I began the day thinking that writing was becoming a thing of the past as my fondness for Rollerblading now was, though in my time of writing and my time of Rollerblading—and these did sometimes overlap—I was far better at the former than the latter. I was far better at writing than I was at Rollerblading, and for the most part considered them vastly different. However, when they departed my life, they did so identically, robbing me of the ability—in retrospect—of remembering separately when I wrote and when I Rollerbladed. You were going to say that writing was for birds flying when suddenly a feeling came over you. Someone beautiful was talking about your sentences. It felt like rain. Things were starting to line up: history was speaking, which hardly ever happened to me. It was saying I had arrived at a moment where I could put writing “down” and walk away from it. I remembered the ache in my mouth when I ran into the back of that pickup truck. I was alone in a parking lot and had already given up too much—too much to brake, too much to swerve. I gave up most in my mouth, where a tooth chipped and I bit through my lip. I gave up most in going to the hospital. The language I had accumulated confused me, and slamming into the truck had cut my knees. I didn’t know how to explain myself to the medic, but soon I began writing poems. In the ensuing years, the poems became prose, and I had written my last of it. Finally, I was done.

I began the day just trying to get a handle on their sexual entanglements: everyone had been with everyone and was now with someone else in the room. Everyone had tried love or sex with one of the people sitting here, then later on tried love or sex with another of the people. They had been men and women doing this, and if I were to get up and go, they would be alone. Though the way they loved or had sex would probably not express itself immediately: I didn’t think if I left the room they would begin tonguing each other or fighting or writing each other into their books, not that day, not in the middle of a meeting nobody wanted to have. As I sat in the room, I wondered about all the people who were outside of the room, who also could be added to this map of loving or sexing, who were not here because they didn’t belong to this institution yet belonged to this network of lovers. Sometimes through these negotiations you realize your purpose: they needed me. I was the only one who could get up and leave, and if I did leave, it would only be to bring the others back with me. I had a quest, and it was in service of my colleagues, but it was not the kind of service valued by the university, so I was torn as to whether I should do it. It was hard to fathom the consequences. If I brought all the people who had loved or sexed all the other people in this room, where each person had loved or sexed at least two of the original people present, and they were all together with the stories of their past relations, sometimes written in books, sometimes forgotten, and I sat among them having slept with none nor read none of the books, what would I do while they were reminiscing and what would I do?

Artwork © Colourful Abstracts