The images muddle together like a child’s watercolor, and I can’t speak to the clarity of my own epiphanies. I followed her over the fence into a garden, and I remember blue on the trees. Her face cold and red. A girl receding.

The sentences lengthen now; I can feel myself stretching. Don’t you see? I have wanted to tell you about the moments that allow me to be new. All the cracks, and missteps. How I dragged myself forward on my elbows without any real hardship. These girls on bridges, never crossing. I can’t hold anyone together anymore. That was the vow I made, and I wrote it on paper to avoid forgetting. When I named my desire, I said, “I want to be loved as though nothing is wrong with me.”

On the drive to the river, she told me not to be nice to her. “If you’re nice, I’ll probably cry.”

“Why would you cry?”

“I’m losing a client and her daughter today, and I’ve tried everything to keep them.”

“Should I be mean? Should I punch you in the face?”

“No, just don’t be nice.”

So I told her a story about G. And when we got to the river, we walked out on the bridge and she told me the history of Peaceful Valley, including several failed suicide attempts. “This is where they wash up. The last guy just broke his wrist.” She wouldn’t look at me, which gave me plenty of time to look at her.

People jogged past, even a guy in a suit. A twitchy weimaraner. A woman with tiny weights she kept saluting overhead. The water dashed below, and I lasted nearly five minutes before I kissed her.

She wore enormous tiger-striped sunglasses like a buggy Lady Gaga, a black leather coat, and giggled endlessly. Noon on a Monday.

She ended up with a lunatic, and I ended up married, and the whatever ended. I dreamed of girls then. Cities of girls. Girls building houses, and digging ditches, and giving speeches. Girls in summer dresses. Girls in Levis. Girls with tool boxes.

I was convinced in the end I’d be with her. Years later. I’m not sure when I realized that it wasn’t going to happen. That sometimes you just aren’t supposed to. Sometimes momentary is all you get.

I’m unscrupulous about stories. I’ll report whatever I choose. And in the proud tradition of Henry Higgins, I apply my bad manners universally. Nobody gets shit-talked more than I do. This is where I confess, and process, and hone.

So, last week I pissed a chick off. When I got over the irony of her reaction, I thought about old-school writers’ journals (e.g. Anais Nin). The juicy dirt in those journals often didn’t see publication daylight for decades. By that time, who really cared any longer? Devotees, perhaps, but the players themselves, how affected were they?

I broke up with this boy in grad school, and his parting words were, “Please be kind to me in your writing.” I stood outside my car afterward, keys in hand, and thought, Why the fuck would I write about you? You’re boring. Still, I appreciate his sentiment. The people around me worry because nothing appears to be sacred.

Here’s what I’ll tell you. I stalled for months before posting about masochism. I checked in with Mary beforehand dozens of times. People will think this shit is about her. They will. Even when this shit has nothing to do with her. And I have learned that she’ll always encourage me to post whatever I want (I find her pathologically against censorship) but there’s a dragging thing she does with her head when she’s uncomfortable. It’s only happened once — the subtle resistance — and I know better than to post something head-drag worthy.

I use my best judgment. I walk an edge much of the time because that’s where I’m standing. I never mean to pull anyone over. I never mean to fall over myself. But it happens occasionally because I push. Because I chase. Because I can’t let anything go. Because the mechanism has to be deconstructed before I understand how it works.

Why masochism? I don’t know. I have ideas about it. Theories I kick around. And maybe you’ve never experienced it. Maybe you’ve never had the world go entirely white, and your body fall away. Maybe you’ve never been without self. I think that’s what happens. I become solely my body — the pain explicit, focused and direct — and then white. A flash of white, and nothing. I used to think of it as peace. To recover a place without thoughts or emotions.

