You are still my best friend. 
I wish it weren’t so. 
I wish I could move on.
But I need you every day.
…

There was a simple pine box in my father’s office desk. The box, like the entire drawer, smelled from a small bag of pipe tobacco he kept there with a couple of used corncob pipes, cream rims brown from smoke. His other pipes, those of fine woods but not his favorites, hung from a metal rack on top of his desk.

His box contained a small, soft leather pouch the size of a plum, a few handwritten notes, a Saint Michael protection card printed with gold-ink, a tiny, faded photograph of his mother and a couple clip-on pins given in recognition of his community service.  The pouch held a stone fox, the color of iron, with a piece of turquoise tied on top of its neck with a slim strip of leather. A note inside the pouch read, “Thank you, from the people of the Navajo Nation.” I found these things after he died.  

By opening his desk, I learned that he, like I, had a secret place for talismans, superstitions. 

It was strange to find this stone fox because a couple months earlier, I’d given him a small, stone grizzly, about the same size, also tarnished iron color, also from a Navajo artist.  I bought it at a roadside shop in Southern Utah because it reminded me of him.  Thick and strong bodied, it had a long nose, a slightly tilted head that made it appear to be listening, and penetrating, warm turquoise eyes. The grizzly fit perfectly in my palm. I could wrap my fingers around it, heat it up, fill it with life.

I placed it on my dad’s nightstand and it watched him die.
…
The grizzly is now my fox. He’s been with me for fifteen years. I keep him at my bedside wherever I sleep, wherever I go. When I’m most afraid, I clutch him in my hand, sometimes all night.

Perhaps because of the times we are living in, the ennui that has set in, the deep sadness I can’t shake, perhaps because all the suffering in the world hovers in the atmosphere like unbreathable pollution, for whatever reason, my grizzly has materialized, expanded to life-size.  

He lumbers around my apartment, the scent of sweet pipe tobacco following him. Mostly though, he sleeps on the couch, cuddled into the pillows, sniffing the ocean air. He’s begun attracting winged creatures. Sunflower-colored seagulls, lizard dayglo green crows and persimmon and pomegranate songbirds.  And the birds are attracting butterflies the color of pink and purple petunias.

I have felt so lonely, myself an extension of the long arm of time reaching around the curve of the earth into darkness. A dead silence rests heavy around my heart. My sustenance, the kindness of strangers, is gone.

Come here, sweet bear. Rest your head on my knee so I may look into your otherworldly eyes, touch your fur as soft as a Labrador’s, your velvet nose shortening the distance to the horizon. Let us wait for luck...when a songbird will sing for us, a butterfly will land on your head and you may feel the whisper of wind as fragile wings open and close, open and close, open and close and I may find peace in the gentleness of it all.

Early morning on the beach, a misty, dirty cloud covers the sun. A low haze hangs over the sea. The waves are weak. It’s already hot. Two days ago, my daughter said, “I want to leave.”
“You want to leave Spain?” I asked.
“No, I want to leave.”
I knew what she was talking about. I'd been thinking the same and I told her so.
For a moment, we both felt better.

Only a trickle of people walk the water's edge. Some out to exercise; running or striding quickly. Almost everyone wears bathing suits, women with straps tied around backs instead of shoulders. No tan lines, I guess. An older woman’s breast hangs out of her suit. She doesn't bother putting it back. No one cares. Women go topless here in Alicante.

Couples, most all. I am alone.

The silver sea is capped with foaming white waves. People pass like illusions. Wondering what their lives are like, I gaze down at footprints in the sand. The impressions dissolve with two or three brushes of waves, just like me, just like I have dissolved from lives, cities, jobs, friendships. How nicely this metaphor, this cliché, works.

Pale, cushioned benches under yellow umbrellas line up in neat rows, a new addition on Campello beach. Tourists, most from Madrid, have dropped in with big city arrogance and cash. Past tense are days of silence teased by palm branches brushing the balcony railing, birds chirping choruses accompanied by pulsing waves. The Spanish people are beautiful. Especially young girls with black eyes, long faces, large, long noses and thick, black hair. Picasso proportions.

