"I was filled with longing for joyful permanent fixations, and insight, for play and a secular individualism, a spiritual life and some unnameable opportunity like a right I vaguely remembered and couldn't get purchase on. It was no good. It took me years and one mistake after another to realize this and even then I simply got washed out, put aside I didn't really learn a lesson. I know it's not so much the mistakes not the divisions, or cultural impediments, the threats and isolation techniques we run on each other it's the heart. My father went to his grave unchanged. So did Poe. And beautiful Anna Karenina. And Ovid. Consuela Concepcion, too, my piano teacher. They say in the end Mussolini was so terrified his mind seized and he couldn't speak. He sat there swelled-up and bug-eyed. This is not it. Or anyone drowning or lurching from the fire shrieking he didn't want this to happen. There is so much gibberish. And imprecision. No wonder we lock in. Like you, I get scared. I used to go to my friend's house, sink into the old sofa on his back porch and read all day. His family and the ducks and dogs would pass by, let me be—discreet love—I'd feel safe."
