Sublime

I sang the low, mourning song of a sailor’s wife. Come back to me, big dick, please take this heartache away. He is lost o’er the sea, my big dick. I cried with my mouth hanging open, the sad, empty place where the dick should be, and then, after a while, I just silently held the crying dog but left my mouth gaping like a distended stomach, loose a

Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them.

The words, though old-school, had a weird power. A few seconds ago we had been in a play and now it was turning into real life. If you wanted to be sure the play would end—the curtain would fall—then you shouldn’t say those words.

I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

His life was so pungent and real. He seemed to have no trouble recalling his plans from a couple weeks ago, while mine had become very vague to me. I was like those poorly attached kids who would sit in any mom’s lap at the potluck, whereas Davey had been thoroughly, perhaps overly, loved, and so Claire had stayed in focus. His restraint wasn’t a f

I could feel the accordion between my hands and how impressed he would be if I said yes.