Damn I wish I had more kombucha

He didn't mean to do it, but he did it.


My ankle hurts hurts hurts and I take to my bike anyway. I can no longer stand all this stillness.

I ride and I ride and I ride and my lungs burn and they burn and they burn. I have forgotten my water bottle.



It has been a long seven weeks.


When I was six years old, I had an ant farm. 




I think We all know one of the reasons I work so much and one of the reasons I run so much is because when I stop working and running I start thinking about it. Of course by "it" I mean all of it.


Case in point this week I cannot run, as I have not been able to for seven weeks now, and this week I have worked less than I have in at least five or six years, and here it all is. I do not sleep without the assistance of drugs. I write down story ideas every 20 minutes, it seems, and I write and I write and I worry about the news and I think about you and I regret and I ache and I doubt and I am afraid it's going to kill me I remember I remember I remember I remember


Here I am listening to Carrie and Lowell and even though I've heard that Sufjan is kind of a douche and even though he does look like kind of a douche, frankly, in that yellow frat-boy hat, it is making me cry like it usually does

I am picturing taking flight again. It is a 14-hour drive to Oregon and 24 to PA. I need to change up my life, again, because long ago I made a promise to myself that I would never spend my evenings watching TV and also because I am queer and he will not talk about it; he's afraid I will leave him for a woman

What I can no longer abide is making myself smaller for someone else's comfort. 

What I regret most is not taking the time to define what love means to me.


Meanwhile he goes to meetings and tells everyone he knows that I am a love of his life.

That love can be so easy, and so hard, is one of the many things that confuses me. The man in the live video recording says, I had this anger problem, but I was only ever angry with my intimate partner. Never with anybody else. Just her.

I am the him and the her and the anger and the intimacy.



I am embarrassed of my googling, a private window for my private inquiries. Only they may not be private; only they consume me sometimes such that I cannot breathe; only I do not know how to tell you that I miss you so that you hear it

We watch Brokeback Mountain and he weeps and he weeps and he weeps. Here is the flesh and the blood and the fighting and the salty tears. I cup his temples in my palms and I stroke his sweaty, curly hair. I feel such tenderness as I cradle him. And still too I am wondering: How many men have I held in my arms? And will I ever be given a turn to be the one weeping, and the one embraced?


Suddenly fall arrives.

Of course it has me homesick, as fall always does, that breathless sickness for both the woods and farmlands of Pennsylvania and a vague something that leaves me wanting. Fall is my season of yearning.

This explains partly why I took to my bike yesterday, and it is nearly all of the reason why I will ask my physical therapist at tomorrow's appointment when I can run again. He will remind me, as he did on Monday, that I have asked him this question repeatedly, and that it will still be quite a while before I can take to the trails. This is painful to me. I am trying to get somewhere.



One of the things I remember is how you smiled the first time we dropped down in that pirate's ship out of the sky.

One of the things I remember is how he speculated tenderly on top of me on that quilt in the dark night Maryland grass.

One of the things I remember is having sex on the futon in the upstairs of my parents' house, climbing on top in that long, blue dress.

One of the things I remember is smoking weed in his parents' house and staring at the seaside screensaver, swearing that I could see the little surfers dashing across the waves. The image of that room forcing me to confront, every time it appears in my mind's eye, that I am a survivor of every category of abuse.

I am working to integrate this. Here is another sentence.


I have let the arugula go to flower. It is for the butterflies and the bees.


I am drinking room temperature water out of a giant plastic beer stein. 


You are 5.5 miles into the backcountry when you hear your ankle snap.