Versipellis

And it was Petronius’ fictional slave, Niceros, who first told the tale in words some few thousand years ago about the soldier who removed his clothing, piled it upon the ground and urinated in a circle around it. His clothing turned to stone and he shape-shifted into a wolf and bounded off into the woods.

Since November, my skin has been heavy and stiff against my shell. I try to write and my fingers burn with an echo that slips in and out of focus, frustratingly close and yet beyond all my grasp. I sleep by degrees, riding long threads of dream story that terminate in heaving intakes of breath and wide open eyes set upon the ceiling. Most times, I cannot sleep at all, fixated on the process of falling asleep, trying to find the moment when reality shifts and the mind opens to something else, the body sagging down into darkness and warmth.

When I was a child, we used to magnify ants and burn their bodies in the hot sun. You cannot perhaps imagine it or believe it, but there is a smell even in a body that small that sticks with you the rest of the day. Or at least I could smell it at the time.

I came of the age when I could discern life and death early, and as soon as I realized I could not grasp the transition from mobile and animated to static and decomposing, as soon as I realized that something larger than myself was happening and that it was something indescribable and unknowing, I walked away from my friends. I stopped killing things before I was ten, not because of any other reason than it didn’t seem like the choice that I was capable of making because I could not understand the consequences.

This was the first time I left. From that time, and for a long, long time after, I was mostly alone.

Before I was twelve, I had taken to walking the banks of the river by my home with a tall, hoary stick. Only the things I came upon at the roots of trees and at the shores of water gave me true connection, fulfillment and understanding. As I grew older, I used to sneak out of my house at night and climb into the branches of the maple tree in my front yard, find the bough-cradle towards the peak and lay staring up at the stars. Some nights I would sleep there, others I would simply feel the wood under my back for hours, wondering why this was the only time I ever felt happy or at home.

I would shift in and out of this solitary state in the years to come, wobbling through relationships that were long-term commitments of two years or more from ninth grade until after college. I would fall into community/family-flavored friend groups where I would remain for as long as they would hold. But in the times in-between, I was alone, apart from many friends in close proximity, withdrawn. These became vast oceans to sail and woodlands to walk through with always a transformation taking shape along the way. But as I would finally come to see, all these transformations were always the same one, over and over again in the same direction, desperately trying to become a permanence.

There is a reason I keep having the same series of revelations. I’ve never accepted any of them before as fact.

And so, each time through the vast silence, I would lose more and more of my ability to retrieve myself and it would take longer and longer to snap back. Like a sleeping sickness, it would settle in to my mind and muddle my self-perceptions, or it would become a thing so deep and intense, so full of meaning and purpose, that I would sink down into it as my one true home only to recoil from it vehemently when the next shiny bauble reflected my shadow and beckoned me to bright lights, money and gluttony. The confusion over what truly was awake and what was asleep continued.

It was not until the last time and the end of the last time, that I saw it all clearly, when a series of tragedies and traumas brought me so far down that I had planned a series of elaborate and hushed, suicide plots. None of these passed the first planning stages (my favorite was a leap from the Columbia River Gorge into the winds I had so fallen in love with). Instead, I kept getting up and feeding the cats, going to bed, paying my bills, breathing and eating and working and purging. In the end, I lost two months, a blackened period of which I still have no memory.

But in my time of severe need, I called out. I did not call out to Christ, or Buddha or Mohammed or Krshna. Instead, I found one of the missing pieces I kept throwing away and ignoring, instinctively in my choice. I called out to my companions, some of whom I had met before I was twelve years old, a few whom I had met in dreams, some who found me hiding in bushes when the grown-ups were seeking me, some who came in the twilight of wake/sleep in the bough of my tree. Others, I had met on the road driving, or in sweat lodges, or in the hidden places of root, stone and hollow.

When I called, they came. And we struck a bargain.

I have borrowed time since 2003 began, and now that time is up. I have spent two years following clues I left myself in 1995 and 1996, the last time I trekked across a solitary wilderness. And that time is now over. After a day where crows sat outside my windows and flew at the glass, scattering the cats; after a night spent watching three young raccoons weaving through the bushes outside my door with growling yips and the long drag of clawed fingernails, after many pointed dreams, it’s time for me to drop my clothing in a pile on the ground.

