11.9.99

It's been the whole morning in the storage closet. Outside the wind and rain are #666666, but it is not as cold as the plywood and concrete cavern of my memories. Directly above the place where I sit, employing an old file box for a seat, is a circular vent in the ceiling that I've never noticed before. Only today has the wind sought and found me through that sieve. Its feathery tendrils add chill to my cheeks. That plywood hall is already a refrigerator and I've learned to dress for it in layers of thick socks, fleece, and Gore-tex. This time two men came while I was there to replace a burned-out light bulb in the cap of the hallway. I had to move some of the pictures and my file box in order to let them through. I don't know what they thought, but I sensed they didn't want to disturb me. They talked quietly while I continued flipping through photo albums. When the men dropped one of the long metal light fixtures onto the concrete floor, they apologized at length. One of the men, a man from Russia or Eastern Europe, asked if they had frightened me with all the noise. I told him no. He said he worried that I thought they would collapse the building on me. I replied that I thought they would warn me if that were their intention. My mother put photographs taken by my father and herself into albums. The pictures are not labeled nor are they displayed chronologically. People in those images age decades and reclaim youth again in a matter of pages; nevertheless, I understand the story. Mother's head is long and black at our feet. My heart is leaden with history and I have lost all desire to be anywhere familiar. I dream of bursting into anonymity, to cheap eats and slower living. I find I like coming to Puyallup where I am extralocal enough to elicit curious glances from the lunch goers at a local chain restaurant. I sit with a small stack of unorganized photographs, and then a book on chess, while spooning away at a chocolate shake. And then, in the middle of my escape, my love's voice traveled in on the undulations of that aforementioned wind to my little island, just to remind me of his captivity.

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