my mother didn't start looking like an old woman until her mid-60s. and i could tell cute stories about my childhood--of how i used to fall asleep anywhere at any moment--the floor of the bathroom. in the middle of eating a cracker wearing only a diaper on an avocado colored chair in a picture in an album on the lowest shelf in the front room of my mother's house. i'm starting to look like her. the long dark hair. heavy librarian framed glasses. anemic. selfishly remotely emotional. caustic. personally unforgivable. furiously serious. i had a deaf photographer boyfriend, once, who tried to capture me intensity. now i only think he could have been wrong. that howl is the ghost of my mother and her mother. it's the signature of a woman who needs men like wild dogs need meat between their teeth. like a woman who wouldn't start wearing the ages of her life until she was damn well ready. maybe the answer is somewhere in those dusty pictures 1500 miles away, before my brother turned into my father. maybe i've already had all the sleep one lifetime requires, and i just didn't spend it wisely. i need my grandmother to bake more batches. we never ran out. at her house. why the hell didn't somebody wake me up, anyway? wake up. i wonder if tonight, in quick snatch glances toward sleep, i'll think about crackers. there are so many stories. like popping corn. where the fuck is the fire? i've been to england. a lot. i fell in love there with a wildly articulate and handsome mathematician. and thought i might stay. you know those email quizzes friends send between friends that are supposed to enlighten us all by answering whether or not we're a chocolate or vanilla kind of girl? [this is an aside. i never quite fit those things (ted could tell you if he asked him). i'm no audrey or katharine -- i'm loren bacall.] best kiss is always--always--in that shower with him and the skylight under the moon. we went to war, that time too. i think? and i was working on a paper about identity formation. i think back then i was still into performance. i never thought i'd reduce that memory into something so trivial as an email quiz answer. that's something i should feel shameful about. everything gets crushed down, doesn't it? i hate that. i haven't spoken to the people i most love in ages. locked myself away inside this head and tried to let it all go. but there are so many things that i don't want to collapse upon themselves. every day i lose more of her. like my mom's fight with age. at some point anything will sneak right up and bite you. catch you up so short you'd forget how to even get home. maybe the question has more to do with the sharpness of the teeth. because, the thing is, i miss writing love poetry about and to and for the green lantern. and i miss writing so much it hurt because everything hurt because i loved so much and so hard that i didn't know what else to do with myself. i have a doctor's appointment tomorrow. and a dissertation to finish. so i go into the missing. sign.

maybe i do.

i also meant to not make december, so soon, a lie.