The staples and the cuts in your arm.

2:19pm.

I cleared the desk of everything, even the lamp, and set before me a square telephone in the center of the desk, then sat down and pulled the telephone toward me, very cautiously, into my lap. And I called the hospital. They hadn't admitted a girl with no hands.

It was all very curious, and so I dialed for the Sheriff's Station. Similarly, they had not received any reports of a girl found with no hands.

But I saw the girl with my own eyes, spread out calmly, longways on the sidewalk, with her arms placed at either side. In the dark it had looked as if the girl's hands were simply buried in her jeans pockets, and that she were passed out, but the closer I came to her, I could see that if the hands were buried anywhere, they weren't around here, and the girl was not sleeping or passed out, she was bleeding profusely. The supermarket towered over this side of the street in either direction for a block. Across the street, in the empty lot of the closed strip mall, there was nothing, and nobody. There were no hands lying around, bleeding on the concrete.

But the frayed end of her wrists were bleeding everywhere, pooled in the cracks of the sidewalk underneath her, creating stained splotches at the bottom of her t-shirt and the thighs of her jeans.

Nervously, I plunged my own hands deep within the comforting warmth of my dress pants and held my head low, walking away from the girl on the sidewalk.



I stopped in at the all-night bakery for some orange juice and toast, sitting in the corner booth, listening to an older gentleman ruffling the hem of a newspaper at the bar. Steam curled up in delicate dreamy clouds over his cup of coffee. On a small white glass plate next to the cup of coffee was a fork and what looked like crumbles of soft cake, with a little frosting scraped off onto the side of the plate. The two ladies behind the counter of the bakery were actually knitting. From my corner booth by the window I could almost make out the supermarket down the road, but it was kind of blurred by the darkness and the trees that blocked the streetlamps from lighting this view.

It took me nearly an hour to finally go home. When I did, I showered and I thought about the girl with no hands, about bathing her in this bathtub and singeing the ends of her wrists to cauterize them so that she wouldn't be drained of all her blood before the autopsy could be performed. I wondered what the pathologist would make of this situation. I should maybe have tried to talk to her. There could have been a last word on her breath, waiting to be expelled if I just pushed down on her belly a little and parted her lips at the same time. She could have tried to say good-bye, or she could have tried to say no, a failed defensive statement that never quite got out because her body, in shock, had given up too quickly.



And I thought how brave the paramedics would have to be, to wrap her up without crying. They would likely be thinking of the girl's mother; or both her parents, for that matter, and if they were together still, or divorced. They would be thinking of whom in their circle would be responsible for breaking the news to the parents, if either of them could be tracked down at all. Or if they were even still alive.

After a shower I dressed for bed, in a pair of black slacks and a nice shirt that wouldn't look too terribly disheveled in the morning if I were to be tossing about fitfully in sleep, wondering if I should get back up and telephone the hospital, or the Sheriff, to find out if -- or ask when -- someone finally reported (or would report) the dead girl.

Yours,
JARET.

Everything could just disappear.

3:59am.

It's so early, but something is eating at me from the inside. It's been going on for a little while, but every here and there the indifference parts like a curtain, and the cast of characters inside me just stand there and blankly stare out, naked and unable, effortlessly apparently vague and questionless, limitless but without depth. Until the inevitable time where everything closes again and it dawns on me that bottling it up feels a whole lot better.

It used to be that I just didn't feel I had honest human blood in me; that somewhere inside my veins coursed the lineage of something distinctly inhuman. Kids, right? What a silly lot. Somewhere along the line that turned into a faded portrait of just some regular guy who didn't care. And people will say it's harder to frown than to smile, but motor responses are more dignified than to lay everything out on the line because you think you're smart enough to know the difference between the way most people in your neighborhood seem to be growing up, and the basic reality of grasp of concept. Especially if you don't have anything in life to lose, what's more indignant than posing as somebody who gets it? If I were to present a perfect case of very purely bland basic facts: No friends? Dumb job? No desire? Not even any expectations anymore? That composes a smile way more honest than the one you get when you give somebody a birthday gift, because a smile that means nothing means more than one that does.

