1

The seasonal darkness—-like the narrowing shaft when one descends into a coal mine, and the way claustrophobia surprised me by tightening my shoulders and increasing my heart-rate before I recognized it. (“But I am not scared of small places?”) The way the “I” is modified by the particular. The way darkness surprises when it arrives.

2

A game I play in the dark with a treasure: The Compendium of Lost Words. Treating each word as character, re-inscribing their epitaph, mourning an intangible that has vanished from the world. Looking for its cousins in other languages. Fiddling with words.

Amarulence (n). Born in 1731 and died in 1755. Meaning "bitterness; spite." As in: The airgonaut could not avoid the particular amarulence that arrived when his feet touched the ground. Amarulence has a Romanian cousin in Amar, who is alive and thriving, and means "bitter."

3

Notebook, April.

My father phones from Korea to wish me a happy birthday because he is ahead of me in time. He calls from a future in which I am already 45 years old. In this future present, I am his morning as he is my afternoon.

His voice bumps against the grass beneath my notebook. "You were the happiest baby," he says, "You brought so much joy."

I can feel his mind reaching backward into time, fondling memories, and how strange that this baby is me in a memory I cannot share.

At the gas station, a lady is speaking to another lady while filling her tank. She mentions adoption, and how much she loves her children: how grateful she is to the woman who got pregnant and then "chose another family to raise this baby" for whom she has chosen life. I wonder what it means to choose life. Did that birthmother have what could be called "a choice"? If she lived in a state where abortion was illegal, no one can properly say that the birth mother "chooses" to birth a child for others to raise.

Coerced birth is such an unthinkably vicious punishment. How will we tell children that they were born as a punishment,* as a permanent scar against the mother, whose body was forced to carry them? What illustrated books will descend like gumdrops to cover the image of a woman imprisoned in her growing body?

Note to self: you are an idiot. The theocrats believe that birth is God's way of punishing Eve. It is a Divine Punishment. They are doing "God's work" in the post-Edenic plutocracy.