Though her mouth is generous

James Richardson says, "Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean."

So.

November 2. I am scraping the melted wax of November twos before from my grandfather's tombstone, at the same time trying to figure out why cemeteries are the new lover's lanes. A girl is waiting by the acacia tree. She is looking at the charred ground of what was once a sugarcane field. The boy is yet to come for her. The rumble of his motorcycle is yet to disturb the stillness of the day. (I wonder where other people are. I think about my cigarettes, wonder if they have all gone stale.)

November 3. I do not stay long in my parents house. My father refuses to speak to me, because he might ask me to sleep over. My mother is bent over the stove, stirring the spaghetti sauce. My brother Joshua is thinking about a girl named Ellen, whom he will never meet. My brother John does not realize that all of us is waiting for him to come through the door, grinning like he used to. A small frog has turned its mint-green back to us, watching the wall and waiting for ants that dare scuttle along its line of vision.

November 4. My new glasses make everything clearer. Few people know that they have been mere haze for a couple of months. There is only one person who I bother to sit close enough to that I can count his eyelashes if I feel like it. I count them now, as he takes a sip of coffee in a place no one would recognize us.

November 5. I have talked about how trains are the worst places to meet people. I am wearing a pink skirt that slides along the ridges of my ankles whenever I walk. I am sitting beside a poet I have not seen in a month or so. He wants me to stand beside him two weeks from now, as he talks about Klimt's The Kiss. I see myself, a fading reflection on his glasses. I see other people in them, with me, those behind me: the lovers who never hold hands but would soon; the lovers who would never ever hold hands; the lovers who held hands the entire day, then stopped when the clock struck eight.

November 6. I am introduced to a painter. We talk about Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Kafka. We talk about the demand of objectivity in observing tribes and the inability to pull it off. We talk about how truths are easier to understand and accept when given in a subjective, literary manner. He will ask me if I have a boyfriend. I will tell him that I don't think so. He will then read a poem to me, The Rider by Sarah Manguso. His voice will be soft and steady. He will sound like he has spent quite some time letting words roll from the inside of one cheek to the other. He will be quiet after the poem ends. As will I.

November 7. I am quiet. Not because there is a conversation inside my head that I'd rather keep to myself, a conversation with a being very much like myself -- impatient, impetuous, impulsive, easily bored. I am quiet because I have lost the ability to speak. My throat has prevented me from doing so, like a hand curled into a tight fist, that sand could only sneak and slither to escape. I squeak every time I tell things I want them. I show notes to tricycle drivers, informing them of where I have to be. I could be bent over the toilet bowl later tonight, spewing squid and baguio beans. Instead of groans, what sounds like the scrape of heels on wet grass would come out of my fetid mouth.

Hay. Analyze that, mo'fos.