I used to not believe in souls and mates and all that kind of nonsense. I guess I wanted things about love to be more definitive. More resolute and controllable than all that.

Love is a lot harder to sort out than making an organized grocery list.

I need to stop the spin. Of you.

So, I run. Set out in the rain and the perma-dusk of the day. Walking. Where the University hits V Street, I step up the pace. This driving rain. The power from the music wailing in my ears. The blind driving wind. I run. Turn. Try to loose myself in neighborhoods through which I've never been. Look for a place that might resemble something I recognize. Of home. At 22nd street, my right hip pops out of its socket. The sharp cracking noise audible over the drive of the headphones drives me insane. I'm not supposed to be here. This ligament disorder, and doctors, have told me so. But I have to move. Through this damned soaking rain. The entire right side of my body between the knee-cap and the shoulder engulfed in flames the color of napalmed forests on foreign soil. Turn my face up to the sky. Scream inside my head. Walk the rest of an hour under the increasingly darkening streets. My clothes soaked to the bone, already, an hour and a half before. But I can't stop. This madness. Moving. Catapulting me forward. Against the streetlights. I wonder what normal people do with their time. Match the beat of every footfall with the syllables pounding in my head of all words in every language I can recall for every part of you: collar bones, nose, eye brows, chin, lips, ears, hair, chest, shoulders, every last eye lash, wrists, wrist sockets, teeth, roof of the mouth, forehead, cheeks, tongue, temples, back-of-the-neck, palms, knuckles, finger nails, ribs, belly, back, hips and the hip joints, the ankles and each instep, the ball of the foot, the legs, the knees, the valves, the drum of the ears, the bones, the red and pink fleshy works and all the other untraceable unreachable places from hands and eyes--lips and tongues. Your clear bluest-grey eyes. The pain and the wind and the rain guide me somehow home. Peel off my wet clothes just inside the door. Stretch out. Take a hot shower. Make you some dinner without words. I can't stand to eat. Four or five drinks later. I'm too tired to think. Too stupid to stop the stupid pattering of thoughts pounding in my head like rain drops. My right leg, still, a raging flame of fire. Instead of stopping, I open a book and read. About how boys have been killed senselessly in war. And I know I won't sleep. The mutability of life and all the time I'm wasting away. The way this love is just like breathing, and now I don't know how to let it stop. To lie down under blankets and feel the steady drift into nothingness. If I could go out and drive the same pace again, just now, I would. My feet and hands ache. And I wish there were something forgiving to bite down on.

Hard.

*see Jess for really good attempts and the origin for the idea.