These dark days came without snow and all I had was a memory of never-resting wind as I walked down the alley day after day. I looked for something warm to shiver under. Because the cold finds a way past everything. Into the snarl and snap of morning voices. There is no quiet. Silence rolled up its tatami long ago with a sigh-o-nara, suckers. Shattered time, space, and eternity with one small phrase. Which was fine by me. I never looked for a place in eternity. Cold, black, and too damned infinite. Nothing to scrape your knuckles or stub your toe on. Just the blustering whip of nothing cracking against forever.

Through a series of accidents, there I was playing footsie with the apparatchik I was never supposed to have met at that bar. The conversation could only be nebulous. My English kept rolling through his Russian mouth, falling to pieces in helpless solecism like crumbs sprayed across the table in a paroxysm of laughter. He asked me to explain the Canadian rock music falling like heavy-footed upstairs neighbors through our miscommunications. As if my toes were not tracing the groove of muscle between his tibia and fibula through carefully distressed denim. I practiced shouting his list of most useful Russian phrases between his deliberately shy smiles. I played and he played along and we did not pretend we were more than cliché strangers in a cliché seedy dive. Whoever we were for those twelve drinks and four hundred minutes. Wherever we would end up in the churn of bodies at the end of the night.

Naïvety went for a long walk and came back dirty and unwilling to shave. Unwilling to be bound to whatever life it had left for the road. So she is stuck. She finds no comfort in her worldly knowledge. Not the way she’s meant too. There are too many meals against her guts. She is too dark to be penetrated by useful light.

She smokes. Like other kids who grew up cool and stressed about the responsibility of some day discovering the effects that tomorrow has on today. It’s the same thing. She plays with her lip while her fingers pinch the cigarette. Like former Hollywood heroines. Not smooth, laughing Mae Wests. The nervous and timid femme fatales of Hollywood’s young adulthood. Twitchy women with darting eyes. She balks at being more rabbit than woman. She knows there isn’t a man to save her.

This isn’t about feminism or echoes of Doris Lessing. She is both waiting and not waiting for some life to cling to. She wanted, always, to have one foot on the ground and one hand halfway up a mountain. Either way, at all times with the cold, solid planet pulling heat from her skin. A kind of exchange: a portion of the Earth’s validity for the heat in her skeleton.

Her laughter is never spontaneous. Her sense of humour never gives itself away. Even in her recklessness, it delivers short barks that are never abandoned. Every day, she forgets who she was while she was asleep and wanders through the alert part of the day with hyperawareness of the unfunny world.

She does not believe in me. I am always a figment, always the unseen puppeteer. Even though I never attached any of my strings. We were inevitable and she stays as if I suit her. But we don’t love each other. Unconditionally and courageously.

In this room, there are fourteen chairs. The air in the room suggests it has just emptied or is just about to fill. The chairs form a crooked circle. They don’t look comfortable or inviting. And yet

in this room, there are fourteen chairs and one woman. She dozes or pretends to doze or tries to doze. Her chin is sunk against her chest and her eyes are closed. Her arms are folded and her left hand grips the handle of her handbag. As if the empty chairs might try to steal it. But then

in this room, there are fourteen chairs and one woman and a podium. The mic is live and faintly thumps the footsteps of someone just beyond the door. The woman doesn’t move but her breathing indicates that she never was or is no longer dozing. She doesn’t move. Not even when the door shuffles open or clicks closed. And suddenly

in this room, there are fourteen chairs and one woman and a podium and thirteen vapid men. They drag their heels between the chairs that become no more comfortable or inviting with time or rotation. They open and close their mouths in greetings that never reach enthusiasm or basic human animation. They vaguely realize that

in this room with fourteen chairs and one woman and a podium and thirteen vapid men something isn’t right. They believe that someone forgot the pitcher of water and carafe of coffee that usually accompany such rooms. The woman never flinches and never explains. And she doesn’t sleep.