When I was a boy, I was a sucker for girls with books.

So nowadays I’m used to coming across books in my library with inscriptions in them — dusty words from ghosts.

A little while ago, when I picked one up, I remembered reading it in Z’s apartment. The loneliness of her world made bearable by the words she’d given me, bound in a wood spine. The story was like a prayer Z wanted me to know.

Z was not nice to me, ultimately — though I’m sure she felt the same about me.

But one thing’s for sure, the world she put in my hands — and that I poured into my mind while sitting on a purple couch as she slept alone in a room not more than 10 feet away — that world still lives in me. And sometimes I think that that whole relationship was worth it just to get that.

It was about the heart and love and the world that tried to leash these powers down and keep them under control. And the tragedy that so often follows such restrictions.

It was called “The God of Small Things” but there was nothing small about it at all.

In the dream, we’re in a farm field with our couples counselor, M. The field is carpeted with a rich deep green grass, dark with rain, and bending down into a hollow. There’s a red clay wall at its center where you stand as others from a short line look at pictures of you from when you were a kid and confront you with what they see. I watch someone being told by strangers how they see his past. His shoulders slump a little. His head falls. It’s all part of an exercise that M has concocted. We’ve agreed to try, but I am frightened by it now.

I turn. I’m at a curving red diner booth with you at the edge of the field. M is there to tell us what she has learned. Somehow our oldest is there too. He knocks a glass of milk off the table and it shatters on the floor under the booth. I look down. A big crescent shard of sharp glass wobbles in the milk near a rusting chair leg. As I focus on it, I feel your anger and frustration at the interruption. You won’t get the chance to hear what M found out.

Then we are in a truck going along a green road, just me and you and the kids, to do something else M has asked. We turn up a muddy track to find a place. We pass an old beaten tract home with a low cinder block wall around the back and a rusting swing set. It’s up on a little hill and we briefly think to stop and knock on the door but we don’t.

We drive another 500 yards to where the wire fence ends and park to climb to the top of a small knoll. We start the exercise M has set out for us. The house we passed to get here glows in the distance.

Suddenly the owner of the house is out driving wildly around us. He is Ernest Borgnine and he is crazy angry. We’re on his property. We’re disturbing him. Get off! Now!

We yell we didn’t know. We say we are almost done. Who knows if Ernest Borgnine hears us through the open window of his old pickup truck?

Then he is gone. I re-assure you that it’s okay if we finish what we are doing (whatever it is). It’s unnerving but I feign confidence and we continue until I am pelted by a paint ball. I know it’s come a long way because it doesn’t hurt when it hits me. I look to the house. It’s Ernest Borgnine‘s kids shooting at us.

I yell again. We’re almost done. We’re about to leave. Stop. We have kids with us.

They don’t care. I start to get angry.

Suddenly, the shooter is there. He is big and broad shouldered in a football jersey that’s torn at the midriff. He tries to intimidate us. We’re scared and angry. We tackle him and attack. Then I realize what’s happening. Wait, I say. This is wrong. We can’t hurt him.

We step away from him laying face down on the wet grass.

In a flash the scene changes and I’m in someone else’s body that is also mine. I’m heavily tattooed with dark tribal patterns. I am standing in a narrow hallway leading to the stage. I feel exhilarated and naked; strong and aware.

I am also wearing a cheerleader outfit. It is a joke, a Britney Spears pastiche, but it is weird.

Someone is trying out for the band. It is the kid from the house who intimidated us in the field. He wants to be the drummer.

The dark patterns on my skin hide me from him. He passes me without realizing he knows me from before. I can also tell he is afraid. He thinks we are tough so he is tough. He does not realize that our inked shells are just masks we look through, protective signs of our inner tenderness.

A test for the try-out appears in my mind. I begin to weep and my band mates — who know me as even I do not know myself — begin to cry with me. I twist in the cheerleader uniform and go to each band mate with a pink balloon that I blow up myself and give them in place of my heart. Each takes it protectively in acknowledgment of what I am feeling.

I bend to offer it to the boy who does not recognize me. He is more afraid and unsure than ever.

Will he take it?