The path diverges here. It’s time for me to take my place.

I have a family and community again in the city of Seattle, a group of friends closer than friends who are becoming larger in number and deeper in heart. They are my fondest treasure. Those circles are connecting and spiraling outward into other circles, and large soul stones are shifting as a result. They are bringing back pieces of myself that I had thought gone forever, and illuminating to me how those kinds of friendships are the true meaning of life, opening my heart further and further with their unselfish giving. I near my 38th birthday in a few days with the return of the sun hard at hand, and as I do so, I find the cycles of my life have run their course.

I’m tired of the self-deception. I cannot find the words anymore or the energy anymore to keep up the mythology. Something happened in the last month that is unnamable and indescribable, and after it happened, whenever it happened, I’m simply not the same person I was. I cannot write in the same fashion, am not drawn to the same places in myself, am not interested in figuring out what I already know. I have moved into another phase of my life, and there is no time to play the game of loss and retrieval anymore. Nor is there the luxury to wallow or deface.

What I have to give up is the thing that was so comfortable for so long and gave me so many, many years of delicious suffering and self-loathing and blindness and fear and fetal-curled escapism that led to so many juicy, vulture-hovered words. But how long really can you keep that kind of thing up before it becomes the last party guest that simply will not leave?

And so, we come to a very hard ending. Because this is the last rambling, highly personal catharsis you will see in this space, and the end of a very, very long book of my life. Over the last few months, I’ve been stretching and expanding. I am now writing to five or six different channels: poetry in an old spiral notebook, the makings of fiction on my laptop, rambling anima glimmers in a hidden blog, a personal journal on another public web site, and this blog. Although there will be more open-hearted bleeding in my journal, it will no longer be of the same kind as I have written for the last eight years in over two hundred postings here and in Walkabout. And none of that internal-focus will ever again appear in this space, other than as a linking theme for an externally-focused piece.

If you are a friend and want to keep reading those sorts of journaling, drop me an email and I will point you in that direction. Otherwise, this place will eventually be full of more creative non-fiction, travel pieces for 2005 and a number of purposeful, column-like entries that hopefully will lead to my upcoming Alaskan road trip. The positive response to the Shiftless Seattle entries was so great, that you’ll have many more of that ilk as well.

As for me, I feel more complete and whole and self-knowing than I have easily in thirty years.

I finally get it. I’m giving in. And I am now more than ready to move on and get started.

A Bird Flies like a Bird

“Clear water all the way to the bottom;
a fish swims like a fish.
Vast sky transparent throughout;
a bird flies like a bird.”
- Zen Master Dogen

And this is a beginning of possible relevance and possible irrelevance, depending on where you stand.

For there was once a boy made of wind and water.

He wore a fishbowl for a head and had legs of tall timbers and arms of bone antler. And his feet were made of mission bells, his liver a sack of cement and solder, his left ear a mortar shell, his fingers sea stacks and pretzel rods. Because though it was not his home, he lived in the place of gravity, density and compression, the only one of five elements that limited movement, flexibility and form, because he believed it to be his home.

This came to him one day when he tossed an acorn into a pond and observed the effect. The acorn had changed location. The pond had changed composition. He had expended energy he would never get back. Everything was profoundly affected and irreversible. If he were to do this every day within sight of another human being, would he be called an acorn tosser, or consider himself an acorn tosser? Probably not. Were he to write every day and post these writings, would anyone call him a writer or he consider himself a writer? Probably so.

What is the difference, then, between the two pursuits, he asked himself. An acorn in the air. Words on a page. These are actions with some or no intent, some or no aim, effects and results unchangeable, the same action. Only when the name was spoken, the “ter” or “or” or “er” or “tor” or “can” or “ist”, did the power of the name take hold. Only when the name was believed and defined by generations of belief, did the binding lock down. What is it more important to be, an acorn tosser or a writer? They are the same. And so, this is where he had lived, in name and construct of name, in role and construct of role, because it was the only ordered world that made sense and was commonly inhabited – the logos of slow-moving molecules.

