I started dreading they would show up, become as present in reality as they'd become in my mind. Rather, he would show up because she wasn't really the problem, not at least, the primary cause of it. Afterall, it wasn't she that put in the effort to contact me and let me know what horrible person I must be. Isn't everyone? At the supermarket, the only one in town. At the post office where most conversations were carried out with people I hadn't seen in a month or two. Or even longer. Usually longer as I'd taken to the reclusivity of old age. What is the use of a social construct when all it led to was outbursts like his. There was so much hostility in what he had to say and where it came from appeared to originate in something other than what I had said about a scientific theory that I understood if not completely then at least enough to have substituted it for the failed one everyone else was pushing around like an empty shopping cart at a flea market.

Dear Whoever You Are, Once again, I fell to sleep, eventually. The amount of pain I felt was beyond my tolerance for accepting it as 'just pain' and rather, I believed it to be mental illness. Things will never end will they? But you knew this, know this. I wonder who is the teacher? Is it you or the devil? In the morning I wake to realization, that kind of nausea that everyone knows. It will be there for some hours. It is that pattern that I've learned to live with, not an old friend but a regular visitor. A mailman or garbage collector. It is almost a hobby but like stamps, filled with a certain amount of dread, a certain amount of fascination. The sadness that started in the heart and went into the tummy, ends up in the hands. Circles back into the heart and runs the circuit until it has divested of the pertinent electrons responsible for the distribution of grief. Grief? The losses endured. The losses of things no longer even there to remember let alone to grieve. Ancestors. They are there but no longer have names. Whoever you are, my question is this: have you felt your skin on inside out yet?

As if an open book revealed an open heart. I don't like to read books anymore.

Sobbing I dreamt of Gaza last night. I'd been there before, many times. We were visiting a relative in Borj al Borajne, the sign for Gaza in the world of sleep. It was a symptomatic rendition of a proto-typical slum in the Arab world, places you never see unless you have chosen that path. There were orphans there in a room where a dozen or so Arabs were sitting and one orphan in particular who was being bullied by everyone. The orphan had very tiny eyes that never opened. I went to the orphan and picked her up. Her tiny eyes opened as I cradled her well. There was so much love and longing between us. I then had to leave with the group that had accompanied me to the slum. I somehow got separated although as I passed the correct path, the one that went down a hill..I instead went up the hill all alone. I took a wheelbarrow from a worker at the fork in the road in order to carry something. At the top of the hill it became clear I was in the nice part of Gaza, the universal slum. The buildings changed..I noticed terrace gardens where someone had capped their potted plants with old plastic bottles to create terrariums. I was getting more and more nervous, the buldings were getting more opulent and modern. I was in trouble, getting further and further away from my group. I entered a salon and asked to use a lady's cell phone and she agreed but said she had to do some things first. I knew if I called Mel he'd come and get me and the number I can never remember while awake became quite clear. The woman however was deliberately avoiding me to prevent me from leaving her salon, that world of beauty in which she performed an endless number of tasks to put me off. I finally decided to ask one of the customers and went from face to face, person to person and crying. No, because in my dreams I do not cry. I sob tremendously hard. It was one of these dreams that are so common with me now as if to populate every single dream I have anymore. They all end up in desperation until I fully acknowledge that I have the power to end the nonsense. I choose to wake up. I sense an enormous sense of relief knowing that incontinence missed my house once more time.