I wake before finding out and scramble to write it all down before it evaporates in the rising light of morning.

The old bookseller used to say, “Don’t just look at your books. Touch your books!” When I asked why he said simply, “Because when you do they synaptically register in your mind and when someone asks for one a complete picture of exactly where you saw it will appear to you and you will go to it without the slightest hesitation.”

And he was right.

I get home and you don’t look like the person I remembered. You are hard and angry. You make no effort to be anything else.

You think I blame you but I don’t.

I just see you as you are. And I reflect back what I see. Hard anger without any romance. Frustration. Disappointment.

You ask if I’m upset with you. How can I tell you? Do you really want to know?

I’m not sure I understand the point at the moment and just say I’m reading. But the ink and paper is useless on my mind and I go to sleep. And later when I find you sleeping on the couch and ask you back, I think maybe this is a restart.

It’s not. We just go back to sleep. Except I can’t sleep.

I’m here in the dark, writing this, while everyone sleeps.

And I’ve only been away two days.

It was in the old brown house where the willow bulged in the backyard above the roof like a depressed balloon. We were sitting at the cherry wood dinner table and they were arguing about something when she said him, “And there you are, taking potato chips out of the bowl like you’re some kind of King. King William G. Walsh.” I remember him reaching at that moment into the wooden bowl and pulling a misshapen oval of salt out. His look stretched down his long nose and was made longer by his arm.

Before he could get the whole thin cut delicacy to his mouth, she grabbed the bowl and suddenly chips were falling like big brown tears in the dinning room.

We cried as she banged though the kitchen door and she backed the Volkswagen down the drive past the dinning room window to go no-one knew where.

We were artists who weren’t making art and we settled for the only way to signal that we belonged to that class of free thinkers we wanted to be seen to be part of. We drank.

We were poor, too.

So we held a party the first Thursday of every month at our apartment and anyone was welcome. The deal was simple. We’d make gin gimlets, chilled and straight up, no rocks. Period.

If you didn’t want that, then you needed to bring your own.

And people did that. Beer. Wine. Vodka. Whiskey. Anything to avoid the gimlet.

Of course, a few tried one, but usually only one. Its sweet, citrus power was true and real. It went down well, but then exploded in the brain. Women had to step out of heels to walk the hall. Drivers had to be called to take people home. And the apartment was smeared with laughter and jazz and minds soaked in boozy lime slosh.

The best part was, at the end of the night, our gallon of gin was still nearly a gallon of gin. But a months worth of beer and wine and vodka and whiskey was left behind. So we could drink until the next first Thursday.

“I love this place!” someone said once. “It’s nothing but books and records! Why can’t I live here?!”

It was a funny thing to hear because no could really live there. Not for long, anyway.

Still we could go on believing we were artists, though we didn’t make art.

The fingers move back and forth like the tic toc of an old clock. Tic. Toc. Tic. Toc. And I float back into a world of memories that peel away like the petals of a flower that never ends. One after the other, the forgotten rooms and smells come back. I walk hard wood floors of apartments I haven’t been in in years. Girls and women swim by. A garage of Truth or Dare is suddenly with me and then on to the next thing. And then I see my wife that first time we laid under the cold windows of the 157th Street place. Her skin shimmers with softness before me and I can feel the warmth of her there. The muscle in my chest becomes a softened heart and tears come in sheets of good. I don’t know why — except that I am grateful for her.

What is this place I am in that lives inside but I do not know?

I once told the therapist that I decided to give it a shot because I had somehow changed 18 years ago. I’d put the bottle down and taken a new road, so anything was possible. Even change.

But now that I am nearly 20 years on, I’ve seen the sudden knife inside me come out to stab blindly, driven by a machine I have no control over.

Days afterwords, I can only hope that the people I have chosen — and who have chosen me — can still see the part of me they love, the part that is worth waiting for and being with.

Yet I can never promise them that I will ever be able to control this thing. Or that it will ever go away. No matter how many steps I do, or how many hours I sit on a couch barfing out myself onto a paid ear.

I will always be myself and that being will always be part of that self. And while there may be no center to the onion, the onion is still an onion.

It makes me wonder if there is really a point to anything at all.