When did my anger morph to despondency? I've risen, like the waves, to the occasion, crashed it, turned around healthy and gone back in again. Too many times. I'm tired of fighting for alright, joy, my verve. I hate getting older. Just one more thing out of control.

Only a few people wear masks on the beach. One blue-masked woman carries a purse which she lifts to her face like a tiny wall each time someone passes. People protect their health, their lives. We’re survivors. It's in our DNA. But I want to leave, end the fight for fundamentals, bread and water, work, love, belonging.

Did I become so strange no one wants me? I’m tired of blaming myself. Tired of knowing no one wants to hear me asking for help again. Tired of putting my chin up, my chest out and pretending I can do it alone. Tired of the pain of losing people who loved me but are gone like footprints after a few gentle, morning waves.

Afraid of the future, disappointed in the past, the present as elusive as a just world.
I ran to a Spanish desert
from cruelty, injustice, people,
fled with my sense of helplessness, ineffectualness, meaninglessness. Intimidated by hate. Afraid of civilization’s monsters. Ashamed that I am not David or anyone at all. That I am vulnerable and tired.
I cower in solitude.
A child looking through a crack in a door
as adults fight and the mean adult pushes the weaker, kinder adult against the hard edge of a suffocating knee, and going down the kinder adult, the gentle giant, takes the sheets and drapes and comforter and all the murdered innocents along. A flimsy torn, tired piece of cotton catches a candle’s flame. Fire crackles, cracks like a breaking windpipe, and consumes the room.  My hair catches fire
as I watch the room burn,
my daughter’s room,
her grandmother’s room,
her father’s room,
her granddaughter’s room.
The desert around me, dry and dark, is ready to burn as well.
For hope, the house comes down.

I roll up the window shutter when it is still dark; the January chill creeps through small spaces in the large, white framed window.  A hyacinth, resting on the black table, is in bloom; its smell strong and sweet.  Like other spring flowers, it calls out in a musical whisper to be noticed. Light pink flowers, partially opened, from its five, tall thick stocks, all bound by a blue ribbon I tied them with so their stems could cluster for strength. A sixth, small stock nestles, tucked between the durable others.

As the sun rises, construction workers begin their work on a new apartment complex.  As I am on the second floor, the new building has stolen the morning sunshine that once brightened my spot at the table. On the other side of my apartment, buildings shade the evening light. It stays dim inside all day.  

The drilling, hammering and occasional loud clunks crash into the room’s silence.  I watch workers walking along the scaffolding shell and kneeling in bare concrete rooms drilling.  They work like ants.

The sun rises, again unencumbered by clouds.  Every day, for as long as I can remember, for months, it has been clear.  Only one day lapsed into the gentleness of rain, Thursday last, the day my friend left Milan. It’s hard for me to believe only four days have passed since then. Already it feels an eternity of loneliness.

I could be anywhere in the world with a hyacinth on a table in January and construction  outside my window. 

When I go out wandering, examples of human capacity surround me, architectural examples, churches the most obvious. A strange comment about humankind that it creates such masterworks in respond to ideas of God.  There is a contemporary building I like, the Bosca Verticale, a high-rise residential building in Porto Nuovo, with large balconies dripping with over 4,000 plants and trees.  The plants help clean pollution from the Milanese air. 

My hyacinth cleans my air. As she realizes the day has arrived, her fragrance increases. I can almost see the movement in her flowers, the stretching and awakening of her stocks. If I pause to watch, even for ten minutes, I see the sixth small stock reach upward to the light. This is my vertical garden, masterpiece, spot of wonder among the hubbub of development outside.

How different would life have been, I wonder, if I were born someplace in Europe.

Alone I walk a formal garden, the conversation not gone, but moved inside my head, behind the Villa Reale, now home to public art.

Ducks and strangely yellow swans rest, plucking at their feathers, on wet, brown earth near the small lake. The sound of a contrived waterfall clapping softly.

On the palace lawn, a boy kicks an orange and white soccer ball with his father, stylishly Milanese with cobalt cashmere sweater and plaid scarf tightly wrapping his long narrow neck.  A couple with two young children, noticeably English, stroll by.

