Look at how she is with him: she doesn't care and he wants her. She doesn't care and he wants her. How not to care is a course I missed.

So I guess when you're doing a Spiritual Fasting, you shouldn't chew gum the whole time. Question mark? It's not that I don't know the answer, but that I still ask the question.

She trundled down the street—why did she always ask for the brown paper bags. It wasn't about the environment, in fact, she always felt duped by this in particular: was plastic really worse than paper, since paper you need to cut down trees? No, it was because of the smell. The smell of the paper bags had always drawn her respect. Not like gasoline, but subtler and more heady, like a curry. When she was told the way cockroaches hid in paper bags, she understood, but felt she could never elaborate. Not that there was no way to corroborate with the roaches, she knew a series of tests could be performed, like Pavlov. But she knew this was a test that would never be conducted. Insects were left behind in these tests. They fail both tests: they're not cute and we can't inject them with something to see if they roll over, loose their hair, grow an extra nut. She considered changing course, of switching to plastic, but at the moment, even the idea seemed crazy.

She allows commemoration. It's as if she's an alien, yet I know people do this: take pictures, remember moments. I saw this phenomenon with my sisters, who unlike myself, all have verifiable lives. If you ask where they live, there is a pic of ground that would raise its hand if it would. Open up Earth and say she is my Queen, and they have babies, made there be life: usually the first child who gets all the pictures, and the scale descends thereafter. My sisters used to pack cameras, to remember to pack the camera. Used to pack the camera, check that it was asked, ask their husbands “Did we pack the camera?”, how the uninitiated imagine OCD, always with the on and off on and off, just checking, of lights. But again, she's not American. I have never met her face to face and still she floors me, fucks my respiration.

N had friends with exotic unpronoucable names, often involving a “V” or a string of unexpected vowels. I had friends who had American girl dolls named after them (or vice-versa): Kristin, Kate, Rebekah—all spelled the way listed first in the Number One American Name Bible, 1977 Ed.

She noticed that when friends spoke of her, they never spoke in superlatives, only negatives: she was not a goldigger, she did not need a hair transplant.

What made the heart bake like a bread and then keep baking: calcify, hard, burned rock. Then worse: disappear. “Heart, where did you go?”, the worst.