I think I have forgotten to bring my pumpkin costume to Colorado

What I have been writing is changing again. I am like the wood chopper, metal fangs gleaming.


A can of Hunt's tomato sauce sits red and green on the table beneath the windowsill.

Wilson's small nose smooshes into his chest, my arm resting lightly across his torso. We are sharing the afghan my mother made when I was eighteen. Hanna sprawls out at our feet atop my brother's old throw rug--blue and geometric, it is fitting.

Yesterday I spent three hours teaching and practicing yoga and today my thighs are growing. To look at my legs is to see what it is to work toward building muscle all the time, and to see what it is not to use them. My right leg is still so weak. My left leg is stronger than I ever knew my legs could be.

My fingers remain as spindly as ever. The numerical looks harsh and so I replace it.


That was all so long ago.


I make chia pudding and I eat it for breakfast every morning. It is kind of bland because I didn't feel like hunting down the vanilla extract from the high shelf above the kitchen sink, and because I didn't feel like buying a whole bottle of maple syrup when I only needed a quarter cup. Luckily I have a penchant for bland foods, my friends teasing me for the fact that I hardly ever add salt. 


I am using fewer em-dashes than I ever have before. Perhaps it is because I am less anxious.


This afternoon I will see the bodyworker for my ankle and do more yoga and then I will meet the people who are becoming my friends at the local brewery where I can drink locally brewed, gluten free beer from the tap.


Tomorrow I will research human anatomy, go to the laundromat, and contemplate a temporary return to Pennsylvania. I have been away longer than ever before.


There is only one part of my life in which I frequently feel like I am delusional, and that is in romantic relationships, which is to say intimacy, which is to say whenever I start thinking too hard about certain situations. Which is to say whenever I wonder what other people think of me.



I have started to believe that I am worthy of pursuing. By that I mean I am in pursuit.


It is time to carve pumpkins again. Whatever will you be for Halloween. In the past I have been a peeping Tom (only everybody at that DC dubstep house party thought I was the dude who founded MySpace) and a children's pumpkin costume from the Lancaster Salvation Army. The orange fabric digs into my armpits and I wear a green sweater underneath so that three quarters of my torso isn't exposed. I bobby pin the green top into my hair and get drunk with my friends.

I think I have forgotten to bring my pumpkin costume to Colorado. Whatever will I be for Halloween.


Soon enough I will outgrow this basement apartment.


It has taken three hours for the temperature to rise.