He talks to the girl like the only thing that ever has been or will ever be between them is a playground filled with afternoons of tag and four square.

In this moment I see him and love him more than I could love anything else.

He flutters out in the field, a lithe body, moving to his own music. "Hey G," the coach yells, "No dancing in the outfield!" He straightens up for a moment, a perfect baseball figure in the grass. But a few moments later he is two-stepping again when the ball sails up his way. The parents in the stands all hold their breath as they watch it arc to him. He pokes his glove up in a perfectly choreographed move and pulls down the ball. We all laugh with relief and surprise, me most of all. And pride is there too. It's his way and there is no other.

They moved us to a new building where the desks have no names and you never sit in the same place twice. I hate it.

Your friend told you his wife was working in the Park for the summer and that you should visit, but now you've been drinking all night with her in the dented trailer where she bunks and after a meal of spaghetti and another red wine you are down at the river with her where the true darkness cloaks you from the deeper world and she says lets swim and before you know it she is taking off her clothes and her body is a naked ghost wading out into the water and you follow, glad the moonless night is so deep she can not see who you really are, but then you think she might not really care because as you float with her in the silky water, you talk about the Milky Way like it is a river you see every day and that this is normal until you get out and the summer heat keeps you from shivering and the moment comes when you are standing close to her with the cold smooth stones of the river bank pressing into your naked soles and the pause comes and the door opens and you think of leaning forward across a threshold you will never be able to return from and so you don't and instead resign yourself to years of wondering.

We huddled in the doorway with the cold still on us like a blanket of crisp fresh air. Your lips tasted like strawberries and the heat of your tongue gave me breath. I still remember your blue crystal eyes and wanting to never look away again.

It's not six yet when I get home from the gym. The interior of the house glows in the pre-dawn gloaming. The lights are on in the kitchen and I think for a sec that I forgot to turn them off before I left, but when I come through the door there is a full stillness, like breathing. I go back. On the red couch, a tussle of blond hair hovers over a book. A ten year old's body curled in concentration, a soul held in suspense. I know this moment in my own life. And I envy this first taste of new worlds without maps. 

One, two, three and then they are aloft, arms waving as if swimming in weightlessness, from one bed to another. Part of me frowns at our decision to put the kids in the same room. The twin beds become pre-dream trampolines. I tell them it's time to read. They don't care. They laugh in abandonment as they fly through the air. Boys.

When we wake up the boy is there, all six years of him, blinking up at the ceiling. It's like a sensor goes off and he springs into action tickling his mother and nestling his head into her like a gentle bull. "Tickle fight!" She laughs and makes him writhe in laughter. I catch the flashes of her white teeth and red hair and I feel good as the boy shimmers with joy. This one little moment could hold me together forever.

Now they sleep in an expanse of sheets and pillows, alone in their dreams but waking together every morning. More separate than ever.

He saw himself in his mind's eye reading: body still, head bent, eyes moving over the black slashes of ink decorating the white paper pages. It dawned on him that he was staring at a block of wood, thinly sliced. And that the words on the page would be a meaningless secret code if it were not for his own mind conjuring a voice out them and making that voice live vividly within himself for a brief moment, the imprint of another mind desperate to share on a different block of wood, in another place and time, what it understood of life. It felt odd to think of those once-upon-a-time people who now lived forever within him, trapped in the wood except for his curiosity and never-satisfied hunger for more.

Would anyone bring his voice back?

He had every intention of jumping over the bike. But he misjudged the takeoff spot and his ankle buckled even before he got in the air. The pedal gouged his soft throat just under the jawbone and went deep. 45 years later he still remembers the sunlight and hands reaching for him to keep the blood in; the cold blue bathroom of chrome and porcelain where his mother told his father that it was deep and they would have to go to the hospital; the gurney-view of the masked doctor who said it would hurt like a big mosquito bite but it would be better after that; the kids at the ball game who pointed at the stitches he was sure would make him into Frankenstein forever; and then, eventually, the voice of a lover asking him in the dark, "What is that?"

We're sitting at breakfast when S says: It's like a completely new dimension. And I think, that's exactly what it's like. A door that opens every Tuesday morning at 8 to a world that's always been there but that I've ignored and pushed away that is now opened because I knocked, opened by a woman who is a stranger to me outside of those walls, alive and known only within. (What is that all about?) And then I think of the day in her office when my slow controlled voice broke and the facade fell for a moment and a deep sob rose up from the barrel of my body. Yeah, I say to S. That's exactly what it's like. But I know I'm still lost.

I had an escape artist's discombobulated morning. I spilled coffee all over the car dashboard but not a drop on me. I walked through an exercise class at the gym while staring at my phone, without walking into anyone or causing what would have been justified anger. I paid for the wrong parking spot at BART but didn't get a $75 ticket.

He left the kids with the sitter and got in the 2007 Avalon with magnetic flames, turned up the Zeppelin when it came on the RADIO and cruised to Costco to pick up $200 in fresh fruit, cooking oil and a $40 paper shredder.

"I AM THE MAN!" he thought as the warm wind caressed his bald head through the open window.

The two black kids on the train smoke dope in the back seats and joke about being shot and killed by the police for being "armed with weed." Everyone looks elsewhere. And he thinks, "What have we done to each other? I can't be the only one wondering."

Driving around with the window down listening to the radio this weekend somehow reminded me of an awkward 17 year-old boy with a shank of black hair and arms too long for his shirts and the afternoon he drove his sister and the French foreign exchange student, Blondine (who was tall and mature and more woman than anything he'd ever been close to and made him shy and hungry all at once) out to the horse track in a 1969 Volvo where they lost all their money on the ponies and then lurched back home in that four door box of a car only to get caught in a passing thunderstorm and the windows wouldn't roll up and the rain came in like great veils of warmth and the wipers couldn't go fast enough and two soaked girls laughed and screamed in the back seat all the way home.

I once knew a girl with an 8-track cassette of Bread's Greatest Hits. She drove a Saab and drank golden beer from plastic cups.