Except that I know I love, too. But in this time of hurt, where is that being? Why is it not turned on to keep the knife quiet and in its sheath?

Love, I need you now more than ever.

I’m slow and angry with the fight. She told me I ruined Christmas again. That I’m awful at birthdays. I had to beg her to sleep in our bed where we never touch.

I might as well have been drunk.

And I’m seeing less and less the difference between here and 18 years ago. Except if I were alone I’d be hurting no one but myself.

A Lyft driver named Innocent picked me up today. During the ride he told me his eldest child was murdered 2 years ago at the age of 24. He asked if I believed in God. I told him believed there was something connecting us but I was baffled about how it worked, or what it was. I heard his anger and his sorrow. We wondered why the universe allowed such suffering. Then we agreed that we only really had the moment we were in as he drove along. And for a brief moment I felt like I was known and knew him and it was maybe the most alive moment I ever had.

The bookstore never really existed without Christmas. Even in the warmer Chicago springs, Mr. B piped “The Nutcracker Suite” through the PA system. So when the actual season did come, everything got turned up to 11, sometimes 12.

One year, I remember a late afternoon delivery of a huge bowl of ice and champagne. Mr. B watched the white gloved men put it on his round oak table in the back. He took a moment to read the card that came with it and jumped into nervous action. “Mr. P is coming! Quick! Put the art books out! When he gets here, close the store!”

It seemed odd to me that the arrival of one person could lead us to shut the store, but sure enough when Mr. P showed up at 5:30, we ushered out our customers and locked the door. He was not a particularly tall man — more of a perfect medium build. But in his blue cashmere top coat, he looked like money.

Champagne flutes were handed out and everyone took a glass. Then Mr. P proceeded to spend 30 minutes with each clerk, and an hour with Mr. B, to find out what we were all reading. Each recommendation was placed on the table with the champagne and Letty, the accountant, added it to his tab.

I sold every book I’d read that year to him, starting with John Casey’s, Spartina, and went home drunk and charmed with the feeling that I’d touched some old world of plutocrats and literature where I danced with Tolstoy and Hemingway and thin women with names like Plath and Parker.

Six months later I remember Letty complaining about Mr. P as she stamped “Final Notice” on a bill that she was stuffing into an envelope with a Pebble Beach address.

Mr. P was in arrears.

“The Nutcracker Suite” swirled from the stereo anyway. I’m pretty sure Spartina was sitting on a shelf in some huge house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, spine unbroken.

Truth or dare and Laura took dare and in the warm yellow light of the garage she slipped her hand down my pants and everyone looked on as she touched my erection. And it was weird and glorious and afterword we never really talked. Because it was just a moment in truth or dare in the garage.

I’m told there are two sides to you. A remembering/story self and an experiencing self. Together they make the coin that is you, but you are only really allowed to be on one side or the other. When you are on the remembering/story side, you string together recollections and either project backward or forward to who you were or think you will be. It is a story flavored by your mood or something in the moment that has brought those memories forward and all they are soaked in. When you are on the experiencing side you are there, in a moment with the world, and all else drops away. There is no reconstructed you from the remembering/story side: there is just what is happening there, then.

When that moment is over, your remembering/story self immediately jumps in and puts the moment in a place, into the book of you — a liquid place where everything is clear and blurred at once, distinct but running together, sharp like the cold water of a river that is never the same no matter how often you stand in the same spot of its bend.

But somewhere in there, that process, there is a nano-second when you are on the edge of the coin. An ever-so brief nothing in time where you are both the story of you and the experience of you.

And when I am lucky, I find that place where the pen meets the paper. An inky moment where the whole of me disappears — and is there at once — and I am both the story that I am telling and the experience of telling it and the listener who is transformed by it.

It is magnificent.

At bedtime the boys go nuts. They are like ping pong balls set loose in a room of corners. They have no center other than each other. Energy ricochets. I ask them to stop. My voice bounces off their rubber ears. There is no hearing. And the kettle inside me boils over and in seconds I am taking away screentime and tv shows and paintball afternoons we haven’t even planned.

And I know I am the crazy one now, not them. And still I cannot help myself.

