1.

I drive over red blotches on the 405 and wonder if they’re the blood stains from some gruesome collision earlier in the day.

I can imagine that head-on happening to me with a cinematic clarity.

Can picture so plainly the intersection of my vehicle with another.

All shattering glass and sickening crunch of car metal, skin, and bone.

2.

Skin and bone. Intersected, dissected, resected and sewn back together. Like hers was.

Me: Get over it.

Me: I can’t.

I try to the most after the nightmares.

They come each night, wheeling her, in her hospital bed, to my apartment door and parking her there alongside the rows of mattresses she’s ordered to help me sleep.

3.

I am most peaceful, most poetic, in the space between sleep and waking.

4.

I pulled a wide blade kitchen knife from the block tonight. Sliced a honey dew melon in half, put the knife down and started scooping out the seeds, eyes moving from melon to knife.

5.

Yesterday, I bought a used copy of Wojnarowicz’s memoir. I figured this was ok to do since he’s already dead and won’t miss the profits that sales of new copies supply. So the one I ended up with, it’s battered and bent. Some girl had it before me, I know this because her name is written in the top right corner of the first page. “Amelia” it says in loopy letters.

Standing in the bookshop, I flipped through the pages and noticed Amelia’s notes more than the

author’s. “Other-inflicted violence,” she writes in the margin, “self harm.”

6.

When you walk from bright sunlight into shade there’s that moment of uncomfortable blindness so extreme that, were we not accustomed to the transition – light to dark – we’d surely think our eyesight damaged.

Instead we know what to expect, we’ve made this switch before and learned that the discomfort is temporary.

7.

Lying in bed I can hear the freeway. A far off hissing interspersed with the whines and rumbles of tractor trailers shifting gears.

And planes overhead pulling air and jet fuel across the sky.

And I’m thinking about the ticking pipes in that shoebox sized apartment on Mulberry and Prince. How they kept the place so hot I forced open a window, got it stuck and left it, never worrying about invasion or someone climbing in.

8.

How to get it back? That blissful invincibility.

9.

“Now he’s dead and I feel more vulnerable, like I’m standing on a conveyor belt leading into an enormous killing machine.” –David Wojnarowicz