Tomorrow will mark the passing of the 2006 autumnal equinox and my own passage from social disconnection to emotional desolation, to a place of strength and longing. Upon learning that the astrological sign which claims me is Scorpio, a beautiful Jersey girl once hissed with her fingers in a cross, “Oooh Scorpio! Sex and death.” Everything becomes but will never be, especially in the season of dying and the dead, the epoch of retreat and recession, of imperceptible horizon.

I used to walk to school in the fog. Everything comes to you out of dreams, the voices and footfalls, the shoulders and faces. You hear them in places you cannot see, like the future. Obscured by uncertainty, they are the grey and the white. You approach and out of nothing appear each to the other, smiling and hands clasped. Had it been today your hug would rush you through years up to now, everything present, shrouded, audible.

A. invited me West for the beginning of next year. If I were somewhere, someone different, I would be able to join her. We grow into our different powers and our limitations. I demurred impossible circumstance, except in case. Understanding possibility and deferral, A. simply let me know that A (a different one) would be there, which started me thinking and remembering.

I remember being somewhere between D.C. and Maryland. I remember a cool summer evening. We piled into a van with bubble-eye rear windows and custom body paint, veined leathery squares with rounded corners like a styled and geometrized highway stripe. Riding around the streets of D.C. with no destination, we hooted like children. T. was “dad” because only he could drive the Dabela behemoth. (This is one of the reasons that when I come back he will be my father.) We all were grinning and me mostly because I was again in love with the now, because I’d made the journey to with A who is so beautiful that remembering her face makes me see rain.

The years flow by, even now.