could fit into the fridge, and then sat on the edge of the bed with an open bottle in his hand, slowly taking swigs and staring out the window at the beach. Without intending to, he fell back asleep and when he woke it was afternoon.

Out on the street he walked watching the flow of people. He followed the tide back down to the city center, where he bought a flask of whiskey in a convenience store and then walked out on the quay to sip it and stare at the water as the sun set.

Behind him he heard the onflowing mix of voices and languages. The sounds settled with the lapping waves in an isolating way he found relaxing. He watched down the beach as a hotel lit floodlights on a wide gazebo and began testing dance lights and the stereo system. Music blasted across the dark water then went silent.

He spent another hour walking the city, growing more drunk but taking no joy in it because he was alone. The jet lag was coming on again and waves of fatigue tossed his head around.

He had been on the island twelve hours and was no closer to his goal. David looked at the empty flask and set it on a window ledge as he passed.

Sometime later, after another pint of warm beer in a British pub were families were singing karaoke, he caught the sight of red neon down an alley. A minute later, he found the small strip of light above an unmarked door set away from the street. He knocked and when there was no answer he tried the door. It opened on a long fluorescent hallway with lime-green walls.

David pulled the door closed behind him and walked carefully down the hall. In the light he realized how drunk he was. He trailed a finger along the plaster of one wall to maintain his balance. The hall turned to the right and ended in stairs going down. He heard faint dance music from the floor below, more an echo as through a wall. He went down the stairs. A set of institutional-looking double doors at the bottom made him think of a hospital. Through a glass panel he saw more hallway but now dimly lit and lined with doorways, and down the hall women stood in many of the entryways.

He expected the music to grow louder as he open the door but instead it was sealed out completely when the door closed behind him. Watching him enter, the woman nearest him stretched an arm up the doorframe and smiled. She was topless with red nylon running shorts and tube socks pulled high up her thighs.

But she said nothing as David walked past. Each door had a small window, giving the floor the look of an asylum. Some doors were open to show girls lounging on small beds, reading magazines or talking on cell phones.

The air smelled like a hundred different perfumes, plus latex. Some women were obvious types: French maid, schoolgirl, black leather, long ironed-straight hair. They watched him genially as he passed. He expected scorn or distance in their eyes but each smiled. Some spoke in German, Spanish, Russian. Low music played from some doorways. Somewhere a toilet flushed.

At the end of the hall waited another set of doors. David pointed at the floor and asked the nearest girl, “Mas?” and she nodded. As he passed through the door, he saw reflected in the glass panel that the first set of doors was already opening. The women’s bodies all straightened in response.

Down the nest set of stairs he found the same scene. This hallway had branches that led off like different office departments. As he walked past the women he found himself growing more detached. He studied their earrings rather than their breasts. He looked at fingernails, the shapes of their hands. One woman had a pinky that went crooked when she put her hand against her face. More languages came at him and he smiled without responding.

He was growing more tired without another drink and had begun to forget the initial urge that drew him toward the neon. David put his hands in his pockets and walked slower. There were other men in front of him. He had time to linger without catching up. He turned a corner and heard music that made him pause.

From an open doorway at the end of a dim branch he heard, “If I could be one thing, I’d be your cigarette.”

He blinked, not trusting his ears. The mind had a way of matching foreign languages with memories, creating a false understanding. It was a song he hadn’t heard since he was a student. Since before the war and before Sarah.

The second line convinced him he wasn’t dreaming: “So close to your lips, so full of regret.”

David nearly fell over a chair along the wall as he approached the doorway.

“I’d be your cigarette.”

The door wasn’t open completely, just cracked enough to let the music and a line of yellow light free into the hall.

He knocked on the door, pushing it open a little, and said, “Hello?” and then “Abend?”

“Yes?”

The door opened to reveal a blonde woman in a tube tope and high-cut black shorts.

“Hello,” David said again. “Do you speak English?”

“Of course,” she said. Her bobbed hair moved as she talked. “Would you like to come in?”

She pulled the door open wider and stepped out of the way.

When he was inside the tiny room she closed the door completely and moved a curtain over its small window.

“Would you like to sit?” she asked. “There is the bed or the chair right there.”
David chose the chair, sitting beside a dressing table with a few perfume bottles he didn’t recognize and containers of lotion. The music was coming from a small stereo on a shelf above the bed. It’s power cord stretched to the floor like a crack in the wall.

“Where did you get that song?” he asked. “I haven’t heard it in years.”
She looked as if she didn’t understand him, then glanced at the stereo and said, “Oh, that. The internet. I don’t remember where. It’s good though, isn’t it?”

“I know the man who wrote it,” David said. “Or I did a long time ago.”

“Are you from the States, then?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Are you on holiday?”

David did not answer right away. She had moved to the bed and sat with her knees together. She had hazel eyes and small lips and he imagined this girl in an office suddenly, presenting to a board with her chin raised. Then he stopped himself.

“Not really,” he said. “Is it a holiday if you don’t plan on going home?”

“Of course,” she said. She smiled. “That’s the best kind.”

She lay her head to the side so that her neck made a long smooth line to her shoulder and arm. His eyes followed to the divot inside her elbow and rested on one small purple spot. She saw his gaze and moved her arms across her knees, leaning forward so the loose neck of her top fell open a little.

“So,” she said. “My name is Anne. Would you like to stay with me?”
David raised his eyes to hers.

“I think that would be nice,” he said.

She told him a sum in euros and he nodded.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked.

Jet-lagged when evening came, David put on his battered running shoes and left the hotel to run down the long strip that paralleled the beach. Hotel complexes lined the street on either side and groups of tourists carrying air mattresses waited at the stoplights. The air cooled down and the neon and red taillights stood out against the darkening sky. He ran easily, tasting the sea, and ended up down in the marina in a clot of people that forced him to slow to a walk. He listened to the languages and read logo t-shirts, heard American music from the open-air bars.

Running back, he pushed himself into a near sprint, arms pumping, hands making karate chops, until his breath cut in his ears and flashes of light threatened his vision. When he realized he was punishing himself he kept going. The street was wide and flat and he wove between parked cars along the curb. The sprint evened itself out but he was still running – not jogging but running like a chased man, so that people turned to watch as he passed, then looking for the pursuer. . . He ran to the hotel and stood in the parking lot panting. He pulled off his t-shirt and wiped his forehead, looking around and squinting through sweat-stung eyes, still amazed he was in Spain, when only this time yesterday he had been sitting behind a desk in Seattle.

In his room, David took a beer form the mini-bar and searched for a bottle opener and finally managed to pop the cap off with a counter top. The beer cooled his throat and he watched the remains of sunset on the Mediterranean.

Later he went to sleep, but woke at four and lay staring at the ceiling until it was time to go down for the breakfast buffet.

Eighteen hours from Seattle, David pulled his black bag from the baggage carousel and walked toward the front of the airport where the tour guides were waiting with clipboards. The women wore blue scarves.

“Deutsche?” a woman asked him. Then: “British?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling.

She checked his name on the clipboard and told him “Hotel Del Mar” and he said fine. She pointed with her pen through the doors and told him his bus number.

David blinked in the Spanish sunlight and felt suddenly pail. His tie flapped against his shoulder.

The other tourists on the bus were all German, and he listened to them as they found seats and shoved bags in the overhead space. The driver made a speech in German that made them all chuckle. He didn’t repeat it in English but hung up the microphone and put the bus in reverse.

The ride took an hour, across the dry interior patch-worked by strawberry fields and small yellow towns. Tiny cars passed the bus and he looked down at the drivers as they passed, studying their backseats and dashboards. He looked up to see a little German boy watching him and he smiled.

The bus entered the resort city and began weaving through narrow streets, up and down hills, finding each hotel in order to call out its name and help the passengers off.
Hotel Del Mar was a small white block on a slight hill above the beach. David pulled his bag from the under-bus storage area and faced the beach from the parking lot. He stepped forward to the sidewalk as the bus ground into reverse and backed adeptly from the cramped parking lot. He smelled the ocean and watched the sun glint off the wide leaves of the palm trees.