Through this, he came to see that there was no definition, no role, only action. There was only what he affected, what he touched and infused, what he collided with and connected with, a reality made of all-sided perceptions. Ego and “I am” were traps. He was a resistor that stood in-between the charge and the ground. The less solid he could become, the less resistance would be provided, less and less to stand in the way. And in this, the manifestation of what he might envision and what might inspire him might become instantaneous, the resistance and friction null. Spark, connection, with only diffusion to undertake.

And if this could happen, if he could not exist, he might see "creation" as an act of non-aggression, story a wave that exists beyond oneself, that keeps moving irregardless. He might see that it is impossible to create anything, for there is nothing to make anew, only to discover. And in that act of discovery, there is no active action. Be quiet, and it comes. Move with it and let it ride you.

But he was a boy made of wind and water who had always been alone, scared, hurt, apart, shy, unable to belong. The things that gave first validity and acceptance later became dangerous to toy with because they had become load-bearing beams. Any attempt to move them or any small crack in them could easily lead to a loss of definition, then a loss of firmly-clutched validity, and then a collapse of the structure. For all actions untaken can be made perfect, the only possible deterioration of that perfection being an attempt to act at all. Without the attempt, the perfection is maintained and the solid is both solid and safe. And the equal can be said for imperfection, as no action untaken can ever improve upon its situation.

These became heavy furs piled upon icicle shoulders, mountains of seaweed on a hard barnacle chin, until the shape of the covering became the thing it had been covering.

While the thing that was being covered continued not to exist at all in any solid form.

But this was largely unnoticed….for a long time.

When he realized this as the acorn struck the surface, he recognized a problem of solidity and decided to try to solve this problem, because even though he was a boy made of wind and water, he believed in gears and steam valves, in the greased machinery of solids. And so, the attempt was made, many attempts were made at punching fog and enclosing sound and shadow and fixing slack.

But any attempt has within it, by design, a “try”, which is the defining of a problem state and the solution state, or the goal state. So, an attempt has within it, a non-state and a completed state, thus a duality. But an action apart has within it no problem and no goal, the focus not on the dirt collected or the cleanliness of the floor, but in the action of sweeping itself. The before and after represent a change of state from a perceived less to more, from off to on, from problem to solution. The middle represents the present moment and the movement both towards and away. And this is the place of wind and water, the will pure, not directed to any outcome other than continuance and expression, fed by things like intuitive desire or open intent. This is a non-dualistic, non-thought state – zero resistance to the flow, charge, or wave. It is being and not existing.

And so, he was reminded that the attempt was a Chinese finger puzzle, and the solution instead of pulling and struggling, examining the casing for gears and pulleys and levers was to let go and stop resisting, indeed stop solving – for even seeing it as a problem that requires a solution was still dualistic and fed the struggle unnecessarily. Flow is flow, and all else fades back into the dot field, and you believe what you believe.

There is still a boy made of wind and water, with a soup pot hat and geode eyes, a belly of old suit linings. If you see him, give him an acorn and point him in no particular direction at all.

Ghost Ship

I took a walk today.

My destination was not important. I had no destination. I had no reason. I walked out my door to check the mail, and then I just kept walking. I left the house unlocked, the television running, and a half-eaten sandwich on a plate on the table. I didn’t take my wallet or my phone, didn’t put on a coat or shave. I raptured from life like a sailor is whisked from a ghost ship, gone without evidence.

I passed by beds of flowers whose names and types I’ve never known, and holly bushes and long spreading hardwoods on fire with autumn. I peered into the spaces between the wall rocks and reached my hand where the spider webs stick to the moss. Prayer flags fluttered, pink flamingoes and ceramic mobiles. And I kept walking.

There were two identical cats on a small, low hedgetop, one with a bright red harness, and one without. They barely raised their heads as I passed, two old sisters having whiskered conversation while their limbs warmed from cold fish flesh to burnt sandalwood. The water appeared on the horizon, stuck full of thick-masted sailing vessels, a harbor of octopuses and six-gill sharks that sucked in gloom sediments down where even the light fears to reach it’s snack-food fingers. I did not pause at the crosswalk. I kept walking.

