Overstaying

What I say needs no translation and cannot be translated by anyone.

I’ve never said I’m proud of how wicked I am.

When night comes he falls silent, lies down on the bed, peers out from the down hood of his sleeping bag with his doelike eyes, and gives a grin by means of his sharp teeth. And then as he slowly pulls the zipper down and reveals an undershirt (and not much else!), and his white skin glistens forth in the candlelight, I know that it’d be better to lie down in the kitchen, where it is below freezing, than next to the naked visitor, whose potential progeny I have no intention of hatching.

The visitor’s story, which isn’t mine and which nonetheless is increasingly becoming mine, weighs heavily upon me.

Maybe I should answer the phone and tell my siblings that I, too, have multiplied and/or taken in a needy visitor who more than fills up the emptiness allegedly reigning in this house. Maybe I should tell them that it’s just not right to kick a poor visitor out onto the street, one who cannot master our language

The fact is, all my life I’ve longed to go away but then I’ve never left.

the world saying I’m too little to understand even though it was always the world that was too little.

I have no idea what to call it. I think I’m sometimes the only person who hears this sound—a quiet sound, resting on and around things, making me tilt my head, like a slow tracking shot, all gentle and fading. Sometimes I decide to die, and then I don’t know what I mean by that.

Sometimes I can’t even tell the difference between 180day and night, between dream and whatever the other thing is,

Just look at how he walks right through the door now, without knocking. Just look at him scrabbling across the parquet floors toward me. Just look at how his brushfingers stroke the windowpanes, as though he’s a prisoner in this house, gazing out at a freedom closed off to him. Just look at how the visitor scratches at the glass, even. He looks at me, questioningly, so questioningly, and I say: I don’t know either. I pet him, tugging his eyes, forehead, and folds of face skin toward the back of his head. His head lies in my hand, streamlined tight.