(I’m not giving up. I don’t feel like crying.) My restless heart is awake tonight. The love of my life so far called up from Los Angeles where he lives and works in Hollywood, tonight fixing the green screen behind a mechanized animatronic badger some pool soul created for a Wisconsin lotto campaign, because that’s just how the world is some times. He moved a few months ago, changed apartments, because his roommates were having a baby, and tonight she’s gone into labour. The father was text messaging him the scale of dilation as the news came in as he and his wife prepared in the same room Angelina Jolie gave birth to her baby twins in. Strings to my heart from his, I’m not sure how tonight I will sleep. David lives here like a knock-off imitation of the real thing, flushed with sleep in the bed behind me as I chatter, endlessly, joyfully, down south, a river of miles away. I wake him, briefly, when Antony’s iPhone runs out of batteries, and he’s grumpy with me, annoyed, red-eyed, and I wonder if he feels as displaced as I do. I still think of Tony as my boyfriend, my skinny mad lover too rich and too clever and too handsome for anyone to live up to. He’s a couple of weeks recently only a month begun dating a performance artist, some woman named Michelle, I think, with a mad friend he doesn’t like. He didn’t tell me before for gentle worry it would be cruel to send a note. Deliriously, he is right. (We are declawed, yet holding back our teeth, soft like cats, cinnamon and sweet.) He tells me that she isn’t very attentive, a whole week went by without a call, without contact, and I feel justified, while I laugh with him about fallacy, how we get caught in these dramatic traps like early twenties, just teens, just out into life. Before me, there was no-one for ten years, a decade alone, and all these details, streaming through my blood like jade in my arteries, not jealousy, but something more mundane, a sallow sadness, not very good at expression, that loves him like the sky, oh loves him still, and stronger than I care for anything else in my life, the one here I have been trying so hard to build, so keenly, like he’s a knife I hold in my hand to keep myself safe, the city nothing to me, the distance, the far flung dreams of walking, of taking one step after the other, until I find myself there, waiting at his door, flowers in my hand like a scream.