What if masochism is a safety test? What if I have placed myself in the most vulnerable of circumstances repeatedly, not in an effort to have my power extracted lash by lash, but to release it myself. Not to have it taken, but to give it away. What if I have sought your mercy by asking you to separate me from myself? What if your agreement is an act of love? What if the moment when you give it back, when you return my power, is the one in which I love you most? Because I am never helpless, never bereft. I am at our mercy. Yours and mine.

And then Jim tells about a recess they were all kept indoors because of rain, and were sent to play in the basement. They stuffed a kid in a box, piled boxes and chairs and other heavy items atop the box, and left the kid there. Later, in their classroom, when they were asked if they’d seen the kid, they all said no. Finally, Bob told about being dumped in a trashcan in the girl’s bathroom by three freshmen girls. He was a 7th grader, and it was the first time he’d ever seen a feminine hygiene dispenser.

Maybe these stories are as close as we come to adventure tales. The old brawling days. The teachers you were forewarned not to push. The ones wielding sticks. The ones who kicked desks, smacked heads, enjoyed humiliation. The ones you weren’t to be alone with. The fact that you learned, early, the tactics of the schoolyard. Learned there was always someone bigger, stronger, more ruthless. That sometimes things just happened from boredom. A rainy day in a basement.

Her food is like a spell. The house rich with it. I grew up with masterful cooks. Precision cooks. She isn’t precise, or timely. Her meals are strangely European. Hearty. Comforting. Dynamic. Food is a service, but it’s also an expression. I don’t think she could cook dinner for me if I’d upset her. What I suspect is this: her meals are an interpretation of desire, a balance of offering and appetite, and they reward both of us. What she doesn’t know is that I stay as close to the kitchen door as possible, to be infused with the sounds and smells. It isn’t just the sexual aspect that draws me to the door, but something even more magnetic. There is something spiritual in the preparation, in the presentation, in the fulfillment.

We lived in Mainz, Germany when I was a kid. My parents took my brother and me to Dachau when I was four or five. Here’s what I remember: the fence is made of iron in the shape of twisted bodies; the museum had a photograph of an old woman that I couldn’t stop looking at — she may have been naked because all I remember are her ribs and her drowning eyes. The ovens smelled of barn. We saw them. The ovens. We stood there and I asked why they were outside, and my mother told me. She explained why. And because I was a child, I kept asking. They put people into the ovens? They put people into them?

I think Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay is one of the most important books ever written. Her Hunger Games series, in the Post-9/11, soldiers raping children with machetes, Abu Ghraib, war tribunal world, tackles the warrior’s tale in unprecedented ways. It’s marketed for teens, but this is a series we should all read and discuss. Because the savage is barely contained much of the time. Because anger sets the world alight. Because our memories are faulty, and we want to believe these things can’t happen. Not here, not to us. But they’ve never stopped happening to someone somewhere. There can be no progress without memory.

In August, the scars hurt a bit more. School kids.
The cycle relentless. I meant to achieve something
definitive. Wall hangings. An entire bookshelf of my canon.
I’m probably kidding.

What is the ego for anyway? To spurn us?
Do we have it
for absolution?
I think I am more fish now
than mammal. Comfortable in cold, sunken places.

Sometimes just being alive makes me feel like a soldier.

My devotion alternates between simple and searing.
How often can I go on
disappointing you?

If I were straightforward, I’d have a slogan.
Literal and plain as farmland.
Catchy and charming as pop songs.

It’s just love, isn’t it?
Common as glass
bottles. So why the fissure? Why the luminous sheen?

Music allowed me to reset. I still use it that way. I play guitar when I’m freaking out, and trouble falls away. That’s the thing about art, you get carried away with it; your experience becomes reflective and objective and human. You share. And you hurt.

I stall at the end of books. Run my hands over the binding. Remind myself to breathe. I’m stricken. No matter how many times I read The Little Prince, or watch High Noon, or think about Graveyard of the Fireflies. I’m reminded that I’m alive — tenuously, thrillingly alive. We’re elemental. Our bodies, our stories, our seeking. That we stumble after beauty is how we are saved.