Before I could contact her about the box, Dave's mom wrote asking me to return it. (What makes this synchronicity?) We met and the box and news changed hands. The next night Dave e-mailed me asking if I would meet him while he was in town in August.

I wanted more time to relish the certainty of disconnection. But it worked out like this and all you can do is roll with it.

I agreed to meet him.

He looked like himself and unlike he'd ever looked before. He is happy; we're both living for ourselves.

The body unreels its memories over ones newly made and the confusion makes me feel like an ocean, shapeless except when touched by fickle winds.

These are all the possibilities I knew, the realities that were, and the present truth: admiration and gladness and an undeniably long history the emotional diapason.

The window is closed.

Can you stand there like a hollow pipe in the wind and hear all the different ways you can sound?

I feel a persistent hunger. I want it sated so I buy decadent food, I buy clothing, I drive around at night instead of going to the gym, and I let myself go to bed early.

A compromise lives somewhere.

For three weeks yoga intensively, Monday through Thursday at 7 a.m. Pam says the feat won't be how much more flexible our spines, but that we got up at 6 a.m. three weeks straight.

Monday night at the grocery store I bought an acre of brownie, wondering if I would finish the whole thing before Andrew had gotten a taste. It's funny how we expand carnal relationships to general hedonism: I partake of you; I will nourish you.

Wayne came to see me while I was working. We took an hour I didn't have to sit in the Cherry Street Café working on my resume.

I am lately driving to work. Plugging the meters with quarters. I buy quarters like people buy candy. I walk out every two hours counting out four: one hour. Count out four: two hours.

Exhausted from early yoga, from pretending to work all day, from working too hard that night, the short drive home turned into a long drive along the water. The same song repeating, that same song the only song played all week.

Too tired to be anything but bedded and sleeping. Slept ten hours.

Driving the mile or two to work, down the hill, left, then up over the hill and down again. I covet the rides bikers have and covet the narrow shouldered bikes they ride. I believe if I owned one of those bikes I would look ten pounds less--like those chiseled commuters, their skin taut so you can see the muscles gnawing inside their calves.

In the morning my boss asked to speak to me privately. She said she'd noticed my productivity was down. (It's finally catching up to me.) She asked if there was anything she could do to help. I thought about what I wanted to say: Wanted to say there's no reason to bust my ass for a company on its way down. I said something politically correct that stroked her self-esteem.

Sitting in the Starbuck's inside the gas station across the street from the car wash where I left the car. (A clean car drives better.) An old couple is sitting down in the section of the station under A&W's jurisdiction. Sitting there now unloading the tray. Furrows in the man's ruddy face disclose an effort I do not know and I find there in the agedness scrawled into his skin the loneliness just now mine.

Suddenly I want to hear his story, to impress upon his face the suppleness of his own youth. I'll eat every word you utter -- I'll become you for a moment, transgress time to find the place where you were like I am now. I'll marry you there and bring us back. From my tongue your youth will flow.

In the afternoon the man running the company I work for told us he could not make payroll next time around. Instead, we'll all receive what he's calling a $500 advance. He's got tricks up his sleeve, enslavement his goal. My task is escape.

But I'm too tired.

At Golden Gardens sitting along the shore watching the Sound swallow the sunshine. This is where I used to go. I know the hue rendered by each hour out here: Kitsap lights twinkling at 2 a.m. or the cerulean of winter's bright and early morning. It's 7 p.m. August 17, silver is at meridian.

A young couple walk hand-in-hand over the path along the shore. His black tuxedo and her sage green gown seamed at their union. They stop and kiss and grab. Pant legs wrinkle and rise; he lifts her off her stilettos. At times her face disappears behind his long curly black hair. He's careful not to disturb her make-up. It's beautiful to watch them dance like this, trapped in appearances, groping to be free of them.