cribchronicles.com

skipping stones, a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
– Shakespeare, ‘The Tempest’

just before sunset on the last day of April, the day the lobster traps go out.

this is Dave’s beach, his father’s beach before him. the water is cold. there are mountains on the other side of the shore.

this is where we brought him, the last place. his birthright.

we laid our palms in the water and the last of his ashes drifted into the tide that has taken generations before him to sea. six years to the day.

it is done. and it is good. at the end of the sea change…peace. for each of us in our way. in the end, we are all of us only dust to dust, stones skipping on the water. what remains, six years later, is only love.

(waking today to this day of portents, i hope for sea changes all around, for less fear, for peace. i sit quiet and solemn, and hope for something rich and strange to come.)

cake?, a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

last year, we made Oscar’s dragon cake together, the night before his birthday party, working late into the night over crumb coats and wine. it was fun. i had visions of doing it again this year.

but Posey started throwing up at 5 am the day before Oscar’s party. and that night, just as i set aside my term paper and Dave set aside his keynote address in order to cut into the bilious blue cake we’d baked that afternoon and try to fashion it into something adorably fierce for our dinosaur lover, a cry echoed down the stairs. distress. and more vomit.

there’s an unwritten rule that it’s bad form to mix vomit and birthday cakes, even if the birthday cakes are actually dyed rather garish and pukey shades. so he took the upstairs and i took the downstairs. he slept that night with a sick little two-year-old waking him hourly to stuff her Lovey Rabbit in his face.

i finished the cake, and about 2 am, the term paper, and slept on the couch.

and then we woke and started all over again.

when it works, it is mostly about work, this relationship stuff. but it is good, sometimes, to have someone to work with.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire

– T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, Part I, The Burial of The Dead

April is a love letter, the worst kind. it sneaks up in flowered paper and leaves you twisted and gasping at its end. its mud holds all the carnal knowledge of dust to dust, all the endings from which beginnings start again, another year.

maybe we never bury our dead completely. dirt piles up on the graves we make, layer by forgetting layer, but dirt is fragile. the rains of April wash it loose.

it was raining, that morning five years ago when i started out.

the crib sat in the next room, an act of faith performed on our behalf. Dave’s parents had bought it and set it up for us: left alone, we might have wavered, too afraid to call down the eyes of the gods on our hubris. but it was there, sturdy and ready, covered in tinfoil to discourage the cat from nesting in it. i ran my hands up its old-fashioned spindles and caught my breath. it was an artefact of promise.

i named the blog cribchronicles.com ten days before Oscar was born. now, i blush at its domesticity. but in that moment, it felt crazy brave.

it said, this time we will bring him home.

the blog itself was Dave’s idea. he asked, and i said no, i couldn’t possibly, and then, well, maybe i could and he said yes and he set up the wordpress account and bought the domain. an act of faith. my words were bottled up and choking me, all this crocus blooming in the raw earth of April and my terror and my grief, and he saw and he opened a door and i walked through.

and so i began this witness, this love letter, five years ago today.

and now it is five years gone like *that,* another rainy morning, and i am stunned. an eye-blink. and i try to imagine this past five years without this space and i cannot, because this is one of my lilacs out of the dead land, these children, yes, but also these words and this work and this community, these friends. memory and desire.

five years in, i want to thank him. because i would not have started on my own.
***

it was raining last Friday afternoon when i met Susan in DC.

she was among the first bloggers i connected to, more than four years ago now. she wrote smart, humble, patient posts about her last baby, and her toddler, and science, and i thought, i have something to learn from her.

she discovered that summer that she had cancer. she beat that cancer, and a couple more to boot. the fight is ongoing. she writes about it. but she writes about living, mostly. mothering. being a NASA scientist, and a writer.

when i flew into DC for Theorizing the Web – which was fabulous and warrants its own post, coming soon on the theoryblog – i thought maybe i’ll go a day early. maybe i can finally meet Susan, if she’s feeling up for it.

then it was raining and i had a cold and she had scans that morning that will tell if the tumours are growing and i realized at the last minute that i’d asked too much but then my phone rang and she was there, at the hotel.

