A. & I walked through Mountain Park one snowy night... His mother lived up there, in an apartment all deep carpeting, natural fibers and tubular furniture...

We stayed up til five one morning, for what purpose I don't know... Some kind of self-imposed endurance test maybe... Perhaps an insistence on wasting time in its purest sense, uncluttered by meaningful activity of any kind... Neither of us truly sure of our own motives, but at least happy in our ignorance and content to play our parts to the end...

Once he'd said in a tone of quiet revelation that our mothers kept the same bottle of Schultz plant food in the same relative position on the kitchen window sill... And, I suspect, both had the same paperback copy of Recipes for a Small Planet... Kept as much for its value as part of a reliquary (for the benefit, too, of our growing minds?) as for its utility, its use value...

This was how I saw my mother's library, relegated to its brittle knotty pine and cinderblocks... The titles were pointers to a former self within the person I lived with. They were ciphers that somehow formed a complex pattern, a layering of past aspirations and motivations– a museum of effort, the result of which may have born fruit or merely a withering blossom– captured in its name and circumstance if not its original– and this, in fact, is how I saw and see my own library, not of books merely, but collections of all kinds, photographs, objects compulsively stashed away, ticket stubs, a phone number and name written on a torn-off box flap.

Above the dusty volumes of William Golding, Petrarch, James Dickey, Dylan Thomas, then, up the use-worn treads and enameled banister, into the closeness of rising heat and knotty pine panelling you could find all of this, my library, my private hell of things... There were all the layers, all the secret caverns that could reveal me– all the pointers that led in loops, all with their unique geography of regret or vindication. I longed to escape; I couldn't exist outside it... Because as P.K. Dick says, you are the common thread... You follow you wherever you go.

Consider the map, a net of restraints over a core absurdity that looms larger the closer the scale approaches 1:1. A map of the self must approach and overtake this vanishing point...

I was too fond of paradoxes like this one; perhaps I hid behind my liking for them, confused timidity with a love of reflection untainted by action... Witness:

I watched D. walk by the cafeteria windows, suddenly real and opaque, not at all what I wished, what I constructed... She was real, fallible, capable of cruelty even, as I was... Not a great, indelible cruelty, but the ordinary, mundane cruelty of walking by the cafeteria windows on a gray day in late fall 1987 or '88... Just out of reach of casual eye contact... She couldn't know, how could it be cruelty? But the result was torture... Nothing sweet, nothing sentimental... Only raw frustration and an anger growing in, like incisors into a jaw...

I didn't know her, didn't even think I knew her... It was the question her face posed, the solution that tormented me– I had framed the question in such a way that the only way to answer it was to upset the equation... That one word or expression would be lost in a white noise of failure, of stepped-on lines...

When there was no problem at all, merely the unaccomplished fact of an awkward 17-year-old kid walking up to a brown-haired girl with green eyes that spoke a permanent expression of guileless expectancy, punctuated by a smile or at least the promise of one... He approaches her and speaks to her, a thing he's never done, a thing that horrifies him– and even in his carefully-constructed confusion he knows this is the answer because it horrifies him.

His father had told him this– in the cab of his panel truck, smelling of wet doug fir dust... "No matter what you do, you're gonna shit your pants." Indeed. But it is not the shitting of the pants that's the problem, but the sweaty terror of the moment of eye contact and the space between your open mouth and the utterance– the horror of saying something you've recited, the horror of saying something you haven't... If only you could blurt it out, get it over with... If only you could speak out loud, instead of screaming to yourself.

But this is not Hollywood, but passing time, moments to be lived, and every single one, not just the interesting ones. There are obligations even for you, a confirmed and sometimes proud shirker– distractions– excuses.

And you never speak to her.