Sometimes after a long depression, a time so long you can't remember what you felt like before it began, or when it began, or even why, sometimes after a long time of feeling like you've been walking on thin ice all your life, simple sadness brings a special kind of solace. A relief to let down and feel the world still there, the moon chewed away by time, the night, the city wrapped in its million dreams of which you need dream only one. You. What can I say? Came out on the ice with me. Knowing the danger. Knowing you might never make it back. We none of us make it back, but most pretend we can. Black ice. Let me hand it to Gibson here, speaking of hopeless romantics. Or was I? Lost in the circuits, the exchanges, potlatch of memory, so many of us who have passed this way. The earth shaped to our wandering feet, trekking further, deeper, well past the point, so long ago, of no return. The sky itself eroded by our vision, wondering, in awe, carving constellations into the night, projecting patterns where no patterns are. Once in a great while, once in a blue moon rising, we stop, amazed, and see in each other's eyes this is no mystery, no secret. I know you and you know who knows. Something happened on the ice. Touched us. Changed us. Something like a sadness that is hard to tell apart from joy.

I sit here in this little room, where I have learned to appreciate being alone. Savoring it sometimes, when the shaking stopped long enough. When the ice held, let's say. Which is not always. Not every day. And each time I walk in here, where this deck sits, this old machine on its last legs, barely able to hold these too many buffers open, so crashing, and I think perhaps this is an analog for grief, our metaphors so thin, so etched in substrates we have never seen or touched nor would have wanted to remember if we had. Each time I walk into this room I see a black notebook, the pages black paper, ruled, on which long ago I wrote with a pink gel pen, how luminous, how wondrous in itself...

I went to the South on the Day of the Dead. The sun was a black rose in a turquoise sky. My eyes hollow sockets, my bones rattling as I walked. All this felt familiar. The village children screamed in fright and ran away. They are so beautiful, I thought, but I understood their fear. The women though, some of them, would come out to greet me, weave flowers through my rib cage, around my hips, which they would kiss with great longing, remembering love. And the men, a few of the old ones, would take off their hats and look down. My heart went out to them. Why only now do we see, I wondered, blessing as best I could our blindness. I was looking for you there, a sudden memory from another time. The day faded into night, but I could see everything, for miles. Coyotes and scorpions came to me out of the desert. Sat around me in a circle. I sat down too, there was nowhere to go. I wept. Waiting for you as I have always waited, knowing you will never come.