Mark is still dead. I don't think about it for days and days. I'm busy. Then I remember and I think, STILL dead? Every other phase of our lives no matter how Shitty if we can just see the point of it or bear it anyway if we don't will surely end sooner or later. Yoga teaches this in microcosm. Terribly painful but it will end. And you can do anything for a minute. And what is time except a minute at a time? Patti Smith, she says to Fred after almost 20 years, You've been gone long enough. But he won't come back. Aaron isn't dead but I think of his absence constantly. All the time, to me he is gone, and I think of it as I am doing now. The absence of the living is distracting for the outrage it occasions in us, for it is a choice no? The absence of the dead fades because there is no point being outraged, I think, so our minds walk off from it after awhile as if from a show after the credits. But maybe the living have no choice either. Away everyman goes, somehow, inevitably.

Then, after he left me, the beginning was not only the first, happy occasion, opening into an infinite number of happy occasions, it also contained the end, as though the very air of that room where we sat together, in that public place, where he leaned over, barely knowing me, and whispered to me, were already permeated with the end of it, as though the walls of that room were already made of the end of it. ~Lydia Davis, The End of the Story: A Novel

VIRGO Unlike zoo animals, people often get to design their own cages. It sometimes takes them a while to realize this, though. You have more freedom than you think. Current boundaries are either illusory, self-imposed, or both.

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.~M Train

The temperature was dropping and a light snow was falling. I sat before Brecht’s grave and hummed the lullaby Mother Courage sings over the body of her daughter. I sat as the snow fell, imagining Brecht writing his play. Man gives us war. A mother profits from it and pays with her children; they fall one by one like wooden pins at the end of a bowling alley. As I was leaving I took a photograph of one of the guardian angels. The bellows of my camera were wet with snow and somewhat crushed on the left side, which resulted in a black crescent blotting a portion of the wing. I took another of the wing in close-up. I envisioned printing it much larger on matte paper, and then I would write the words of the lullaby on its white curve. I wondered if these words caused Brecht to weep as he wrung the heart of the mother who was not as heartlessas she would lead us to believe. I slipped the photographs into my pocket. My mother was real and her son was real. When he died she buried him. Now she is dead. Mother Courage and her children, my mother and her son. They are all stories now.~Patti Smith, M Train.