Like sumi-e brushstrokes, the children were flecked on the hillside. Their movements wavered them in my eyesight, watercolored them in streaks with no terminus. The sidewalk widened and I turned away from the gathering crowd, the clamor of speech and the stench of logos. Conversation has a direction. Doorways, burnished orange carpeting, and folding sandwich boards were silent hawkers, beckoning with music, scent, baubles for trinkets. I had no wallet or money, and so the sin had no firm anchor. It hissed at me with deep roasted coffee and household solutions, my own future betterment played out in there in the glib words and the shiny packaging. I kept walking.

I stared up two thousand wooden steps, the towering construction ladder that stretched from ground to bridgetop. Songbirds were dashed lines in serration, hung like fat fruit around me. Beyond, the white, blue mountains and promises. The shadows, the crows followed close. The things I see out of the corner of my eye, followed at a safe distance. I kept walking.

When I reached the water….

I stepped my foot out over it and made my way to the other side. I looked down on the faces of mud fish and the leftbehind treasures of junks and houseboats as my feet brushed the cold brusque of whitecaps. The wind swallowed the breaking bows of kayaks and the whoop call of tugs. Beyond, underneath a curtain of kelp, wavering in the lowlight, the pink stabs of ginger blossoms, the low, hollow stalks of snake-wheat leaned against the marble columns of forgotten civilizations, stretched to worry letter-worn cornices and crumbled cherubs.

I paused. To the East, with one step, I would be in Montana, cradled in the open sky. Another step would put me in Wisconsin or Cleveland. Another would take me to the edge of the Adirondacks, at the fringes of tribal lands. One more would place me at the doorstep of a little cabin in Maine, there where oil-drenched cormorants explode from the dock depths, and eagles scoop silver shimmer-prey from distant beaches.

And then the wolves would walk with me, muscles and haunches, snout exhalation through shaded, golden woods. I would strip off each article of clothing in turn, shoes, socks, shirt, pants, underwear, and then tooth, nail and skin.

I would never look back, were I to keep walking.

When I reached the water, it was all laid out before me in an arc of connection, and all laid behind me on thin, tenacious tendrils, tugging at the Sundance fleshhooks. This is the nature of the soul. And so, I turned back home.

I took a walk today. And this was a gift to myself, and as a gift, telling and transparent. That such a thing I would define as a gift, the simple spontaneity that others do without thinking, the small pleasures that break free and spiral quickly, split the carapace with a cedar sword and free-fall towards the copper-basin of the late-season sun.

This is what it means, all of it. And this is what I should be made of as well.

Why? Why Not?

It has come, this heavy doorman.

It bends over the blistering yellow, squeezes tight the husks with peyote-scented hands and sweetgrass. Its long, ragged sleeve cuff drags small circles in drying soil. It calls out across green, deep ponds. A chalk laugh stirs the fog of mosquitoes. It presses down with thick, stiff boots on the marsh, on the mud, stumbles into lily pads, small stiff islands stuck to the surface of diminishing water. Tadpoles close their null, glass-bead eyes and lament a low, slow warble.

My windows are cold and the walls shake with wind. There is a knock made of twig fingers at the bottom of the door. There is a knock and a slow sniffing at the frame, in the cracks, around the sealing. It throws its arms wide and I smell the inside of its coat, warm and close, the old sweat and smoke wool, of eel bellies, the faint lingering of chlorine in the pocket linings, a half-chewed button stuck to the seam, paprika and burnt leaves, sienna landscapes and deer skulls.

Now there is a hollowing in the place underneath, where selkies slither and slump on oiled skins, vanish into greyness, where things tumble and crawl, carrying small satchels, rucksacks, backpacks, pushing shopping carts full of their summer lives.

My sketchbook is open before me. The leather binding creaks and the metal wolf head clasp taps on the wood table top. Whenever I don’t know what else to do, I open this book and stare at the lack of lines, draw diagrams, wheels, charts on each surface. Tonight I am forming a simple glyph, cloud-like bubbles that feed into a swarm of small, randomly placed squares that feed in turn into long straight rows and finally empty unto simple phrases. The clouds are named for inspiration. The squares are ideas. The long rows shape the outcomes of fiction and non-fiction, artwork and animation, performance.