and one of the gifts of this blog is that everytime i meet someone i’ve known from here it is like meeting an old friend but this one afternoon will stand out for me for the rest of my days. because she took me on the subway into the city through the rain, the two of us without umbrellas, splashing like kids, and we went to the Library of Congress and stood under the vaulted ceilings in that temple to knowledge and the mythos of a nation and the tour guide asked us both if we were twenty-eight and we very nearly kissed him and it was like playing hooky, for a minute, from time and the rest of the world. there is an archway there with four mosaics on the ceiling, science juxtaposed with family and poetry with education, and we posed like muses in our representative corners and i felt like maybe that hall was built solely to house the two of us in that moment. or like it should have been, even if all the names on the tiles were dead men.

she stopped on the stairs. i don’t remember exactly how she said it, only that there were tears in both our eyes. i know she said the word “die” and i thought she was brave to insert it into the conversation, to breach the hull of the unspoken. i know that the afternoon light shone in on us off all that marble and gilt, and the rain outside was invisible for a moment. we read the gold plaque that testifies to the power of authorship, us two brought together by words. and i know that what i heard her say sunk deep in me and told me, in that timeless place, that words matter. that all we leave behind is what we make and share. love. legacies. lilacs out of the dead land.

something to learn, indeed.

it was a perfect April afternoon, joyful and raw and close to the bone and the soul, both. and i thank her, for bringing me, for sharing it with me.
***

Dave’s parents came again this weekend while i was gone. they brought a bed this time, a full twin bed for Oscar’s fifth birthday ten days hence. it waits in the shed for the pirate quilt to be unveiled. Posey will graduate to his toddler bed. and the crib will go, its spindles no longer needed here.

it has a drop-side and The Law tells me i should not pass it on, though it is sturdy yet. and i wonder, do i bury it? honour it? light it a pyre in the backyard?

it will be gone but its legacy will still be here, in these words. as will mine, someday.

i thank that little crib, for being true to its promise. and i thank you, for being here, these five years, for witnessing.

evening stroll, a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

in the spring light i want to promise that we will pack ourselves up every evening and step out the door.

i want to promise that we will watch the tulips come up and the grass return to the park down the street and i will remember what it feels like to swing my arms as i skip down the sidewalk trying to miss the cracks.

i want to promise. i want to turn my face up to the promise as if it were the bright sun, strong enough to hold my trust.

there are a hundred reasons i shouldn’t, i know. there are taxes, and insurance, and cheques to write and playground mud to wash away and a dishwasher to unload. and papers and posts and plans, all waiting, barely tethered. they sit on me like stones. there are worry dolls crafted of anxieties and inadequacies and the collective foibles that shape the silhouette of this small family: the deeper burdens of our particular humanness. one child hates the transition of leaving the house. the other has no fear…a categorical danger anytime she’s not strapped down. their father cannot seem to learn to keep track of his wallet, his keys. i cannot seem to learn how to keep track of both my hands at once: when i clear the table of butter knives, i am a threat to all around me. we seem a motley crew, better suited to piratehood or a monastic life or an episode of Hoarders than this daily grind of rushing from the house to the car seats, bags all packed. to do it again in the evening? madness, i whisper at myself, and curl in again on my couch. the sun hurts your eyes, i console the whisperer.

but in the fading light of after-supper, when we are four together, just moving, i forget all that. i forget that the Emperor has no clothes, that the grownups aren’t coming, that we are it and probably insufficient to the job of these small, fine, vulnerable souls. i forget. for a minute we just are and the one who hated leaving the house begins to hop and skip and i feel the muscle memory in my bones and i twitch and know we will make it to spring, again, one more time.

and so i promise. even if i lie, i promise.

from the minute they were born, they looked exactly like him.

all of them. even Finn, smallest of doppelgangers, his dark eyebrows and his tiny big toe carbon copies of his father’s.

when Oscar was a newborn in the NICU, the nurses used to joke that they couldn’t tell him apart from Dave except for size. every time Josephine smiles, her father gazes out at me, shrunken and in pigtails.

high school science class taught me that what i see when i gaze upon the faces of my children is genetics in action.

i accept that i lost that bargain, in terms of passing on anything visibly recognizable as my own. it’s not a bad thing: i have a fondness for Dave’s visage, particularly as it’s manifested in the faces of small cute people. plus they missed out on the crossed eyes and colourblindness that ought by rights have landed somewhere in their paths, legacy of my glorious gene pool. i’ll take that luck of the draw.

i need a tshirt that relieves commenters of the obligation to note the kids’ lack of resemblance to me. YES, THEY LOOK THEIR FATHER, it would proclaim. underneath, with a nice vintage salvation show wagon, See Bonnie, the Circus Geek, the Scientific Marvel: a Seething Mass of Recessive Genes!

i never believed that genes mattered much. i grew up on Anne of Green Gables, on stories of orphans and foundlings. i was raised in part by a woman whose blood relationship to me was distant, who passed on not one of her genes in this world. but she and i were kin at the heart. she loved me and taught me.

and yet sometimes i wonder about blood.

the thing Dave likes least about me, i think, is my capacity for wounded outrage. deep inside me a she-donkey lurks, eyes turned out to the world. the donkey is not suspicious; it looks for friends. it is not needy, particularly; it can live with being ignored, can live even – though not best – with hurt and conflict. it is earnest; will always seek engagement, a happy ending from all encounters. what it cannot endure is dismissal, smugness, perceived cruelty, any authoritarian refusal to engage its warm human donkey-ness. it is not jealous, and it can be equivocal about being cheated. but it is outraged by being slighted. and being subject to the indifferent whims of dehumanizing power? makes it wild and destructive and rather silly, a tempest of hooves in what looks from the outside to be a teapot.

the donkey is not especially easy to live with, i will admit. with renewed humility, as it is becoming painfully – and loudly – clear that Oscar has his own rather potent little donkey. or a herd. though he has never once – okay once, ONCE, people – seen my donkey go off, and even then in restrained-ish form.

i DO see myself in my children. not in their looks, but in their senses of themselves, their relationships to the world. their alignments, for lack of a better word, to power, to limits, to what they perceive as unfair. and i puzzle.

perhaps they learned these things from me, i intone to myself gravely. nurture. my job is nurture. and i try to tie my donkey tighter, because it is indubitably part albatross.

but i visited my grandfather last week at the hospital. he’s home again now, recovering from a mild heart attack, his much younger homecare nurse happily ensconced in the house with him in an arrangement that is neither romantic nor conventional but seems to work for them. none of my business, is my opinion. we should all have someone good to us at 91.

but last week he’d been three nights in the hospital, and there had been a night nurse on duty, an older nurse who had upset him. he alluded. i asked, pressed a little. his hands shook in punctuation and he would not meet my eyes. he knew the story was not dramatic; he tried to play it down. she put up all the rails in my bed, he said, shrugging at first. i told her i have the same bed at home, that four was dangerous. any two would be okay with me. i asked her if she’d ever seen pictures of a fire in a nursing home. he spit the words. that’s how old people die.

he is not wrong: he was a fire chief for years. she had dismissed him, threatened to tie him down. he won, and slept with only two rails up. she’d told him not to blame her if he fell and killed himself. she left.

she was not NICE, he said. that’s not right. there were tears in his eyes, and they were tears of outrage. they did not fall. his donkey is more experienced than mine.

i did not spend a lot of my childhood with my grandfather. i have never, in almost forty years of knowing him, seen him express that kind of wounded anger. but there it was, and it was like looking in a mirror.

i put my hand on his cheek and looked into his eyes, and said you’re right. that wasn’t kind. that wasn’t her place. that was MEAN.

you just need to look the hooves in the eye and accord them their dignity.

i got the head nurse’s number before i left, but he was released the next day. he squeezed my hand and i walked away, stunned at seeing what i’ve always considered this ridiculous secret part of myself on display in him. as i’d seen it in Oscar, only a day or two before. perhaps it is in all of us? or perhaps a strain that runs somewhere through my invisible, unassertive genes. i don’t know. i shook my head as i walked through the hospital, marvelling at the mysteries of us humans, of biology and nurture and blood, the unanswerable puzzle.

i think the idea of blood as thicker than water is a learned thing, one that runs through culture and often causes more hurt than good. i do not believe genes make families, not at all.

and yet i see Dave’s face on those two little creatures we shepherd through the world for a few years yet, and wonder what it is of us that our genes carry, what of ourselves runs between the generations, written in blood and bone.

sick day a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

pity him, for he is tragic, sick abed.

