Your Face Will Surely Show It.

I don't like to cry in the light because I don't like to see the splashes because I don't need reminding because I already know what the old man in wal-mart must have known when he asked me if I was okay. And I almost didn't say yes. But we know how to compromise and drink 1% milkfat and this is that gee-whiz time-suck and I have other things that demand my attention, like the switch function and careerbuilder.com and tiger balm and babies and children and blank walls and old hairline fractures that just won't heal and funerals I won't be attending and how I don't be cool by fanning myself with money. Staying busy keeps the deus in the machina. So I try to stay busy. And when I say that I feel like I... like I... I just sound like I feel sorry for myself, so I don't. So I just go back to the things he has written, to remind myself. Because I need reminding. And it all started in 7th grade, my relentless quest for unequivocal evidence, when a boyfriend wrote me the most earnest, romantic, contrived letter telling me how I was the sun in his sky and I had read maybe a paragraph when Ms. Genette, my French teacher, picked it up and threatened to make me read it aloud but before I could speak he spoke, to the class, "I don't care if you read it aloud because I mean it. I mean it." But he broke up with me a few months later, the only boy that ever did, for some girl he met at church and what is stopping you from just walking out right now? Our social contract? Because you are always quick to remind me that it offers only symbolic security. I trust a spit handshake more.

If I ever die in a terrible motorcycle accident, I will always wonder: Did I say that I love you? Did I say that I want to? And you will always wonder: Should I have looked at porn less and fucked my wife more? And then you will remember about the baby and about the schedules and about how your wife looked and you will know you did the right thing and can live with no regrets. And then I will remember how I could never die in a motorcycle accident because I will never ride a motorcycle or take LSD and I will also live with no regrets.

Major Tom to ground control: there is no hero in your sky.