Sneaking down dirt lanes in the morning, I think: When don't you know what you don't like?
The girl could see the boy working the laptop.
Certain pain, the boy wrote.
The girl living in words appearing on the screen of the boy's laptop wanted to take the pain away for the boy she had once loved. The girl wanted to make the boy hurt less.
The girl no longer needed the boy. The girl had what she wanted from the boy, she had the rock in the garden, and this was going to be enough, and this was never going to be enough. Nothing was ever going to be enough.
There was some secret the boy was keeping from the girl, some secret he was keeping even from himself, a secret that, by keeping it from himself, he was offering to the girl as the husk of a secret he would never reveal, even to himself. The girl knew she no longer wanted to have anything to do with the boy and his husk of a secret that was never going to be anything more than a husk of a secret she would never know the slim presence of again. She would never know the core of the secret that lay inside the husk of the secret anymore.
You understand: at the beginning, the secret is what keeps you there; now you understand, suddenly, at the age of forty-three, that the secret is what keeps you away, that the secret is something you are no longer interested in either keeping away or even now revealing again.
Not knowing the slim core of the secret no longer keeps you alive, it rather kills you, and you no longer love the husk of who you are, or who you once were, in the husky silence of the secret that was always only a silence about how secret the secret of you was always being.
Sometime, late in the night, the girl heard a baby cry, and then the girl heard a silence snaking down dirt lanes in the morning when she didn't know any longer what she didn't want any longer to know.
Mornings, when you aren't likely to know anything about what you don't want to know about anymore, when you are not any longer most likely to know a single thing about what you don't know the least of what is no longer something you think you no longer need to think about anymore, the girl could no longer answer any of the questions she no longer longed to ask herself anymore. She no longer could barely even ask the questions she no longer even thought to ask herself anymore. She'd already smoked too much tonight and was planning to smoke a bunch more, a bunch too many cigarettes, thereby turning her voice into a husk of something only an unanswerable echo on the other side of who she never was could ever love.
I believe in cold air through the open bedroom window, and I believe in kids playing video games in another room, in another part of the house, with the door closed and the kids reaching deep into their own hearts late into the night after stopping playing video games and thinking now of brushing their teeth, now, with their parents long asleep, and trying to feel the things they know they are never going to ever feel again.
I believe I might have imagined the grey veil of existence none had met in the middle of winter, a winter unimaginable except to the men in felt shoes living on other planes of existence, deep in the bowl of winter, smelling the smell of books exaggerated by artificial heat.
By the end of the day, as I lay on my bed, window open, looking at trees with tires hanging in branches over rivers of oil, like low dark clouds arrived too late in summer, I forget where my search began and ended.
The girl quietly shook out her hair, and it fell alone in the room.
Eleven moments in eleven books positioned at opposite ends of the sunlit room.
In another life, I bled in bed with the girl. It was a bed so small it made me feel frightened.