Picking up his suitcase, he walked down toward the beach along a narrow path wet from bare feet. His loafers slid in the sand. He paused and pulled them off, balancing one foot at a time. He stuffed his socks in one shoe, tied the laces together and hung the shoes around his neck. Leaving the suitcase at the edge of the strand, he walked through a band of half-filled beach chairs and straw sun umbrellas to the water.

It was as warm as a swimming pool. An old woman tossing a ball to a little girl said something to him in German that sounded like “You should roll up your pant legs,” but he just smiled at her. His tie threw itself over his shoulder and he felt the win lifting his hair. He took off his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.

David looked down the beach where the marina was barely visible. There were white yachts at anchor out in the bay, and the water looked like a blue sheet of plastic rolling itself out to them over and over. People were playing badminton in the surf, and little kids rode inflatable toys.

Reaching for his shirt pocket again, he pulled out a second plane ticket and tore it in half. He knelt to soak it in the Mediterranean until it disintegrated, letting the pieces disperse around his ankles. He turned and walked back up to where his suitcase stood waiting in the sand.

We bought the camcorder so we could, if I remember correctly, create a record that we were a family. At least that was the idea. I can't remember if she was pregnant then or not. Maybe we bought it to record the dogs.

We drank an entire bottle of wine. One of the big bottles but not quite a jug. We were talking about our fathers. I realized my friend was twenty years older than me and if we remained friends part of that friendship would be watching him die. Of course there is the line: Love is watching someone die. Losing a real love is knowing you will no longer have that. The future.

"Working all the time," he said. "Publishing books. Now making liquor. And not getting laid at all."

I told him: "Why would would I want a girlfriend when I can't even remember to call my friends?"

"You're right," he said. "You're not very good at that."

"I want to make things right now. Somehow a relationship doesn't seem possible."

We sat for a while. I think something happened with his son and he had to go check on him.

I said as he sat back down, "Somebody told me that it's selfish to spend your life alone. Or that's what their mother told them."

My friend nodded. "I need to think about that," he said.

At least six people looked up at the word "Tango." The man with curly hair jumped on the cue, taking his headphones out of his ears and asking the two blond women near his table, "Did you just say tango?"

The woman with curly hair nodded, and he turned away from his laptop to point at her. "You tango, don't you?" he said. "I love it but - oh, man I'm so sore right now. I'm training for a triathlon and I just finished biking fifty miles. Fifty miles! Can you believe that?"

I found myself watching out of pure curiosity. On the power of one word, he was dumping a list of subjects on the two women. The girl with curly hair was now facing him, while her straight-haired friend looked less enthused. She hunched over her coffee and looked from her friend to the guy. He started losing them with the triathlon story, especially when he showed them one of his sore thighs and massaged it slowly. Also, he was wearing white pants.

"Oh!" he said. "You've got to see this. You dance at the Tango Center, right?"

She nodded. He named some famous dancer and she laughed, excited. "Yes, I love her! You saw her at the center."

"No, but I've got this amazing video. Give me your number and I'll send it to you."

She pointed at his computer. "Why don't you look it up online?"

He frowned at the computer. "I don't know if it's online."

"Well, do a search, genius."

He smiled at her, cracked his fingers and attacked the keyboard. She left her seat and moved to look over this shoulder. Her face lit as the video appeared. The thin sound of tango music crossed the coffee shop as they watched the video.

"That's great," he said when it finished. "Doesn't it make you want to?" He looked up at her. She was still watching the screen, and then she looked at him. She had a slight smile.

"Would you like to dance?" he asked.

"Here?" she exclaimed. She looked around the coffee shop. It was half full. The tables around them were empty.

He lept up and started pushing tables out of the way. He restarted the video on the laptop and held out his hand. She lowered her chin, grinning a little, and took his hand.

I watched her friend as the two of them danced.

