Strangers.

Counting the rocks on the way home
pills in the cabinet expiring
strangers
strangers
strage
sorry, strange.
Mistakes
made in counting.

My aunt has asked me to ask around and find a man she once watched play Hamlet. She says he is the only man she thinks she could ever be with for the rest of her life. She wants me to ask around among the "theatre scene". He played Hamlet at some community playhouse in Alabama, had long black hair and muscles, passionate about acting. So it would be great if I could ask around about him, being as I'm involved with theatre and this is New York which is where people go who are passionate.

She said she's prepared to know whatever I might find out. I'm going to tell her I bumped into him at a supermarket...the grocery store...the subway...a bodega. I will tell her I met him late one night in a crowded club. We were parallel to one another, climbing our way up to the bar but seperated by three degrees of people. We reached it at the same time. I found a stylish and likely expensive coat beneath the bar on a hook and tucked it under my arm, thinking of finding the owner, starting off as her hero, becoming her friend. I opened my mouth to order, regardless of the bartender's lack of attention. Someone else's voice spoke my words. "Seven and seven." Seven and seven. Our eyes met. He paid for mine. I spilled his when his hand found my thigh and my balance eluded me.

It's a cruel world, auntie. The way he did Hamlet for me that next morning, the whiteness of his teeth, the cruel madness in his eyes. He didn't have to captivate. He didn't have to constantly eclipse himself with more moremore and all of that. I suppose I didn't have to find him. But I did. And you were right. It was glorious. I end.

I end here...with this imaginary shit. I left a library book at the bar I worked at last night. I hope it will still be there later. I hope I didn't scrawl anything derogatory about my employer on the bookmark. Shit. I think the bookmark was my paycheck. Shit. I should call. I should write. I should make time for mourning while still allowing myself to function within the confines and schedules and rational practice of a normal stupid damn ordinary day. I need to have one of those.

Normal stupid damn ordinary need four more syllables that's six and now at thirteen day. Oh day you began with a stranger who touches me like a wife. You begin with letters and fragmented feelings of alternately mad and upon a point of breaking...something to considering what to do with that bicycle I bought for twenty dollars with the cut lock from the man on the street. It's yellow and stolen. The man was brown and lying. I have chained it to my own bike in the basement and am trapped by the illegality of my own yellow possesion. Comes upon me like a courtmarshaled billing statement. "I must be dealt with. I am yellow and in the basement." Maybe I should donate it to children. A stolen bicycle? Donate? To children? Shit.

What else, what else. Elsinore. I am to play the part of a woman who dies a terrible and frightening death in a film. The character is not based on me, because the man who wrote it did not know of me until last week when I auditioned for him, two of his associates and a video camera. However, to curb my own recent tendencies towards destruction, I will throw myself headlong into this woman and die her death to purge myself of any risk of myself actually dying. I cannot die if the character dies. Because films are not real, see? They are fiction. And one who dies in fiction cannot die in fact. Cannot die, in fact.

Goodnight, goodbye, good else what else is good? Time to wash the sheets. I've lived in them too long and others as well. They deserve to be blank. Strangers. They deserve to be burned but I need them.