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Song 3 | Aug 05 2003

Zero conversations yesterday. I did say “hi” and “thanks” to the woman at the gym who handed me my towel and did leave a phone message for a friend, but neither could be called a conversation. A conversation is a living exchange, it’s when people say things back and forth and no one knows for certain what’s going to be said. Imaginary conversations are not conversations. For even when you need to think long and hard about what the imagined other might say in response to what you imagine yourself saying, you’re still just talking to yourself.

This time I raised my arms to the ceiling and danced, flexing my legs at the knees and rocking my head a little from side to side. It was nearly involuntary. I felt like a baby in its crib, reaching up at one of those crib toys that spin and make sound. It didn’t strike me until later what I looked like from the outside: a mostly naked man wearing headphones and dancing while lying flat on his back in bed.

I have tried not to think about how you picked the songs, what each may or may not mean, why one follows the next, to what degree you thought of me and asked yourself what I would think. It’s dangerous ground. In the years I was gone, my mother read and reread a book she had found in my abandoned apartment. She gave special attention to the notes I had scribbled in the margins, for she saw these as clues to my inner life, the life, as she imagined it, I’d never shared with her or anyone. She told me about the book when I returned. It had taught her a great deal about me and had strengthened her faith that I was alive and would one day reappear—a faith she alone maintained through those years.

And it was all a mistake. I had never seen that book before.