As part of a class, I had been mulling over two concepts: the first was the question "What if you never had another relationship in your life?" and the second was a list of traits I desired in my perfect partner. Both these questions were supposed to help me choose a person rather than let serendipity do it for me.

I remember reading somewhere that online dating ads that baldly stated what you did not want had more integrity than those listing what you like. The word "integrity" was what leaped out at me in the advice column, as if creating a list of deal-breakers as insulation against another person somehow made choosing easier.

Their shoes scraped on the wooden floor as they danced, her cheek against his neck. And as they turned, I saw a ring on her left hand. Watching them suddenly became a lot more interesting. It was obvious what he wanted, and now I was very curious if she was going to give it to him.

I haven't written anything significant in years. About three years. I was in the middle of a fairly major rewrite of "the novel" when my wife told me she didn't love me anymore. The words stopped coming. The file has moved through three computer now, and I've added nothing useful to it. Every now and then I take it out and read a bit and say to myself "This isn't so bad, I should finish this" but I don't.

I even have an invitation to write essays for a rather major site that pays - it's a paying gig - and I can't come up with anything to write.

Well, why am I writing this. I should be working on that.

Not-Fiction

"Non-fiction?" he says.

He squeezes his eyes together and shakes his head slowly. He is my friend the serious writer. His MFA and the five-hundred words a day, every day, make his claim to the title "writer" a thousand times more credible than mine. I am a writer who never writes.

He continues to shake his head while he thinks of a response, because my non-fiction has just been published nationally and his fiction has not. Still, he's trying to be kind to me. I took a writing class from him once - how we met - and there is still a bit of that mentor relationship.

"It's just," he says, "the craft is not the same," which is a kind way of saying that whoring out your life experiences is not craft. He's right about that. I function more on inspiration and lucky word choice than any process of craft, which requires dedication and thought and a level of seriousness that I avoid - mainly out of fear of failure.

If I invest too much, I will lose. I have lost before and I am still gun-shy. The problem with having called yourself a writer thoughout most of your twenties is that when you reach thirty and your book has not been published, and your friends have stopped asking you about it, and you want to but can't seem to write anything else, and the woman it was dedicated to is no longer the woman you are supposed to love - it becomes hard to keep calling yourself a writer.

(I know it's called self-defeat. I've been to the meetings you recommended. I heard the stories and recognized the traits. It doesn't mean it gets easier.)

There are new books. There are new stories. But the only thing that seems to come is the non-fiction, the plain dictation of a life that doesn't make sense very often. Craft is the application of sense to the experience, to create a statement. I can't make sense of anything yet.

I quickly make up a story about the novel I'm working on. I have honestly completed about 3000 words on the plot idea, and that was a year ago. Now I can't even find the text files, and every time I sit down to recreate them, I get distracted. The story hangs in the back space of my brain. I keep trying to come up with shortcuts to getting it down: voice recorders and new notebooks, different pens. I get distracted. I fill my life with activities to make it seems like I'm accomplishing things when what I want to start and finish, I can't.

We are very drunk while talking about this. We are at a party full of artists, musicians, promoters. There is probably no better place to be in this city right now. I admire his dedication and that he is living the life I once desired: the young university professor, writing, drinking, playing pool in the local bars, writing letters to the editor of the city paper. Honing his sense of self and his work by defining it daily for his students.

I am a writer who never writes. I'm trying to change it. I'm trying to change a lot of things, to take stock of what I even have to write about. I think that process has to start with the non-fiction. If I can't honestly and clearly record what is important in my life, how will I ever be able to tell a story?

+++

Every time I think I've reached a place where I can process the recent past, I realize it still hurts enough to stop me completely, even though I can't feel it anymore, I can't recall those details, those things that used to be so important. It is more an overall sensation of failure that I can't shake.

+++

So I should call my friend. It's been a long time since we had the conversation about writing. There was more: about musicians and New York and the city we live in, about women. My face was numb during most of it. I don't know if there will ever be anything more.

I don't know many writers, really. I mean truly know them as friends. However, of those I know, it seems they are all more dedicated than I am.