So for a time I coasted along. So empty of anything moderately meaningful that you'd have counted me among the happiest people you'd have known. After all, it's easier to smile than to frown, if you listen along with those people who tell you stuff but don't know what they're talking about because they have husbands, wives and children they got saddled with too young in life to take it back and so really they're just kind of projecting.

So I coasted along. I got a car. I bought a couple CDs and listened to them at night in my car alone.

Then there came the years of trying to understand and reach back. But empty sand buckets are only so reminiscent of the vast beach it once tried to contain, and eventually that beach isn't so magical anymore, so you lose interest. I tend to fade away and just let the tide carry me further and further, against its own tide, into something less like the open sea and more like some front hall closet full of dusty jackets that only get taken out once a year.

Thank Christ that your twenties are just a constantly overlapping perspective of things, otherwise I'd have been stuck thinking like I did, in all those coils of interchanging lack of belief systems. It's not fun just coasting along unless you like it. I bet if you're rich, that you like it. Not to break the subject, but I bet if you're rich, it has to be pretty fun.

But.

At some point I grew a little faith, I think. And it was not faith in miracles, or in humanity, or in opportunity, or in passion or people or anything like that. Far from it, in fact, as it was a faith in nothing. Very literally, I grew to adore nothing. There is something in absence that can be felt more profoundly than love from another person. It wipes away desire, it takes the tenseness and worms out of the belly, until sickness simply doesn't exist anymore. Ailment may humble you, but sickness is just a frame of mind. And it doesn't have to exist in some respects. A sane man can eradicate sickness. A pair of crutches is no match for something eddying inside your head that'll give your nerves repeated punch-ups until the dawn of your death.

Lately I think I've lost faith in nothingness. I see myself in the mirror more than I used to. It used to be that I'd button my shirt up and comb my hair and be nondescript and presentable. Now, I start to see that there's an actual body in the mirror that does exist. I can't feel more lonely than that, really. Just being there to see me back and not having faith enough in nothing to understand that it's just a reflection. But it's not just a reflection. I've clocked into work enough times now to know it's not just a reflection -- there really is this walking person that does the things I do, and who resents doing it. I resent saying Yes when someone asks me a question. I resent saying No if I don't want to answer. Not because it means anything, but because I'm just plain tired of myself. Of hearing my voice, of being part of a conversation, of being around. I'm coming up with a shyness lately that's so thick I feel like it's smothering me. Getting stuck having to rely on your motor responses to get you through is like a sort of idiot prison. Feeling on the bottom of humanity's floor is a weight off one's shoulders, but you feel the pressure of all those strides and jaunts across your person, surely, as life just carries you on, and on, and on, until you're so riddled with disease and infirmity that you beg to be let back into that emotional prison and feel those ambitious others just rolling right the hell over you. Maybe that'll happen to me.



It's just stupid and lonely seeing yourself in a mirror and finally realizing you're really there when all your life it didn't quite seem like that and you'd already learned to live with it. So you have to learn to not exist within the you that does exist, regardless of how grudgingly that may be. I shouldn't be surprised that I have to do this over and over again. I blame it on faith.

When I dream, I don't exist. I am curled up on the floor and frowned upon, or being chased, hunted or pushed out. When I dream I don't exist, I am closer to me than I am when I am awake.



A blessing fell over me when I discovered the therapy of photography. That beautiful [silent] world of structures and hope and being. Something exists within that quiet frame, something that above all, I want. I'll always feel indebted to the guy who invented the camera. It's a world in eight days, or seven, or how many days or other it took to make this one. It's one of those.

There's nobody home when you talk to me, just so you know. I don't mind it, but I wish I didn't understand it so well. The things you do don't matter, I tell myself, and I believe myself. I believe in myself.

Yours truly,
JARET.