she smelled of rosemary and cloves and had those sun-dazzled klonopin eyes

and leaves in her hair in the wind and finding connexions between the books she has been falling in love with, and without a pen, tenderly marking the pages with ash. her books will smell of cloves now, too. as if the words have life only in those pages. as if.

'You write, I suppose.'

'No,' Oliviera said. 'What could I write about, in order to do that you have to have some certainty that you've lived.'

'Existence precedes essence,' Morelli said with a smile.

'If you want to put it that way.'

the world cleaves about me into ten thousand translucent planes. truth and untruth. hunger and fullness. writing and blankness. fiction and non. stories we write to entertain and stories we write to believe in. i don't trust myself anymore. i am all of a fiction. i don't know where my planes intersect. the elusivity of my truths is just as damning as my desperate need to define them.

when i was very young somebody made a voodoo doll of me and crammed it full of paradoxes, mixed messages, guilt and fear and shame. call me le boite de Pandore. call me Penelope, weaving by day in the sunlight, full of promises, unweaving my shroud by night, destroying this body that is really only a ruse.

and yet. full of tricks and lies, Penelope in her twenty-year aloneness stayed true and faithful. something about her. the desire to write keeps me solid. the sun, the wind, my books, the hitch in my breath when i read something beautiful. each time i am pulling a pin out of that doll that was cast aside long ago, considered worthless. so many pins left but the floor is already littered with them. the glint of metal and dangerous steps in the dark. call me Penelope and i will weave by day and unweave slowly less by night and walk barefoot on more and more pins until my faith returns and my soles are callused and resilient.