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ENTRY 6: November 11. 2025	I came home to a large hole in our bedroom, a ladder led down into the floor and disappeared. What is going on with you? I ask, He doesn't respond right away, his glasses are up on his nose and he's looking at a book in his hands, his legs straight out on the bed, I was just looking at something. I don't ask what, have you made some changes to the house? Yes. I had to access the pipes. The water doesn't have enough pressure, Okay-- and how was your day? His voice is very bright, he looks up, his eyes are clear green, the table lamp coats us both, I was just at work, just the same as always, I see, he goes back to the page, and how is the research paper going? I look out the window, at the cool blue setting outside, I need to speak with you, I have some compulsion against my judgement, I need to tell him, I'm feeling distant from you, He is looking up again, this time blankly, Why? He makes no move from the bed, I try putting my hand on the edge, still far from him, as though he can feel through the blanket, something is going on with me, have you seen it? I feel far away from you, and you don't seem to want closeness, he looks inadvertently into the hole, This is all tied to my mother, I suspect, you know she was overbearing, she followed me around the house, I guess I'm still trying to get away somehow. He keeps looking in the black circle, I feel around in my mouth, we had walked outside some night like this, looking up at the houses across the river, the lights in some windows showed plates, curtains, we pointed at them, I'm sorry you're feeling trapped, I said, I want to let you be yourself, only you aren't showing yourself to me-- I am, you see me all the time, maybe I want to keep some parts to myself, I think of your mother in the kitchen, her soft brown hair which looked like mine, it was feathery and you often called her an owl, you could also be poetic. Who would get to you first? I wondered, I guess we just have to give it time, you nodded and said something, then turned a page to show you had left. I wandered away to the kitchen. My hands on my face felt cold and unattached to my arms, the kettle didn't seem to be working, I couldn't understand whether the light meant on or off, when I went and laid down he continued to read late into the night, as I slept in a different body.
ENTRY 5: November 10. 2025	He always spoke about the birds he saw, we watched the forest change beneath the university, it wasn't true unless proven, we didn't see the road but for the trees circling. --- --- --- --- --- She sat on the couch and I across, a woman I know yet wanted intimately for her to ask, we had been all around at this point, the first night we had sat at a table in a plaza, sure, the others had still been around, the color of stones and neon signs unremarkable, even in Spain, or because of Spain, the woman and the man, parents of someone I also know, they created an egg of sorts, or another name, asking about Jeremy, I didn't know, frying the edges, they seemed to laugh, I couldn't quite grasp the meaning, why they left the center raw, thinking the to-and-fro of the people below might jog something, instead we went to the bike race and climbed the hillside amid juniper berries, I found the paths that had been matted by deer hooves, going far ahead I still waited for her to shout the question up to me, perhaps in the quiet evening alone in the tiled kitchen, a window might look out to orange streets and a square painting hang from above the stove top, the morning light then, as I turned to her making my coffee, she would at once, string together a long grass hill and ask about the lake I had once visited with my mother, although her words would be how are your parents, she would, as we sat at another outdoor table, legs bumping against each other, stirring clean ice cubes she would enquire after my father, I would then move towards a grey green room, perhaps parakeets still nest here, this far south, I turned the key in the wood door as though, where is she? A question posed and forgotten, outside the remains of morning.
