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“This is not what I meant by taking it easy” he says shaking his head. Open in his hands is the notebook I use as my day planner, the squares for the month overflowing with black & blue words.

“Do you have to do every little thing I say not to?” His laugh is so stiff it breaks and he drifts into silence. We sit in the wet grass side by side. I can tell he is staring at me waiting for an explanation. I intently watch the wrinkles in his socks waiting him out.

“Utah, are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am listening.” We make eye contact. As always his smile is fatal to any mood I am having on my own. “How else would I know what NOT to do?”

Shutting the notebook he begins to hand it back. “You don’t need a to do list, you need a TO DON'T list. This isn’t going to end well.” He stretches the last of his words out. They hover over the book resting in both of our hands: each of us holding our own corner. Deja va.

I laugh, “Oh it never does but I'm a writer. I can just fix it later.”

“I wish you would tell me what it is that is bothering you. I can feel the shift you know. All this busy is only covering.”

“But that’s just it...” I begin.

He dips his chin, pointing at me. I stop speaking mid sentence. My words caught on something filed in his mind. He has read nearly everything I have ever written. He decodes me and my fiction like it is a game to be won. He smiles and finishes my sentence, “You are not my doctor and you don’t get to pick that for me.” 

My silence answers him.

“Oh, I see. We are there again." He lets his corner of the book go.

I shrug. “I got this all under control.”

“That is doubtful Ms. Brown, may I remind you...” he is saying but I am already remembering the parts he doesn't want me to; the feeling of control, the peace in exhaustion, the power inside the pain.

"The only way to get warm in the winter is to run." I say. It is the second time I have said this to a man sitting beside me in the dark in under a week's time. I must really mean it.

"Hold-up, this is more than running. This looks a lot like madness and if it was only the crazy kind I wouldn't worry. But this looks like anger. And coming from you that makes me scared."

I put the book down behind me. I lean into him and whisper up the back of his neck, "Yes Dear, but it's okay because I'm not. You know it can't rain forever, eventually it will get cold enough to snow... and I'm not looking for permission from anyone."

"With the foolishness of a child who believes the night’s moon is chasing them one may be tricked into thinking her wildness has something to do with them. Of course you can be wise enough to doubt her, or simple enough to not believe. But her truth is never ending and yet it has no beginning either. I think she is the desert." ~Able Manning, Life With Man, mlb~