(See what I am saying?)

Proof. Read. (or: Hair's Breadth of time)

Her head was on my shoulder.

I could smell her hair.

I closed my eyes.

it fell around her shoulders. she was standing in a wooden threshold. in a doorway. i was standing in the dark. on square spanish tile in california nights. incandescent lamp light was shining out from behind her. there was black hair. there was black sky. there was olive skin. there was a pale moon. there was the feeling that all of life between birth and death is a shelf of books we write but can never read. and it was all backlit in a silhouette on the porch like a actor on a stage in play in my mind.

but as it was I was in a kitchen. there was no moon. but the memory hung involuntarily as the tears feel from her cheek onto my shoulder.

they ran down my arm and dripped off of my elbow like rain in a broken gutter on a house where nobody lives.

they fell like sand in an hourglass.

they fell like ink from a writer's pen; who writes their books with blind abandon, filling their pages with vulnerable naiveté, scrawling every word across every day until God, or the Devil, or the force of attraction by which all terrestrial bodies tend to fall toward the center of the earth, or lack of tensile strength in television cable, or the abundance of it in a noose, or malignant and invasive cell division, or anything else in-between what we know, what we don't, and what we believe, takes the pen away and closes the book.

i closed my eyes and smelled her hair. i tried to hold onto a memory. i tried to stop writing and start proofreading. i tried to help her stop crying.

time and tears are things i cannot stop.

and so i write.

life and death are things i cannot understand.

and still i write.

The Longest Road in America

Interstate 90 is the longest interstate highway in the United States at nearly 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers).