Hedgetrimming

And I try to hold on to all of this lightly, but I still feel the visegrip of the second week of September closing in. Yesterday I sat in West Village Coffeeshop and watched it rain and it seemed like the same rain that came down outside Cafe Naico last year at this time, while I was there on the phone with my mother and searching for flights to Chicago at the end of the week for my grandmother's funeral and Rosh Hashanah was like two weeks earlier last year, which was lucky because I don't think I would have been able to teach the day after. I suppose that, regardless of how drunk I am by the time my free minutes kick in tomorrow night, I should call my father.

And I try to hold on to all of this lightly, but it's so easy to get so tired so fast and I haven't been sleeping through the night so well and when I do sleep I don't always feel rested. I ground to a halt yesterday afternoon and stayed up past midnight watching episodes of Studio 60 online and getting drunk for no good reason and wishing K. would call me back, just because at this one moment, this one point, I needed to hear what I already know said back to me by someone else, someone like him, but of course he didn't call and finally I couldn't keep my eyes open. I need a sign, I said to Facebook, and some girl from my program wrote back this incomprehensible and slightly menacing message about someone else in the department. I kept the phone by my bed just like The Poet asked me to but he didn't call so I guess he made it through the night sleeping in the chair in his wife's hospital room. The surgery went well, he told me yesterday. And on the phone acting like everything was going to be fine again, she'd just have to go back on chemo, and he can come to Brooklyn tomorrow night after all and I am thinking I can't have him in Brooklyn anymore I can't wake up with him on the morning of the day I'm supposed to spend walking around New York with someone new and it's hard enough to get up at 6 to teach as it is and I can't be on this roller coaster just last week you came within two inches of breaking up with me out of not-unjustified guilt.

But I can't say this on the phone. I do the verbal equivalent of nodding. Because I really didn't think he was going to be able to spend the night with me under any circumstances and I just am not prepared. I have to break up with him tonight. Only a bit because of J (the guy from the coffeeshop). I mean, that's not completely irrelevant. I do want to give this thing a chance, if only because I don't remember the last time I clicked so much with someone based on a completely random encounter. And maybe I wouldn't be at this point with The Poet otherwise. Okay, it's pretty sure that I wouldn't be. But still. I guess I don't want to make it too much about J in case we end up hating each other tomorrow and then I'll still be broken up with The Poet and all of this was always at some level about hedging my bets because I told The Poet I would never break up with him unless there was someone else. But these transitions are broken up close and there is going to be an abyss. Maybe only a small one, fifteen hours or so, but an abyss nonetheless, big enough at least for the earth to open up and swallow the Twin Towers, long enough to rip my life apart. (As if those things are in any way equivalent.)

I should probably get to work, including reading next Tuesday's homework assignment so there are no more surprises.