Quit fucking around he repeats, something he's taken to telling me recently. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I take him more seriously than I should. He's my romantic full moon, he knows when the pain comes, and that's his time.

Alright, I say, but where do we start? And he says the steaming coal towns. Does he mean the trip we took, stopping for lunch in a place where we looked at each other across the table, distant beyond measure? That is what a meal together is like, sometimes, some places. Except there has never been anything like that.

Or does he mean the ghost town where we jumped out of the car and ran down a blockaded road and tore our clothes off in the middle of an abandoned highway or talked about tearing our clothes off together but didn't actually do it... that's more likely with us.

This week I stood, crossed the room, and folded a linen away with sharp gestures. My mother's eyes twinkled and I said you know what this makes me think of, don't you. She smiled a little, a laugh nearby.
How do you know it reminds me of his boxer shorts, Mother, I asked? She did laugh then.
You did know! How did you know that? But she was chuckling away back to whatever she had been doing.

I was just back from a walk, the sort that covers familiar ground and doesn't seem like much but takes an hour. 1/12 of the day, a stock market ticker walk that tires the legs but isn't anything really. I need a hug like I'm never going to walk that far again, I said to him. Meaning that I want to hop on motorbikes wearing scarves and go jaunting and be smothered into a chest so that my legs feel weak and fights or arguments mean running in frantic passion. I meant that I wanted a hug that promised I'd never have to travel miles and years again, slow painful time looking around and feeling like nothing. Is that what I meant? If that was my intended meaning, then I'd voiced something I never would have said to anyone else. No one else would consider the meaning of those words, or have hope of or the keys to understanding them. He only shows up when I might say something like that. People have their time in the rhythm of other's lives, and the lucky ones figure that out and can hit the waves like a surfer who is living at the peak- Fast and high and sharp.

I said something nasty to him just as I was falling asleep. It wasn't right, what I said, and for a moment I was afraid that he would go away and never come back to me. But he will, I said to myself. He will always come back to me, I told his brother inappropriately. He will not leave me alone and it's hurting me, I told his mother. Thank you for introducing me to Joe, I told his cousin. And it all began again. Always there has to be the introduction.