So much depends on the placement of the chicken and red wheelbarrow.

Last night between teeth grinding and wakefulness, I thought I understood the meaning of my last eight years, how I arrived where I am today, and I lighted, like a giant, smoky bug, on the pedals of a monumental, black flower. I am in the darkness, after passing through light and hope; after losing hope, community connections and my very identity; and after unsuccessfully searching for myself in the realm of remembering. It is beautiful in the darkness, more beautiful than in the full light and hopefulness, most definitely better than the longing gaze to memory. Sentimentality only occasionally and dimly wafts through these lightless halls, a brief whiff of my dead father’s pipe smoke, his voice on an answering machine repeating into infinity that he will return, the invisible umbilical cord connecting me to my dead mother as she walks to a podium one last time, my body resting on my favorite, faraway, lover’s chest, fitting so perfectly that we think we will be together forever, the dry, hot breeze from an open window on a lone, night drive through central Texas. These are the occasional that enter my regular, extant walk through the corridors of a dreamy gloaming amidst deep, dark truths, in the halls of the mythical, primordial and vaguely romantic. In this darkness, my eyes adjust as if in an Italian cathedral, the image of a Giotto or Bellini slowly revealed.

Like the pangs of grief, if this darkness is denied, my heart will be shot through with holes, my fragile soul shattered. This contemporary and relentless pursuit of happiness does not belong to me. Instead, I fear a disregard for the truths of living. The pain of it. Darkness, like a trick birthday candle, cannot be extinguished.

My body and soul tumble through a voluminous blackness because I am not held in place by love. I accept the sadness this brings. Not depression, not loss of strength, just sadness. I have given up the battle for love in air that holds no moisture. I have entered the free fall, and know that when I land, the darkness and loneliness total, the fresco image finally and completely obscured, I must love nonetheless. I must love when no one is loving me.

A new phase will follow, perhaps light, perhaps hope, perhaps something I cannot guess at now.

The cat stands, stretches, jumps from the chair and leaves the warm place on my hip…already becoming cold. My child sleeps in the other room. My head swims with the loss of those I’ve loved. No rhyme. No reason. I want more power to shape life around me, to stop the unexpected from wrenching my gut, the rain from coming on days we planned on sunshine. I want to stop the dishes from piling up in the sink and dust from accumulating on baseboards  and bedsheets, to end the sense of more to do than can ever be done. I want security, control, success. But I don’t have any of that.

The earth will turn. Rain or sunshine will come. The songbird will stop singing when it sees a worm. The heron will leave the rock to fly away. The cherry blossoms will fall to the brick walkway where they will be trampled to pink paste. My daughter will battle the labyrinth of an over-wrought world. Oceans will rise. Climates will change. Innocent people will be killed.

Oh, look. The cat is back. She has come to my side again and rests against my hip, warming it. I hear her purring, and tickle her neck, kiss her head, and wonder what it is like to be her. She doesn’t have control of when she is fed or when the basking sun breaks through the window or when the humans come home. Yet, she is content.

A stranger wearing jeans and a sweatshirt walks toward me under the viaduct.  
Another stranger shoots heroin in his arm while sitting on shaggy littered grass near the concrete sidewalk.  
Cars pass. It is raining.  
The approaching stranger carries a white paper cup with a brown plastic lid. I assume it contains  hot coffee.  And I think of a…
simple joy, as joy will be. The softness of it, like mist. Loving that was knowing, loving rolling into a body more familiar than my own, unassumingly as easy as brushing my teeth.

He would leave our bed, my eyes dancing over his body, happy knowing he knew how to touch me.

Downstairs into the cold early morning he went to the kitchen,
to the street by the hotel where red rocks cast shadows,
to his car covered in snow, to drive to Starbucks,
wherever he needed to go to get the coffee I liked best.

I used to believe in more love and more time.  

Wrinkled in overpasses now, I imagine the approaching stranger is taking coffee to his lover.
I pass him and the junkie and in my hand,
I clutch and conjugate “to grant.”