“I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio—you’re a train and I’m a train station and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story. But you are my nomad and I love you sideways daily. Sideways because I have to beam my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually finds you.”

“Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things. I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio—you’re a train and I’m a trainstation and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story.”

“Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this - swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood on the first four knuckles. We pull our boots on with both hands but we can't punch ourselves awake and all I can do is stand on the curb and say 'Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.”

“Even if you don't believe in god or fate, at least you can believe in narrative.”

“Every morning the maple leaves.Every morning another chapter where the hero shiftsfrom one foot to the other. Every morning the same bigand little words all spelling out desire, all spelling outYou will be alone always and then you will die.So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalogof non-definitive acts,something other than the desperation.Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your partyand seduced youand left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.Love always wakes the dragon and suddenlyflames everywhere.I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.I’m not the princess either.Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallowglass, but that comes later.Let me do it right for once,for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,you know the story, simply heaven.Inside your head you hear a phone ringingand when you open your eyesonly a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.Inside your head the sound of glass,a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.Hello darling, sorry about that.Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry welived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwelland how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.Especially that, but I should have known.Inside your head you heara phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing upin a stranger’s bathroom,standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes awayfrom the dirtiest thing you know.All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenlydarkness,suddenly only darkness.In the living room, in the broken yard,in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airportbathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy ofunnatural light,my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,smiling in a waythat made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,up the stairs of the buildingto the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,I looked out the window and saidThis doesn’t look that much different from home,because it didn’t,but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,smiling and crying in a way that made meeven more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but Ijust couldn’t say it out loud.Actually, you said Love, for you,is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’sterrifying. No onewill ever want to sleep with you.Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—here’s the pencil, make it work …If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the windowis over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathingriver water.Dear Forgiveness, you know that recentlywe have had our difficulties and there are many thingsI want to ask you.I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,years later, in the chlorinated pool.I am still talking to you about help. I still do not havethese luxuries.I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.Quit milling around the yard and come inside.”

“I want to apologize to you, Nikki. Not just, ‘hey, sorry,’ but really. Apologize.” He paused, either to let her absorb it or to find his way, then he went on, “This is all still new to both of us. You and I came to each other with full lives, past baggage, careers, the works. Both of us. And this trip of mine, this was the first time since we got together that you’re seeing what my real work is like. I have the advantage of having gone on ride-along, so you—I get your life, inside and out. Me, I’m an investigative journalist. If I’m doing it right, I’m spending big stretches of time in places nobody else has the balls to go and under conditions most reporters wouldn’t put up with. That explains why I fell off the radar on my story. I told you I might before I left. But it’s no excuse for not calling you when I got in the clear. The only explanation I can give may sound flimsy, but it’s the truth. When I come off assignment, I have a routine. I sleep like the dead and write like the devil, in seclusion. It’s the way I’ve always done it. For years. But now—I realize something’s different now. I’m not the only one involved.“Now, if I could take back the past twenty-four hours, I would, but I can’t. What I can do, though, is say when I look at you now and see the hurt in you—the hurt I caused by being insensitive—I see pain I never want to bring to you again.” He let that sit there, then said, “Nikki, I apologize. I was wrong. And I am sorry.”

“Pamela, I’m in love with you. Yeah, it’s that bad. You’re so beautiful to me. Shut up! Lemme tell you. Let me. Every time I look at your face or even remember it, it wrecks me - and the way you are with me - and you’re just fun and you shit all over me and you make fun of me and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in any day to think about you enough. I feel like I’m going to live a thousand years cause that’s how long it’s gonna take me to have one thought about you which is that I’m crazy about you, Pamela. I don’t wanna be with anybody else. I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t think about women anymore. I think about you. I had a dream the other night that you and I were on a train. We were on this train and you were holding my hand. That’s the whole dream. You were holding my hand and I felt you holding my hand. I woke up and I couldn’t believe it wasn’t real. I’m sick in love with you, Pamela. It’s like a condition. It’s like polio. I feel like I’m gonna die if I can’t be with you. And I can’t be with you. So I’m gonna die - and I don’t care cause I was brought into existence to know you and that’s enough. The idea that you would want me back it’s like greedy.”