East Bluff Shell

A man met a woman at a convention. She wasn't there for the convention. They met and locked eyes and knew each other. He walked to her. "You are something else," he said. It turned out they lived in the same building on the other side of the country. They were together for a long time. Years later, they went on a trip together. She had a fever for a few days and decided to go home early. The fever had chewed up her heart and she died in her sleep on the plane home.

She went in and out of his life with the most grace I've ever heard of. She blinked away without warning and no violence. She got sick and then she died.

There's a poetry to chance. Kismet. I don't believe in God but there's a point where chance almost touches the world of magic. I don't believe in God, but I believe in poetry. I don't believe that poetry is only in our perception. The world has its own poetry. Not for us, for itself. Not space and stars or trees and wind, the universe itself. Something is to the universe what poetry is for us.

- On a walk from East Bluff Shell, down Farwell to Brady, Brady to the closed Italian grocery store, then back to Arlington until Arlington meets Franklin and then back to my apartment, during which time I thought of a girl I once knew and how she kicked in a car that belonged to her ex-boyfriend and then I realized that I actually slept with her recently and funny that that's the same girl, because the two memories are miles apart in my head. And after this train of thought that I tried to dictate as closely as I could, I was thinking as I walked past the last few houses on my block before my apartment and as I climbed my steps that I don't walk so often now that I run a lot and how the two things are not the same, that you get thoughts from walking you don't get other times.