Breathless

Arms and hearts and beats
and bars and cabs and tabs and -
everything just spins.

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So. I've been in a training course all week and with a little extra time on my hands I've been making some elision poems. They're the perfect way to not exactly look like you aren't working or paying attention. These poems are the literary equivalent of sewing earbuds into the lining of your hoodie. They'll never know you're multitasking. And, they're a lot of fun and look pretty awesome. Lacking a scanner I've had to pull the article I used from website of the Washington Post Magazine (I used their Summer Reading installment, which worked beautifully), paste the correct column into word and go through double strikethroughing and red-bolding. Over all these poems tend to look better when they're nothing but typeface and a sharpie, but you should get the idea at least. This is kind of like chipping away the excess marble to reveal the masterpeice underneath - elide, delete, cross out, blacken, etc any and all words that you don't want to have looking back at you, attempt to form a new, original and unrelated thought out of the raw material given and you have a poem that, Athena-like, springs fully formed from the mind of another. An author who is now entirely unaware that you've defiled her work. yikes. Any red punctuation has been added to try and guide the thoughts through the page.

friends since high school, and although I hadn't known her mother, and the majority of the time we'd spent together was in groups -- at theater events or diorama parties -- I felt the heaviness of the event like a stone in my stomach. When it was my turn in line, we hugged. I said the usual things, and the next person was ready to step in, but I held onto Lori's hands. for a second longer

"I'm available," I told her. I tried to weight my words "Call me if you want company. I'm just more available than usual, and I'm in an especially good place to sit. with pain."

She called the next day. In a wavery, post-funeral voice, she laughed a little and asked if I was okay. I asked her the same thing. We both said no. She knew the broad strokes about what had been going on with me, and later she said she'd been concerned when we talked at the funeral, and it had been a relief for a second to step out of her own life and think about someone else's. Likewise. We made a plan to meet at her apartment that Thursday, and for the next year and more, we met once. a week, every week, while she coped with that major grief and I dealt with a different kind.

Then, it was not symbolic. It was just two people who found they could be helpful to each other due to mutual care and unusual timing. There were no ritual involved. If anyone had offered to do some kind of quick healing "closure" ceremony with me, I would have thrown a fit. Because a symbol is supposed to be a shortcut, a way of valuing and noting in brief what is happening anyway, in depth. But with that marriage, it seemed that the symbols had taken the place of the depth. The kite, the drainpipe, the moths, the flies. Signs taking the place of living.

With Lori, we just sat together on the floor in her apartment in Silver Lake, eating take-out Indian food with glasses of wine, sitting with each other, talking or quiet, watching bad TV or not, with some crying, some laughing, some outrage, some shame, disbelief, pain, depression, realization, the forging of new closeness in the wake of two kinds of losses. The long route.

***

Aimee Bender is the author of "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt," "An Invisible Sign of My Own" and "Willful Creatures." She lives in Los Angeles. She can be reached at 20071@washpost.com.

^ just in case you want to read the original, which is quite good^

Enough.