In June, I was reading Dani Shapiro's _Devotion_

'Imperfection is the price happy people pay to cradle the weight of somethig they love.' I heard it, in passing and I can't remember where.

Talk to me about peristence.

Persistence of will

Of vision

Of motion and time 

Can someone remind me of a time when I wouldn't turn up for a chess match only to discover it was poker night? I never seem to remember chips to cash in, settling in at the table to play with fire, intentionally inviting the vampire in.  And yet, I never seem to end up immortal. The years leave their mark. I am not frozen in time. Nor is this an 'Age of Adaline,' in this story, not today. 

I felt myself switching into automatic pilot at that first conversation, knew I was not going to be long in waking but that I would go down swinging. Everything moved too fast. I hated that I loved the familiarity.

The problem with a pair of pants is that language shifts, even when it is the same English the wrong hands there is too much possibility, too much information, too much background noise.It's such a shame...they werent't perfect, the colour was off but the lacework, and we weren't in North  America, so they definitely were not trousers.

Maybe that is limerence, casting a net. But I know it feels, and I just want to outgrow the dress. 

I want shake the man who arrives. 'Leave the feral girls be, our bodies are not meant to be cracked open by your kind, who can't see beyond their own limitations,' I want to say. 

Then I do and he laughs. 'Ah, a feral girl. My feral girl.' And I die, cringing even as I preen under the weight of the compliment and presumption.  I will have sat for an hour, waiting in the baking heat of a late sun. Good girls wait. We do what we're told, knees together. Keep your eyes closed. There are police vans and officers on alert but idle near by and I think of a June in Athens, more than 25 years ago,  the air feels full of that same sense of foreboding. 

I was minding the church garden, Weaving daisy chains, because it is almost summer when the buildings shook and there were screams, glass and steel shattering. 

But that was a different time, not this afternoon, where I sat reading a memoir of someone else's faith, because I seem have mislaid mine. This afternoon is is calm in comparison, at least on the surface.

There are children dancing in the shadow of the cathedral, fast friends (the tears, my grandmother says over my shoulder, those will be later. And you can't stop them for love nor money, sweetie. The just come down like rain) and when it is time to leave, a shadow falls over the boom, I am pulled up and into an embrace I am not sure I want.

 An echo of that first conversation slips around my shoulders.  'We wouldn't be having this conversation if I didn't think you were gorgeous.' I remember - a soft heave of dispair, of recognition. The transactional weight of being seen as a commodity never doesn't sting. I will shiver. There have been so many embraces I've been pulled into, not sure I wanted. And I think about leaving this evening, how easy it would be to say I changed my mind, but I've committed to the bit now.  Maybe we'll say too much, reach in to deep. But it's already passed, the moment. Even if we meant to stay, to turn into the experience, it has already passed. The light shifted and it wasn't where I wanted to be, the moment. But I want dinner and the rules of transaction apply.

We have a line on our desires, don't we just, these resilient girls we carry in us. We know when to gnash our teeth, when we'll suppliantly move, a reed bending. We know when to go for blood that isn't our own.

 But we hide out resilience, a dagger up the sleeve, a pistol in our boots. A rope ladder in the bushes or under the bed, just in case In the spaces between what we might or should and what we actually do is survival need to be widened.

Beyond that, a horizon we can see and yet...I get so tired of just surviving, of making sure I still have my compass and waterproof matches tucked in my boot.