Writing takes you to things, emotions, people that you'd left behind for dead. Where you shouldn't return, because you will stand there like a pillar of salt, watching Sodom and Gomorrah burn. Even the wickedest places (and people) inspire love.

Dried tears are the crude stuff from dreams. I wake up, caked, and dig out into a blinding light, stalled by cream linen drapes, and I stare at the fabric, at the negative spaces of its warp and weft. Negative space too determines the quality of fabric, how it sieves or represses light.

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Sometimes I don't know what to do. Jim hated that about me, among, it turned out, so many other qualities. I'd stall over choices, unable to decide between rice or noodles, paper or stones, that road or this road. I'd stall and consider all the points, while the world worked on.

I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. That's part of it. I don't want to tell you that I'm bored around you or that I only want to be friends, because you'd get hurt. And I know that I can bore and that people don't like me too. I'm giving you a chance, just as I hope that you will give me one, too.

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Bitchy, you look bitchy, Jim would say. Bobby said, I always thought you was this angry-looking Asian chick. I think "Bitchy" is another word for unfuckable. Or "You don't want to fuck me, and that stinks." People stiffen around me, to see my down-turned mouth and dented brow. I'd get hurt, because I thought I had the best intentions; I was betrayed by my "mean girl" destiny of a face.

Anyways. Nice guys finish last. That's something Jim would say, and I think he took that to heart in the end. Nice guys aren't considerate. They don't think about other people's feelings. They don't move on to the more glamorous, more beautiful, more mover-and-shaker people. They stay in one place (never in a race), considering negative spaces, the drifting light, when Sodom and Gomorrah inspired love.

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