The moment that brought me here.

You were there seated in a field trampled with many feet. The red plastic cup in your hands, legs criss cross, eyes watching me. I was on a stage in those days and i performed quietly for you. There was forever a private joke playing between our eyes and it was this humor that i loved most. That was outside Helena, Montana... we were talking about how to spend your grandmother's money. The money she'd left for you in her exit. It was a piece of land we wished to buy, loose knit pine turning to field and the Dearborn River below.

A few weeks before, you'd said 'i love you' in a Santa Fe city park. Cicadas were rattling overhead in odd ornamentals and my fingers began to shake as i rolled a cigarette. I'd told you many times before never expecting you to answer me. It's difficult to put so much forward without the expectation of reciprocity. I wonder sometimes if i could ever attain that level again.

This first ballast of communcation haunted and delighted me. To feel myself and another simultaneous in thought and step, i never truly believed a possibility. And it sent me somewhere beyond the granted love of a good childhood. In some regards it was another beginning. There was my birth, and language; there was memory, and coming upright to stand on two feet. Beginnings like these... And then, there was this new thing forming inside me and further, moving beyond my body.

However one's belief could place me on this planet, whether a product of supernal hand, or fated otherwise... whatever the case. To be here and have an innate nature of doing and living, is a motherfucker in itself. And in the moments i realize the power of understanding certain things, carried by trembing hands or hairs raised above the skin... i can feel what it is, most important to me. And it seems to all stem from this first shudder of vulnerability.