This may not mean much to you, but to me it’s finally the answer. How do I deal with all the things I see when I close my eyes? And why has nothing before ever worked?

I’ve been raised to think that hard work equates to good results, that struggle and sweat is an investment, that pushing yourself through the unbearable is the way to build strength. Work hard, eat meat and potatoes, go to church, raise your kids. These are firmly ingrained German ethics that sift down to me through generations. They’ve served me very well in living a life, for they are things of the body and of the mind. But I’ve learned finally that the heart asks for much different rules when it asks for rules at all.

My buddy Shorn and I have been talking about the idea of expression and practice, the idea that instead of pushing yourself through a process that you struggle with and find difficulty in, one that is raising stress, you should move on to something that is flowing with you in that moment and revisit the difficult thing later. Don’t force you way through. You should always flow to what is open and leave what is closed closed. I’ve also been thinking about a quote, which I paraphrase here, from the actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman, “Creatively, the second you judge something, you kill it. You kill every single possibility that might have existed and that may have surprised you.”

In every writing book, every artists way book, every discussion I’ve ever had with any performer, artist, writer, musician, these themes continue to surface as truths. I’ve written about them in journals and in this blog, talked to friends and lovers about them, and yet never firmly grasped them in any way other than concept and method. Stop thinking, start doing. And yet, my brain still takes every small idea, strips it of its meat, and weighs it on a scale with a feather on the other platen.

The case in point is this blog, the one you are reading and specifically the way this one began. Since the last posting there have been over a dozen blogs created and deleted because they did not fit the format I have somewhat lain upon my perception of this “work”. In the meantime, in all other categories of expression but music, the same genocide is occurring. Around me my ideas race towards the ocean like newborn turtles. Birds peck at them, the landscape shifts to move them in other directions, large fish wait in the waters, tides toss rough stones and chopped waves. Only a very few survive. The amount of things you did not read about, that I did not bother to write a sentence about in any journal or scrap of paper over the last few years, is staggering.

Stop thinking. Start doing.

It finally explains the nagging question of why I write better when I am depressed or greatly saddened, why things pour from me in that moment more than in other moments. The need for catharsis and expression is certainly greater, but that’s only part of the answer. At times like that, there is overwhelming emotion that floods every sensibility, illogical, rash emotion. And when it overflows, there is no structure or goal, there is no form or desired outcome. It’s all about taking the idea that is burning in you and letting it out in any way it wants to come out just to get it out. But the larger truth is that in times like that, you are touching the raw source. That instinct and need is representative of the natural flow, the natural direction. It is not an exception, but the illustration of how rarely creation is truly as organic as it could be for most of us and how often it is forced through a process of overthought and control. It is what should be sought after in normalcy as well.

The theme of my diagram is “it all flows downward”. Me, I’ve been swimming upstream for many years.

Creating as I have been creating has involved starting with the end result and working backwards from that, with no cache of slip-paper, napkin-scrawled, free-write ideas to pull from. And with that approach, the full retinue of judges and accountants, architects and standards-keepers comes along for the job as well. The end result is whatever ekes through the sieve, given life by whatever inspiration exists solely in the moment and whatever good graces attends the chore of putting skin to bone.

As I look at the diagram, I finally get how backwards that is for me, how inorganic and forced. Because given its will, inspiration can spark ideas that are in turn kept and given their will, that later manifest into form, structure and outcome as is best suited to the idea itself. Starting at the bottom and attempting to write a short story, then looking for an idea to use, then jamming the two together is only a shape-to-slot game that a rather dull child would play, its outcome only clumsy or lucky. Sweat all you want to try to make a elephant into a turnip. It’s never going to happen.

Living in my head as much as I do, it’s very easy to equate the voice of thought with the authority of thought, to make the advisor the decider. And it’s just as easy to take on the mantle of creator because it’s a much more in-control and thus ego-desired position than the actual role, that of translator or facilitator, or even no role at all. We are goal-directed, outcome-nutty, most of us, prone to guilt when we aren’t accomplishing as much product as we feel we should be accomplishing. I was certainly raised that way, and taught often that my little heart-strong wanderings had their source in a feeling of being unsettled, unfulfilled, and unfocused. I’ve spent the better part of the last three years trying to reverse that in my beliefs. And now for me, it’s all about doing and not having done.