The NY agent sent her two sides. She printed them out and worked on them for a few days and I’d see her mouthing the words in the evenings. Her hands danced in the air and I had to resist asking her what she was saying. I wanted to know, but also I understood that she needed the space; that puncturing the chamber of her rehearsal would simply distract her from her purpose and bring frustration rather than connection.

Then one morning, she asked me to help her run lines.

She handed me the pages that had become dogeared in just a few days. Yellow highlighter drew my eye like a flashlight beam in the dark.

The first piece was a conversation between a man and a woman at their daughter’s softball game. Between pitches and cheers, they talked about money and jobs and how to pay for pizza. The second piece was a simple monologue about the moment the woman fell in love with her husband. He’d taken her out to a cornfield to look at the stars and made a ring from a firefly for her.

The first piece was like something our friend DK would’ve written. Simple and meaningful and present. The second was like my writing, poignant and vulnerable and true.

I read the sides like I was supposed to, in the voice she will meet in the room where the audition happens: neutral and cold. Passive.

But my heart betrayed me and I could feel the pull of the words and how well they found a place within me. I looked up after and she could see how I felt. About her. And myself. And the world where we met, that we still fit in, and love, and still meet in.

And I could see I wasn’t alone in all that either.

It felt good and soft and tender.

“It’s fine writing,” I said. But I did not stand up to go. I just waited. Looking across the table at her with a brimming heart.

I see the door of my parents room through the frame of my own door. Between our thresholds a staircase leads down to the life of the house, a straight shot to the foyer where everyone passes. But looking at my parents door, the distance seems forever. And as I think of the things that she did here to me, the distance grows. How did they not know? It’s a question I know the answer to: They didn’t because they weren’t there. But I ask it all the same as if the closeness makes it their fault, their responsibility. It’s not. Still, looking at the door, through the eyes of the one it happened to, I feel unbearably sad.

The words come out like a sudden knife and before I can stop them, they flash by and bring blood. They are quick and ugly. But they have beauty in that, too. I spend the next hours and days on the see-saw of defense and mea-culpa. I have no idea where they come from. They were as sudden as a storm on the plain. Still, someone inside me wanted them out. Why? Who is this person? If I never have meet them, how will I know when they will show up again. I can apologize, but I cannot say it will never happen again.

I did not even know it would happen when it did.

I am a memory machine. I string moments together like beads and decide how I feel about the necklace according to how easy or hard the last bead was to thread. My fingers could be bloody from the work, but if that last black pearl slipped as quick as lightning and felt good as it came to its final place, I’m likely to overlook all the sweat and tears and craziness and think, what a great piece of jewelry.

My whole life is held together like that. My whole being.

And that is crazy.

We used to cut through the backyards and cross Pfingston Road. Through the hedges behind Becky’s place we had to pass by the hulking gray shape of the overlarge farmhouse. Shredded curtains were still as the dead in the windows and there was no sign of life. The garage was full of newspapers from days no one remembered and whenever I peeked in, I always wondered if I’d find a paper announcing Kennedy’s death in a big banner headline. But I never got in and we never saw anyone in the windows. Even ghosts didn’t live there.

Now I wonder who’d owned the place. Who’d left it there for kids looking for a shortcut to pass by on their way to a school that probably didn’t exist when it was built.

I remember when she dumped me, sitting on the couch and telling her I’d like to work on it. Telling her that we got along in every way, but in the bedroom. I remember thinking about her whiter than white teeth in the dark and long slender neck twisting with the never getting there. I remember thinking about the night in the kitchen and her hands up on the wall over her head, arched back. I remembered thinking about the day she showed up at the airport with flowers and the night after her French friends came over and I made them laugh and her ferocious approach on the hard wood floor that left her unsatisfied. I remember the strangeness of being wanted and liked but broken within.

I remembered all that and still thought it could be worth it, but she was certain that this had to be it. “I don’t want to work on it,” she said. And I wondered if she’d ever solve it for herself.

And I remembered all that again 15 years later at a show she was doing when she described me to great laughter as a nice man who’d had too much marriage counseling.

But I also remembered the great relief after as I walked away from the warm light of the apartment: this time, it’s not me.