Dave does not, to his credit, suffer from the affliction known as “man cold.” he sneers at man cold. he has the constitution of a horse.

but today, rather like a horse, he cannot talk. he can only whinny, feebly.

he is sad.

it is very, very quiet here.

when i was a kid, i wanted to plant a time capsule in the backyard.

i never did, which is just as well as we lived in a series of apartments and it’d be awkward to go tearing up somebody else’s lawn with a shovel just to reclaim one’s remembrances of things past.

but not all capsules are buried in the ground. some lurk in the vaults of recent obsolescence, captured on that disappeared technology our kids will never know: tape.

Dave came across this last night, courtesy of an old friend of ours from our expat days. the dress rehearsal of a one-act play called The Sure Thing, filmed in a long-gone bar that served as home and communal living room for the motley expat population of Busan, South Korea that year.

in the play, our characters were two people and two hundred: all the permutations of possibility that occur when one human encounters another in a coffee shop. every time the bell rang, we switched, landing in a different story, trying each other on for size. in the end, the characters finally fumble their way through the mystery of connection. happy ending. curtain.

like all good romantic leads, Dave & i began sleeping together during rehearsals.

he was younger, and had terrible hair. i was blonder. the video quality is bad. my acting’s worse.

the night after this video was shot, we performed the play at a poetry reading/arts extravaganza. we stayed up all night that night. he drove me to the airport at dawn, and i flew to Amsterdam.

i’d booked my ticket months before. i was only six months out of a marriage. i had oats to sow. i had no business being with Dave and i knew it: i had known him five years. we were too much alike, and oil and water at the same time. our histories were too intertwined. there were a hundred reasons, and we both agreed. nothing so trite as a happy ending.

he stood in the early morning with the sky pink behind him and he held my eyes as i walked away to the plane.

i tried hard to find a different trajectory that summer, to ring the bell and land in a different character, a different story. i kissed an American girl in Amsterdam, and a Flemish mountain climber outside a hostel in Belgium. (then i told mountain boy about how my friend Dave had been to the same hostel four years before, had sent me there with a note for Fifi the cook. i heard the words trip from my mouth and i began to realize i was in trouble). i fled to Ireland, had a hairdresser shave off all the blond fuzz of my hair until i looked like Sinead O’Connor. i kissed an Irishman in Galway: he purred in my ear that i could come sleep at his mam’s. i declined.

after six weeks, i gave up. i flew back to Korea two weeks early.

i told him in an email the first time, that summer.

i love you.

***
living is hard on love. when i watch the tape, i laugh and cringe and want to squeeze his cheeks. i know what comes after the curtain, when real life begins. i look at those two kids who felt so old and serious and reckless nearly ten years ago and i think, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, darlins. life is not only in those moments of the mystery of connection, no matter how we tried to keep it so. joy, tragedy, drudgery. more of each than i could have imagined. but still the bell has not rung on us.

i’m not sure what you’re supposed to feel when you dig up your time capsule. wistfulness, maybe? wonder?

this tape is my time capsule. what i feel is snorting laughter. and gratitude.

kisses a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

he leaves again today. i’ll take him to the airport.

i may even go in, buy myself a diner coffee from the little restaurant, kiss him goodbye. i like airports, even tiny ones with single gates for Arrivals and Departures.

i like the idea that i could be going anywhere. the idea beats the actual flight. sometimes it beats the trip.

the kids and i will pick him up together Wednesday evening. we will join the throng at the single Arrivals gate, and inevitably run into someone we know and chat while the passengers stream in from the cold on the tarmac. he will see us, and hug us, and maybe we will take Oscar’s picture on the giant plastic cow that greets all flights to PEI. i don’t know if we quite trust Posey on the cow yet. maybe we do.

and we will go home and small arms will cling around his neck and a chorus of two small loud voices will vie rabidly for his ears. but it will be no big deal.

in their world, it’s not the leaving that matters, it’s the coming home.

i am learning from them.
***
when i was a kid, the airport was the saddest place i ever went.

my mother and i did not fly. my father flew. in and out, once a year, from the far-away Arctic. i waited the whole calendar round for him. i had no stepfather, no surrogate relationship even with my grandfather until i was much older and he was a widower.

my parents’ divorce was simply a fact of my life. my father’s absence, though, was a hole. i needed him, or someone to be him.

he drove a motorcycle. one spring, when i was about nine, i saw a man on a bike blast past me on my walk home from school. and i thought, i KNOW that bike, that back, that leather jacket! i was sure, entirely sure, that my father had come home three months early. to surprise me. i told my mother i had seen him.

