In India we spent the night on a train, an overnight train, rattling through the darkness, everyone possibly tight in a bunk behind the curtains but me, without a berth, lying on some blankets on the floor.* And feeling a rush of euphoria on the thin linoleum tile because this, assuredly, this is something I have never done before. The flying rush of the new—you have to push yourself to get there, push hard, or be pushed.

Sometimes I feel a need to assess the present—assess the choices I have made that have taken me/us in a wild arc past anything I’d suspected. I didn’t know what the things I wanted really meant. I still don’t. The things I haven’t done jostle against the things I have, creating friction, sometimes rubbing each other the wrong way.

Hearing Tallulah speak Spanish—it’s almost like she’s possessed. A new personality, one I hardly recognize—maybe this is what speaking another language is about, a kind of controlled fall, a productive schizophrenia. This kind of thing is why I live the way I do. I remind myself. That and an inchoate need to have the time to say—to say—just, say it.

* I'm going to out myself here as a floor sleeper, the kind of person who will actually choose to sleep on the floor because I find it more comfortable than a bed. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe a deep-seated, even physiological, conviction that less is more?

Soon after I took this photo, I had a little collision with a larger vessel, but...I learned something!