I have many escape fantasies. Escaping what? Nothing in particular. Not the present so much as the future, or my fear of it. So much for paying attention to any advice that anyone ever gives me. But nursing these fantasies feels like a Faberge egg in my sock drawer. Z and I write emails and text messages and voicemails back and forth, abrupt since there is no time for anything more, cascading water. The immediacy of our desires.

I want to bartend in a clamshack.
I want to be drinking something green.
I want to dance in the same lamplit room as you.
I want to be in Greece.
I want to throw broken plates at him.
I want to filter sand through my fists.
I want a flannel shirt that goes all the way to my knees.
I want blue hair.
I want to smoke clove cigarettes.
I want our car to break down in the mountains and we can't leave.

We back and forth, back and forth, but it is a constant stream in my head and she only gets some of it. I want, I want, I want. Anywhere and anything else, a million lives and worlds, minutiae that are not mine.

She told me to get a book called Crush. She had sent me a poem from it which is one of the most heartbreaking poems I have ever read. I haven't read the rest of the book yet because I am too busy reading my animal cards nine times a day, but I have been carrying it around with the rest of my little survival kit, and I am endlessly comforted by the first line of the introduction,

This is a book about panic. The word is never mentioned.


Oh, and one other poem, which I really need in my universe because of the lines

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't
want them, so I take them back
and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.

There is so much more to say, but I will be late for work if I say it.