121318 a misty melancholy weeps over the land gasoline fatigue washes over my lungs; light a match and i’ll never have to wake up again my best friend was a moose. it didn’t last long. a moose is a wild animal apres tout. but it was cute while it lasted. the moose got up on mom’s couch to sit with me. i’m surprised she let it. i’m going to really miss her existence when she’s gone. i can barely even picture the idea. the idea of one so nourishing, sustaining, so constant and forever, so essential to the baseline of all my memories--just withering up like a morning glory seed pod and blowing away. it truly seems impossible that a world could exist that’s that cold and grey and empty. and yet, i’m told, it’s inevitable. she can’t be old but really doing quite well forever. some day it’s going to change to a different answer to how’s your mom doing. and then all the rest of the days after that. when the moose was ready to take a walk, he bounded out the door so fast my arm was nearly dislocated; i was literally flying like a kite behind him as he loped around the yard. i knew it couldn’t last forever. nothing that involves flying can. nothing that involves wildness can. where should we take him to let him go when the time comes. dad & ruth’s neighbor had a long wide wooded property. their smooth sanded wooden decks faded gracefully into rocks and woods and undulating hills grey with autumn tree trunk haze. i took him in the Lincoln. He slapped my face with his hooves; I knew it was time. oh my god the bed calls me with urgent screams; it has grappling hooks attached to the fold between my chest and gut; it’s a jovian gravity well; all i want is to melt back into bed and swirl back down the odd musical vortex of perfect abandon. absurd oblivion. the bent language of weightlessness. the everyday surreal. the idea of staying up after this to start grading is like sawtooth cardboard ice cream. a boring robot. a teaspoon full of death. so tired so tired so tired and yet so fucking far behind and there’s not going to be any time to make up for it if i go back to sleep now. you just can’t keep not doing it day after day and expect it to go away. jesus christ, why is that so hard to understand. i had a memory about whatsername, i don’t even know what to call her, there’s no word that conveys my revulsion, fascination, hatred, discomfort and determined distance. her name doesn’t seem right; names are so musical and intimate. “Ex-wife” sounds so banal; like a normal thing, like a thing I or she might have initiated for normal dumb reasons of mere incompatibility. Arguments. Custody. Money. Sex, attention, you’re not enough of this, you don’t do enough of that, blah blah blah, you don’t pick up your socks, you don’t fold socks right, I work too much, you don’t help out, blah blah fucking puke blah blah. No, ours is too pure a severance to be described with such a bland phone book of a word. So I have no word. I just have rancid memories, memories buzzing with flies like a shriveled piece of fatty steak left uneaten by the cats. It doesn’t even matter what the memory “was” anymore; I don’t even want to type it. It’s so stupid and threadbare. By itself it is nothing. As a hologram it, as they all are, is everything I don’t want to swallow, don’t want to taste, don’t want to see writhing and writing all over my face in the language of maggots every time i look in the fat bloated mirror. the tenuous energy between teddy bears and earnest little girls lights up the whole downstairs like a candle. Libby gave Cinnamon lots of hugs. Instead of putting him safely back in the closet as a “thing that was mine when I was a kid,” I let him sit on this little homemade “desk.” For days after she took him to girl scouts and he didn’t win the award for “most vintage,” she would stop before going to school to give him a hug. He looks out at the room, sort of at me, with unblinking orange eyes, black pupils. Libby put two halloween size Butterfingers on his lap the other day. He’s a sponge for my grief, my sadness, the inevitability of-- He’s fine, really, I reassure myself, he’s stuffed, the stuffed can handle this stuff. They’re made for it, that’s what they’re designed for. They don’t feel pain the same way we do, right? I’m going to miss her when she’s gone. Happy diamond jubilee, I said when I called her. Calling her was nice, harmless, generous, and a little bit much. She said I could call every week, and I haven’t. But I will call her today. Sometime to take a break from grading. If I do it more often, it shouldn’t be as emotionally wavelike, right? It should be a little more normal. Like it should be. A teddy bear slung under the arm and walked around with absent-mindedly, instead of a lodestone, a beacon of heartsong and loss.