You’re always dragging me around. But I see the best of the world with you.
Teddy gets skates. Sam gets a stuffed Laplander reindeer. I get a ski sweater, of some wool from an animal so vigorous, knitted by people so powerful, I feel like I am wearing a force field and not a gray sweater.
DOWN AT THE SCHOOL for the deaf the afternoon passes loudly.
Bridey comes in to check on me. I grab him and pick him up in my arms, taking him to the bed. Our bed. Holy shit, he says. Call me princess. Take me apart. Put me back together again. I take him all night, as much as we can stand and then a little more. And it does feel like taking. As if I am sending something of myself through him again each time that enters him and comes out through his throat, where I catch it back into myself, in a kiss. To send it through him again. I land on him afterward when finally we lie still. I love you, Bridey says.
The smile he gives Mr. Zhe on greeting is more intimate than a kiss hello.
I no longer spent all my time wanting to die, but I was fairly apprehensive about being alive. It wasn’t that my life lacked meaning, but rather that I disliked the meaning it offered to me every morning as I sat at my studio wheel, spinning.
THE NEXT YEAR I kept the Polaroid picture of Peter and I from his last night alive in a diary that I wrote in only when I wanted to die.
I try not to cry and am successful. And this makes the difference, I think.
Mr. Zhe wears a gray zip-up turtleneck sweater that makes him look like he’s a sailor preparing us for departure.