ENTRY 4: November 5. 2025	At my grandmother's house we would wake in the early morning. I remember it now because I am in Spain and the morning is like one I remember, cold and warm at the same time, people are already out and walking in skirts, although my grandmother's house was only cars going by the front window. My grandparents made us breakfast and waited for me to finish. The sky was still a soft color without the full sun, we often ate in silence. On some mornings, she took me to the park down the hill, in the center was a large metal ball rusted and painted like a sun with a face, he looked too human-like, with big human eyes and eyebrows. I grabbed the metal sides and swung around, the hills around were green and I could not see over them. --- --- --- --- --- The man and his girlfriend of 8 months took us to dinner, He liked to control the table, telling us he would choose the place, but once sitting down his girlfriend selected the food, I'm a foodie she said, This place is quite good. She had wide eyes sunk in her head, she was a banker she said with big nods, smiling across to her boyfriend. So the food came and it was many things I did not know cut and stacked together, an olive, a sardine, and a pepper skewer. I ate wrong, not all at once, the talk turns immidiately to violence, the forfeit their rights when they use violence, he says without room for argument, since we're the guests, me especially. His girlfriend is telling us she goes to the gym in her hour lunch, the mother, his friend, telling various stories of them as children, he had fallen while skiing and gotten a scar, she had gone after to stay in the Canary Islands. We have moved off the topic of violence, they instead talk about gluttony, glutton they tell us, we were gluttons in Peru, we were tired of eating, beneath my hands are a fork and a knife, across the city the remains of the food I've eaten is being wheeled around in garbage cans, perhaps going by the window now, reminds me, the man has a big face and a big lip, his hair is combed back, he holds her waist outside and they unite in a hurry to leave. I go to the single bathroom and look at my wide face in the mirror, I smile and look at my big teeth, the waitress is fixing the wine on the shelf, she doesn't look at me.
ENTRY 3: November 4. 2025	His father dug holes with a hole boring machine. His company sent him to cities in Europe and Africa, constructing giant blades to spin beneath the homes, in a single motion it cut the width of the subway tunnels. His mother was a telephone operator, she moved the wires in the switchboard, at night she went back to the farmhouse, this was in Peoria, she said. He came home from school and found the house empty, he took a red metal car from it's box and pushed it along the floor, dust came up where he moved, he made sounds to show the car was driving. He heard his mother come into the next room, he felt the cold breeze come from the open window and the smell of apples rotting in the garden, he lay on his bed until she left. Supper was prepared in the kitchen, the tablecloth shone under the incandescent light, his father smiled as he ate strips of pork and eggs, his mother showed her teeth when she grinned and looked at them all, his sisters sat together, their fingers grabbing at the edge of the table. Kirk, what do you think of a boy who doesn't like to work? He looked at his plate and said nothing. His father smiled around the table and spoke, Don't be hard on him, Mary, I finished plenty in time. When he went out to the garden he watched birds along the fence, he wondered what kind they were, his mother watched from the window, then went to the doorway, she shouted for him and he pretended not to hear, the birds flew from the noise, their wings brushed together in a soft hush. He walked farther down the road, but there were only crows in the path now, his mother came from behind him, she watched his arms hang at his sides and his body twist as he walked, There is a rumbling in the ground, he imagines his father's machine, pushing past the worms and caterpillars, he takes his red car to the edge of the trees and pushes it into the cold mud, he reaches far in and comes up empty, the car seems to drive on it's own, her voice comes from above his head, her skirt is getting wet at the bottom, Why do you never do as I ask? she grabs at the car half out of the water. Slowly, he forces it on beneath the streets.
ENTRY 2: November 3. 2025	It's all state changes, moving out of Washington at some point, Why not put it on the news? The president wakes up from another dream, he writes in a notebook and meets with the president of Isreal, What do I know? They should have hired a material scientist. I put the mixture in the microwave and wait for it to boil, I watch it through the leaded glass. Outside somewhere they are swarming together, they decide when it's time, bubbles pour from the bottle and I send the wrong data, The president is on the phone with someone else, he tells the entire room about his dream, Does it count? When I put the wrong liquid in? When it breaks and we hire a materials guy next time, I don't know about everything, I don't know how you felt, holding the gun in your hand and going to the house, holding it out against your hip, mime the action, mime your hands and show, as though you would, I don't know the fear you felt, the blood in your heart and the suspicion coming in shadows beneath your skin while you waited, he tells me about his friend and we say he needs to be aware of his actions, he needs to open up, he needs to look around. A strain gauge would have helped, we look over the busted metal, To predict every action is to finally be invisible, surely I would never touch the bedside again.