Victoria

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"What if I wrote everything I thought?  It would be exhausting."  I just read that in my pocket journal.  It is humid in this room in Philadelphia, but soft humid, like the inside of a fishbowl, cool.  I feel dense.  That could be being tired or something else.  After all these years, I understand the way I feel so little.  I change the combination of elements around me to tune the way I feel.  Is that a correct way to proceed?  Does that make me an actor with  costumes and props?  Am I a good person?  That would be the question, because I'm not a great person, though I think I've always wanted to be.

"We all try," Don Draper said.  "Being ecstatic or throwing a tantrum is easy.  We dramatize our lives so we feel something.  Being reliable is something," Albert Black said.

I saw this girl at a liquor store yesterday.  She wore a red sweater, jeans, flowery scarf, glasses.  She was staring at something.  I thought she was looking at me for a second, but when I looked at her, her gaze did not respond.  I went to dinner that night and the same girl was behind the bar, unloading a case of wine.  I wondered what her name was, what was in her head while she had waited for the case to be brought to her from the back of the liquor store.  I pictured four dots, two at the liquor store, two at the restaurant, and two line segments running parallel from one place to the other, though not intersecting.  What did Cindy (not Cindy, more like Margaret or Victoria) have beyond the line segment?  I wondered about this for probably about twenty seconds in the restaurant after I sat down.