when he did not show, she was gentle with me. i was shamed, to have been seen so naked in my wanting.

but most Julys, he came. wife and children in tow, and he would show up on the bike and my mother would let him strap the helmet to my head and we would go, to a cottage or campground, sometimes for days at a time.

and then they would leave. and at the airport would come the unravelling.

had Tennessee Williams written parts for dour fifty-something women who never quite got over the fact of their eldest sons’ having buggered off on a wife and child, my grandmother Hilda would’ve been an elegant casting choice.

she wrinkled young, and i remember her mouth being mostly turned down. she was not a demonstrative person, though never unkind. i loved her, even if it does not sound it. words were hard for her, and they are hard to find to talk about her. the last years we all went to the airport together, she and my grandfather and i, she was fighting the battle that took her life the year i was 16.

but the crying started long before the cancer.

every year, we drove them to the airport. it was an Event, a car trip with my grandparents, anything with my father, six or seven of us piled into two tons of Detroit steel on a summer evening. i always forgot to be sad until we got there.

and then we would linger around the boarding gate, the gaggle of us, until my grandmother began sobbing.

i’ve never liked to let anyone cry alone. my lip would quiver and the idea of eleven and a half months without my father would stretch out ahead of me and i would feel small and abandoned and frightened he’d never come back.

maybe she did too. or maybe she felt her failure, somehow, every time he flew as far as he could get and still be in the same country. maybe she had some history of goodbyes i never knew about. but this was a woman who’d married my grandfather at eighteen, in the middle of the second World War. he was a spy. she sent him off over and over again, to untold risk. i asked him once, a couple of years ago, if she cried when he left. he said no.

i didn’t dare ask about my father and the airport, then.

she’d have died to have been caught giggling in church, and yet there we’d huddle, in the middle of that tiny airport where you always know somebody, our small domestic tragedies laid open on the tile floor.

it must’ve been a comical scene, in a way. she would resolutely discuss the weather – the summer window they’d had on the island and the Arctic winter ahead of them; cold, she would testify, imaginatively – until the very last moment. and then when it came time to hug them and let them board, some dam would loose and the weeping would overtake her and then me until we stood in the middle of the airport, she and i crying the ugly cry, my father crushed between us, probably mortified.

we are all so goddam vulnerable to the stories we end up in.

i did not know until i was older and spent more time in airports that public scenes of inconsolable devastation are more rare than my family experience led me to expect.

i did not know until i had my own children that it is okay and normal and healthy to love and need and trust fully that someone will come home to you.

that it is not the leaving that matters.

when i stand at the airport today, i will look around for the ghost of us, those ten or twelve or fourteen summer leavetakings of my childhood. i will smile kindly at my grandmother, in her tears and her sadness and her incapacity. at my younger father in his abdication and his absence.

then i will whisper fuck you, Hilda. i leave this behind.

and i will wave goodbye to Dave and look forward to him coming home.

the muse is in the mountains.

i have to make my own coffee. it’s a hard-knock life. though the laundry seems considerably less in his absence, and all the drawers stay shut just like i left them.

still. the kids sleep eventually. i miss him until the silence comes.

here’s the thing about a partner. he’s a good one. he shovels, and he parents, and he talks with me about networks  and gender and philosophy and all the other ideas that my reading these days precipitates. he’s responsible, far more than i ever expected of him. he intrigues me, and he loves me.

but i am an only child, raised with a single parent, and the older i get the more i crave the monastic silence of aloneness. it’s not that he talks all the time. we could go nights on end with a quiet nod from one computer to the other, especially when we’re writing.

it’s that i have colonized my mind with the idea of a partner.

i make my own panopticon: i won’t eat the last of the peanuts in case he notices and judges. he wouldn’t. i put the garbage out and expect that he will notice and thank me. he mightn’t. but i cast him in the role of internal judge. and i stand as his, and irritate the living shit out of myself over stupid things.

when he’s gone, i stop.

and it is peaceful in my head, and i stretch my little brain and begin to think, hmmm…perhaps we could do this better…perhaps i could change the whole way i...

and then the cat leaps into my empty lap, deeply concerned that my shirt is not currently being kneaded and chewed. she rectifies this. pronto. whilst purring and digging her claws into the soft flesh of my middle.