So I guess it is fitting to come to this kind of realization and conclusion on the day that the night wins out over the day, when the moon takes over from the sun. And the more I think about it, it’s also a comfortable application of all of the things I learned on my Shiftless Seattle trips to perhaps the last bastion of brain-rule in my life. It makes a good break point for things to come.

What it means for my process with expression is nothing short of revolution, a turning upside-down of every way I’ve ever tried to do anything.

What it means for this blog is many more short entries in the future, and less long, structured entries.

So to honor that idea, I’ll start with this one, nice and short, without any format, goal, or metaphor at all.

….

CRAP!

The Parable of Glass and Old Whiptail

I have all this stuff. I keep it in a big box and I sleep there and eat there so that I can watch over it. I surround my stuff with wood and plaster walls, stone and stucco. I lock the box so that nobody can get to it. And here with my stuff, I am safe.

Every night when I peer out of the box with my stuff in it, there is a face. There are small, black, put-together eyes deep-set in bristle-down fur, and a long, Spy vs. Spy nose with its sharp cone point twitching, noting each tight-woven, tapestried scent. There are ears, a child’s cardboard cutout triangles, pink and bare, exposed. There is a mouth, a sly sliver line closed upon needle teeth and turned at the corners. Whiskers point forward curiously, and bone-thin hands press down in faint fidgets upon the brick.

I’ve watched him amble along the uneven fence posts, my little opossum friend, wobbling on tiny rat feet as the skin rope tail whips around to grapple-hook knotholes and curl dowel posts. He is my little drunken master, the blind samurai who bumbled into my village seeking blueberries while holding tiny swords behind his back. His pert, focused eyes miss no movement. He is a shrewd mask of foolishness, a death pantomime.

Between the hours of eleven and midnight, I sit on my basement steps and wait for him to come home. I watch as he rappels and conquers the chain link fence, suspended like Odin in the last few seconds before taking to the new surface. Sometimes he’ll stand in the wash of the flickering yellow security bulb and blink rapidly at me, his hands moving wildly like a blurry detective searching trench coat pockets for a notepad. He never bares his teeth or utters a sound, never threatens, only makes his way up under the foundation of one of the apartments next door and impossibly squeezes his desaturated-tomato roundness into the tiny concrete passages. One blink and there is nothing but grey on grey and shadow. He is gone.

I’ve only seen him in the daylight twice, the day he arrived with his little suitcases and cancelled bus transfer, and the day he stood next to me on the sidewalk. That day, I looked at him blinking in the harsh sunlight of a Seattle summer late-afternoon, his robe tied tightly around his waist. He only smacked his lips and looked past me as we turned together to study the mess in the parking lot.

Then I pulled my knees up to my chest and sighed.

The green glass was shattered and covered the ground next to my car. Thousands of little squares radiated outward from the impact, and sheets of larger pieces lay half-covered in mud and gravel. Randomly, there lay a tube of sunscreen, a cell phone headset, stickers and receipts. The front passenger door hung open limply, dome light flickering breathes. The trunk yawed open as well. The rain continued to pour down over the carpet lining and seats while the car, violated, sprawled with both legs open.

I walked to it calmly and shut the door, which produced a rain stick shower of material into the window space. I shut the trunk, which latched closed with a wet slurp. And then, meticulously, I began to clean up the glass, causing tiny little pinprick cuts along my finger pads as the rain dripped from my bangs into my eyes.

He turned and shuffled off to bed. I crouched and cursed.

On Lughnasadh night, a week before, I sat naked in the moonlight and listened to the sirens. They seemed to come from all directions at once, rushing over the Aurora highway, careening through neighborhoods, whining from the far distance across the water. They Doppler shifted as they passed, changing their register from shriek to lament with the cold chill of prickling neck hair and shocked, arrested heartbeat. I’ve wondered about the nature of the siren. What a primal instinct it is to retreat back into the safety of the cave when that shrill howling rises. It’s a danger sound in our cellular memories, a warning and a call to gather at the same instant. There is no safety here, it says. Flee. Take shelter with others of your kind for strength. Things with fangs are hunting.

