Local Color:

Coming back from lunch there is a woman in the alleyway wearing red curlers in her dark hair and blue blocker sunglasses. She is painting her garage door battleship gray. She has the middle-aged skin of a smoker and I’m sure she doesn’t mind the fumes from the paint as they blend with the menthol from her Virginia Slim. The door is almost done, when I left for lunch an hour ago she was just priming everything in white. The heat has broken. The hundreds of the past several days have resolved themselves into a hazy eighty degrees with a slight breeze and a hint of storm. Her door will soon match the sky.

I am working. I am thinking about things that need to be done. I need to hire someone to replace Diane who is leaving soon for New York. Her boy is leaving for Berkley within the week, so perhaps with the whole country between them they will finally be able to connect. He wants to write things for himself, about himself, like a blog. He wants her to get to know him through his writing because he can’t speak. Diane can speak, is speaking, but wonders if she’s getting heard. She is overwhelmed at the sometime thickness of men. She can’t write, or more to the point won’t write the way that he wants her to, which is in a voice that is more for herself so that he can get to know her through this fictive golem. He wants to see her in a familiar mirror, as nearly every woman in his past was a doppelganger hanging in the either of the web. He wants to project that past onto this possible future. Diane hates her writing and what she does write she would never put it up in a public forum like this, never in a blog. But she does want to write to him, so he can know her, but not abstractly about herself, concretely from herself to him. Direct. Immediate. Diane has an intended audience. She’s retreating soon from his past and his issues to clean her mother’s pool on long island. “I’ve had enough growing experiences for one year, and I need to rest.” As she draws the skimmer across the surface of the water, sending slow ripples to lap against the chlorine cake, she’ll be hoping that this languid time apart will mean more than absence, but that’s only if her boy can hear her absence in his everyday.