i pet her, then bat her away, so i can type. she’s back in seconds, her sizeable rear parked on my keyboard. she is dogged, for a cat.

when Dave is away, i cannot finish a single thought without a large fur-covered punctuation mark inserting itself into my stream of consciousness.

my faithful Clementine. she is, in her own mind, entirely mine. with her, i shall never know loneliness. or real silence. and i suppose that is a gift.

this is not the silent time of my life, i tell myself. and then i give thanks for all that is bursting at the seams of my existence.

and i eat the peanuts. every last one.
***

tell me about your solitude. is it one of the trade-offs lost in partnership, in raising children? or is it a mind-set? he doesn’t care about the peanuts. should i?

we nearly bought land yesterday.

late Saturday night and we play the what-if game of MLS, of possible worlds. our dreams are tame, these days.

he wants land, insurance against a food supply falsely propped up. i want water, the tracks of sandy feet on summer grass.

seventy-three acres, near a picturesque harbour. twenty-five minutes from our house, just off the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. old trees. in the photos, the cottage takes my breath away. a loft, panelled in wood. tongue-in-groove. a wood stove.

we send a midnight message to the real estate agent. too good to be true, i whisper as we fall asleep.

the agent writes back Sunday morning. you can walk in, he explains. it’s been abandoned, vandalized. the owners live far away. they don’t want to fix it.

for that cottage, on that much land, in that location, the only way we’ll ever lay our hands on it.

snow to our waists as we hike in. there is an apple tree off the wraparound deck. abandoned three years, maybe four, it is no more than ten years old.

it was somebody’s dream cottage. left unboarded, the door has blown in and snow sweeps across the hardwood floor. the bay window is green with mold, its wood frame sagging. insulation is scattered across the floor. someone has tagged a wall in periwinkle paint. an animal – perhaps a human animal – has taken a dump on the floor of the upstairs bathroom.

i stand in the loft, under a ceiling of perfect pine planks, watching warily for raccoons, and i realize. MY dream cottage.

but not to beggar ourselves for. too much pig in a poke. the land a strip too hard to parcel and sell, under restrictions for eleven years. it does not make sense, and i know it.

too good to be true. but i am tongue-tied to explain what it is that makes me so terribly sad.
***
we go home and he builds a snow fort in the yard, with tunnels for the kids. we have supper outside. he makes stew, roasts the coffee beans himself. in the fading winter light, with a mouth full of turnip, he is sweaty and laughing, as happy as i have seen him in years.

this is not how we live, not really. he takes tiny steps towards self-sufficiency. i watch, appreciative but disbelieving. because tomorrow we will wake up and grind our way out the door leaving dishes for the dishwasher. we will be low on butter and catfood. the parking violation will need to be paid. these will be my jobs, and they swallow all the hope i have of a truly different life.

i complain about the STUFF, all the goddam stuff we accumulate in spite of ourselves. if we had a summer cottage, it would be more grass to mow, another fridge to clean.
***
late Sunday night and we watch the old Fahrenheit 451 – the one from the 60s, with Julie Christie – and the end comes and i am in tears.

not for the books, not because either world portrayed is the one i want to live in. not even because the story seems so prescient in these crazy, angry times and i wonder where our satirists are and if there is hope yet for this fractured culture that seems to have dissolved into a shouting match.

i cry because at the end of the movie the Book People – the ones who have fled – huddle in railcars on the fringes of society, and i realize i have no vision anymore of that kind of escape from the rules of property and propriety that govern us.

i cry for the waste of the little cottage, hand-built, all that wood left to rot.

we could not fix it ourselves. we would be fools, by the rules of the game as it is played. it is not a Good Investment.

but it sits there abandoned when twenty hands together could make it livable. a different kind of life. that gap between me and imagination of real difference is where the tears come from.

we live in a world where property is sacred. where dreams are bourgeois and tame. i have grown tame. i no longer know my way out of the lab rat maze that is my culture, my role as mother, daughter.

we were far more suited to be hippies together, he and i, than domesticated middle-class partners. i rail at him to shut the cupboards while he dreams of planting vegetables, building with his hands.

he might survive, in a squat in the woods, in a snowfort, in some different vision of our lives. i am the one who split from the program.

but when i sit there late at night staring into the void between my choices and my sense of what makes sense, he takes my hand.

and i am less lonely, and a little less tamed.