I lived in this room a long time before I knew where I was. For a large part of the last twenty years I own no memory. Sometimes I’m afraid to speak my own name, I’m afraid I’ll hear nothing. I don’t remember when I began to write for them again or why. For years I refused and then one day I was here at my small table writing. By then she was far away and it took a long time to call her back. I don’t know where she went all that time, or what she did. I hadn’t seen her since that night she called to me from the top of the stairs in our room on Dog Storm Street. When she returned she hadn’t changed at all, I’m sure. I don’t see her so clearly anymore but I’m sure she hasn’t aged a day. Though we’ve forgotten many things we used to do, we remember we were in love, the three of us. Assuming as I do when I feel the hair on my face, assuming as I do when I wake in the morning and find my feet grown arthritic and stiff, that I’m now more than fifty years old, then the year is at least 1967.
