The first time I was in the house, the cold stones of the floor were a relief in the heat after the long drive to get there. There's a firestove too, though. Young woman as rat in a new cage, I ran up and down the stairs and stole socks to wear on the prettiest carpets and lots of people use throws and floor mats you know, but not there in the main room. A bit of the flavor of the 'special' room some families had growing up. No one ever goes there because it's arranged just right or something? Like a funeral, it demands respect and I'm that friend that shouldn't be invited in. Oh my gosh, there is a freaking huge glob of please let that be mud between my pinkie toe and that other one. Oops. I'm sorry, I lost my shoes in the jeep can I have a beer please because feeling awful about stuff like this is really confusing to me.
No one gave me a drink till dinner, and then she said with a smile, start with a drink and then we can eat? I could have eaten her smile, it was so sweet. My non fucking head hurts. She lives in the Bay, actually, doesn't she?
You can go downstairs if you want he said while turning into whatever he was doing. Some people, if they are in the kitchen, are doing food things. With him... I had the feeling he was fitting edges together. Did I really run down the stairs right then? Do some people learn to expect communication and actually get spoken to? Can I run and jump back into that moment? No, because I goshdarn filthy toed butt cracked missed it. Shoulders like that don't need to be quite as funny, do they, and yet apparently they tend to be. Like a kid who went on a roller coaster now looking around saying I'm supposed to be happy with life? Great life, the long white curtains and rain streaked glass, my orange paintings and green blankets. I will never be happy with a life that doesn't have another human body in it though, whether I can communicate with it or not. Fuck wine. It's about putting your hands on skin, reaching in, feeling that there is life inside and a response.

The next time I was there, I understood that while I had been permitted to run up and down the stairs (I hadn't plunged the depths of those rooms, I have a noisy internal personal space meter), I hadn't seen anything. It would be criminal to say I had, a trespass. There were doors in the walls that I'd never seen. There were arrangements of tools that I hadn't appreciated, or maybe they hadn't been placed just so before then. The box of some great big spinning cutter thing was in the center of his basement work-space. I wanted to wrap my arms around the mind that put that there, because it was arranged so nicely, but how do you do that without moving anything? I'm not a nice little details person. I'm a lot like he was. There's a right way to do things, and then there is trying to say something, and then there's me... half assed efforts in neither direction because neither will get noticed anyway. For me? Are you kidding? Maybe when the mood strikes, but man, that just means 10 extra minutes of the same thing when the conversation ended half an hour ago. The greatest biggest meanest toy you have ever seen, still in the box, the most serious anti-drunk ever and the root of probably a thousand million funnest moments in miscreation ever.

And next to that, there was another door. Need I mention not having seen that door, not noticed it's being locked or not and I'm not one to intrude anyway but it was there and I never knew it until it was suddenly open. The box where the wood is kept is like an open pit grave exhumed so that you can imagine who he had there maybe not last winter but the fall before that? Full of mangled looking dusty roots. And this cranny door that I was talking about was webby too, a surprise because it was kept very tidy and charming despite being so hidden away. It was no color. It was the perfect accumulation of lightness and pedestrian encouragement. It was a quiet place just around the corner from where he keeps the truck and the trailer full of music equipment. Where I should have taken the picture but didn't. It didn't close suddenly and sharply behind me as though to cut my intrusion off, and I would have been surprised if it had just then.

And I hope that maybe he went to the show I recommended to him last night, because the woman he might have met there was a little fancier and she can click a photo the way that I apparently can't. I'm almost 30 and too addled up, I can't keep forcing people to squint just to look at me.

I was running then, those long forceful runs in the sun wearing sunglasses I'd never faced the world in so that my nose got burnt along smooth edges. As I ran I thought about telling the guy I was going to work for about something, someone like him, and how much fun it was. Which is wrong, that's not work related. And this is the slow process of coming back and saying I'm ready to work with you somehow. I'm here now. Except I have to reshape myself into someone who can do this now, and stop running around in circles chasing dreams that don't have pages. I cut scratchy dead wood from the path, tried to trim it back to allow freedom of passage, but I couldn't bring myself to trim back the green growth or the flowers. I am such a mess right now. Yikes. Digging into my lack of urgency and returned interest in silence with a spoon.