This week everyone has had their heart broken, or had someone die, or been panicked and lived at the end of a knife, or been hit by a car, or lost all their money. We have all been in panic, or grief, or shock, or pain. So few people I love are untouched by this cosmic whomp at this point that I feel I should call the remainder and caution them to be prepared for anything and everything, the worst.

It feels like it is somehow my fault, because I am at the center. Like I have been pouring panic and irresponsibility, lalalalala, I'm not listening, lack of self-awareness, into the universe for the last two months, and this is what I get. I would like to speak to a physicist about what is happening here. And a psychic, an astrologer, a priest, a mathematician, a choreographer. We will have a panel in a giant oak room with a giant cedar table. The curtains will be purple. The wine will be red. The ceiling will be open to the stars and the trees. We will drink and talk, drink and talk, circle, circle, reach in the direction of an answer and fail to reach it. There is no answer for a world's worth of psychic pain. My mother says so many things are dying in the oil spill, and maybe it's finally starting to hit us. Connie says she has been watching a comet through her telescope the past few nights. I wonder why no one else is noticing the pattern, the shock wave, the cluster.

It is the Pink, half an hour before close, still crowded. Buffalo Tom sings if my patience were a spaceship, to me, because my patience has been just that. I am dealing with things the old fashioned way, Guinness and Patron and Guinness and Patron and Guinness and Blue and Patron and a cigarette, and the slow but steady path to serious poetic justice. An hour later Becky and I are speaking elementary but fluid French to Jean Claude while he chain smokes and draws a face on the wall and Drew feeds me coke after coke after coke so I can bike home.

"Qu'est-ce que tu dessines?"
"Une figure."
"Quelle figure?"
"Toi, bien sûr."
"Je ne te crois pas."

The thing about Buffalo is this. It is the thing that draws me here and keeps me coming back, keeps me proud, keeps me fierce, keeps me brimming. The bandaid is perpetually ripped off. The trauma and the comfort simultaneously always on the surface. The sky falling around everyone you love and you go out to the bar and someone is always having a worse week than you. There are 80 kinds of people there and all of them comfortable or uncomfortable together, forgetting it together. You bike home and there's a new shrine across the street. White candles and balloons, a poster on a tree, flowers, script. The cars, which speed through to pick up their fix with little regard for traffic law or children on tricycles or pedestrians, give a wide berth. And the next morning, Quick, who's got the tiredest eyes of anyone and somehow wrangles all these teenage drug dealers and a wife and baby and garden, is out on his stoop with his wide grin asking me how I am and if I'm gonna have a good day. "I think I am," I say, and he grins and grins and grins, "That's a blessing."