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kate: ...and then, she will call me in a fury.

anne: at which point you will set everything straight.

kate: no, i will be too busy avoiding everybody and eating pie and, uh, kayaking.

anne: oh no. not pieyaking.

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anne: i've got it. the theme for our chicken coop will be "coop d'etat."

kate: oh! oh! marie antionomelette!

anne: the pheasants are revolting!

kate: off with her egg!

dad: have you both been drinking?

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this fall is special, precious to me. i want to drive an old land cruiser on an older farm and eat pumpkin-based foods. i want to make it a point to see sunsets and not lie to people because i will just not feel like it anymore. i want to listen to a lot of tom petty and work on my laugh lines.

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i want to rest. i want to soak up the desert part of texas like it's tea, the unsweetened kind, because for some reason that's always seemed more refreshing to me than water. i want to turn dirt into soup mugs and grow strong, strong, strong.

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i want to shed all the space and time that i don't need. i want to get ready to travel light, but in the meantime travel happy. i want to be with my dog so we can hug each other. i want to coax something out of the ground, even if it's only myself.

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more than anything, i want to learn something about kindness, something about being patient as the earth. something about loving in all the places where it's long since fled.

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it feels like an arranged marriage sometimes, the way people talk to me about God. they say, You need to love him deeply, now, you're running out of time, or, Don't you want security? Don't you want to get into heaven? This is the only way, as if you can throw terrifying and sacred words like heaven around, act like it's a club in san francisco with only so many spots sanctioned by the fire marshall, and God is someone you have to name-drop convincingly in order to get in, and Jesus is the starlet on your arm.

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the deeply painful part is, i feel like it is an arranged marriage because i feel like i'm not talking to him, just to other people who know him and are counting the days until we tie the knot so they can finally breathe easy. and maybe i see him, from the back, once or twice, talking to a woman at a bar or tying his shoe before he gets on the elevator, but i never see his face, and he doesn't seem to sense me. i avoid him like i have a crush on him, but i don't. i've just never liked consolation prizes.

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what has to happen, like what happens in all stories about love, is i have to leave.

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i have to leave and go somewhere else, somewhere where no one knows this guy. i feel guilty, like i draft dodged or tried to pick up my dry cleaning without a ticket, but i'm also secretly relieved. time passes, and i change in a couple of big ways, or maybe in a lot of small ways, and my hair grows longer and i lose the shape of the life i had before and take up something trendy like basket weaving.

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then, incredibly, i see him one day. i recognize his back, the only part of him i know well. he's listening to someone talk about their wife, and his hand is touching their elbow so gently that he probably doesn't even realize he's doing it, and i'm not sure how he got here or whether he's here because of me or for someone else or if it's just a coincidence, but for the first time ever i kind of want to hear his voice.

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not talk to him, yet, just listen to the tones rise and fall, and the silent spaces in between, where he breathes and listens and bleeds. i sit back on my haunches and lean against the cold brick of the building behind me and don't think about much of anything, just feel calm, like someone is threading my hair into a braid, slowly. i watch his hands.

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days later i start looking for him, but he's gone again. this time i'm the one who gets left, and that is entirely different than leaving someone you didn't think you wanted. i think i see him three separate times, and my heart bounds in my chest like a startled deer, but i'm mistaken. i talk to people who've seen him, and they're not pushy, they just say, he'll be back, relax, will you? have a bearclaw.

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but i don't want a bearclaw, because life is mysterious again and doughnuts kind of ruin the effect. and then, finally, i see him again, when my curiousity blazes out and turns quiet and inward. he's walking towards me over a hill, like we have a date, and i see his face, and it looks like his hands. it's not the guy i thought i had to marry. at least, he doesn't match the description.

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when he reaches me, i turn and walk with him because that feels like the most natural thing. we're quiet for a while, but i catch him smiling a couple of times, off in the distance. i feel like crying, for some reason, and i also want him to give me some kind of signal, that it's okay, that we're friends even though i forgot him. i have a headache kind of coming on, because of the wanting to cry and all, but what really hurts is my heart and i can't stand it anymore so i screw up my eyes and whisper, i am sorry. i am sorry. his shoulder brushes mine. i feel his arm wrap around me.

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i start blubbering, choking out words incoherently, trying to get everything out at once, everything that i fear and hate, all the things i'm so deeply ashamed of, like it's poison and i can't bear even the aftertaste of it for one more second. he listens for what feels like thousands of years. when i pause because i feel like my chest has caved in, he says, sister. you have known grief. i cry until i am almost certain that i am going to die. i think i have broken both of our hearts.

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he is quiet for a long time. i think he wants to make sure that i am okay. then he begins to speak, and i listen, but what he says is not what i expect. he doesn't talk about the poison, like it evaporated when i let it out, and he doesn't deal in things that no longer exist.

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instead, he tells me things that i have felt the ache of all my life, that to be a woman is not cursed, that the person i am terrified of being does not in fact exist, why i was left behind. he asks my name, and i tell him, and he laughs in the happiest way and murmurs my real name in my ear, like the most delicious secret, one you suddenly remember you heard a long time ago. i feel the way you feel when a boy on the street tells you that you are beautiful, and you feel like you will never need to hear it ever again, because this one time was so wonderful and filling and enough. except i know this time it really is.

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and when i come home, i am laughing and can't stop, except for the times that i get so excited and serious that i can't even speak. the people in my basket weaving class are alarmed at my joy and try to get me to lie down. the people in the doughnut store understand my silence and offer me an apple turnover.

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knowing him now makes everything that happened before seem kind of funny, or maybe kind of sad, but it doesn't matter to me, in the way that once you've given your speech for your oral interp class you almost completely forget how much you'd been dreading it. it's like life, except more frightening and infinitely more exciting and with clearer, colder air. it's like love, except so much deeper, more encompassing and mysterious, closing over your body like warm ocean. yes. it will be like water.

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or better yet, tea.