That night, a spate of fires was set in Seattle by the same arsonist. His count to date is fourteen in a line that covers a large section of the north city area in which I live. The latest was a few blocks to the east and a few more to the south. They say that this kind of crime is the hardest to solve and this kind of criminal is the hardest to catch. The last serial arsonist in Washington state set 77 fires before being turned in by family.

At midnight that evening, my opossum came again along the fenceposts, following the same routine path. He carried his life on his back, the rounded spine that gave him a hunched, gallumped slothness to his motions. He sniffed at the faraway smoke and then looked at both the foundation and the rafters of the house in a long, measured glance. The passing headlines brought out the silver spiked hairs in his coat, which glistened like wet straw mats.

I leaned against the wall in a gesture that would imply my next move was to light a cigarette if I had been a smoker. Instead, I cradled my chin in the loop-grasp of thumb and forefinger and looked at him. The sirens became faint moans in the darkness.

He nodded and brought the fleshy mesh of his hand to his face once. Then, unaffected, he turned to walk the jagged, splintered line back to his hollow.

Friday night last, I woke up with a start at around 4am, completely alert and ready for action. But there was silence. Nothing stirred. My senses tingling, I went to the bathroom and returned to bed, listening intently for any small sound, watching for any movement. As I closed my eyes and settled back to sleep, both of my cats leapt off the comforter and rushed down the hall. I heard a police siren getting closer and closer and then stopping a few blocks away. I threw on pajama pants and a robe and peeked around the white plaster corner into the cavernous, seldom-used tiled and windowed kitchen. The microwave clock was blinking the time, and as I inhaled, the refrigerator stopped running with a leaden click.

Suddenly, there were police swarming the walkway next to my apartment. Flashlights were everywhere, penetrating the glass, splitting into shards from the impact against my mirrors. I dove back into the bedroom and crouched down beside the bed, panting. Police were running, chasing somebody a few feet from my bedroom window, a few feet from my head, screaming, “GET DOWN. GET DOWN”. For some reason, planks of wood were falling in the alley. I readied myself for the sound of gunfire or for somebody to crash through the thick plate-glass door into my house.

I heard a cop yell, “GET DOWN AND PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD” and then another one yell, “HE’S IN THE ALLEY! GET HIM!” A police dog barked, deep, gruff and excited, then snarled. I heard the adrenaline breathing of somebody as they raced by.

And then the flashlights faded. Everything grew quiet, the shouts distancing. Nothing but the sound of my heartbeat and my neighbors walking upstairs remained. I exhaled. The night spread on.

The next day, he was waiting for me. He was there with a full belly and an empty lunch pail, sifting acorn shells and pinecones with his pink worm digits, shaded eyes dancing a balance beam along the low twitching snout. We nodded to each other and then he looked past me at the box that holds my stuff. He looked along the glass-covered holes, so easily broken. He looked along the two entrances and their keyholes begging an easy challenge for any tool-using mammal. He looked at the soft wood, looked at the piled dirt around the foundation. And then he looked at me.

When I sleep now, I check my locks and walk the perimeter of the apartment. I mentally record suspicious cars and people and make note of license plates, memorize descriptions. I don’t often go into the parking lot past midnight unless I am coming home from somewhere, and then I arrive conspicuously with radio on and headlights beaming. I’ve been waking up each night at 4 am, listening, waiting. It will all pass one of these days very soon and return to normal, but at the moment I feel naked, and the thinness of the walls is obvious, the vulnerability palpable. I suddenly see those things that are changeable, gained and lost, how nothing is easily held, and it humbles me.

I told my opossum friend this. I told him that I feel revealed and unprotected, impermanent, easily toppled. I tell him that for the moment, I’ve lost the notion of safety.

He nodded and glanced at my apartment complex. The corners of his mouth turned up, parting slightly.

“Very good,” he said. “Very good. That’s one less thing to lock up.”

And as I watched him, he waddled away across the marzipan brick layings and the wood chips towards the hole in the wall and the high brush bushes, his silver swords visible atop his back, his body chuckling as he lowered himself into the darkness.

And I walked back into the house and stood in the doorway, my finger pausing on the deadbolt latch.