Conclusion: The Memory Thief.

He ran flat out down the dark alleyway, splashing through puddles and careening around obstacles in his path.

Before his brain had a chance to compare the relative safety of the building with where he was now, a fist came out of the blackness and connected with his jaw.

Down he went, the bundle flying out of his arms. The thief stared up at his would-be mugger, and the mugger stared back. The precious bundle rested on the wet pavement between them, still wrapped in the thief's coat. Still safe, for the moment.

What do you want?

Is this all of them?

Yes. Why?

I'm taking them.

That isn't a good idea.

The mugger didn't say anything. He walked forward and gently picked up the bundle. He removed the coat, tossing it toward the thief, who didn't make a move to catch it. The mugger leafed through the stack of memories, nodding here and there, frowning and then smiling softly. He glanced up once, his dark eyes shining in the night and then he turned and began to walk away.

Those aren't safe for you to keep, you know!

The thief's sure pronouncement echoed off the brick around them.

I'm not keeping them

The thief jumped to his feet and ran after the mugger. He grabbed the mugger's shoulder and spun him so they were face to face.

What are you going to do with them?

I'm going to put them back.

You can't.

You had no right to take them.

Someone had to save them, that building is condemned. If we don't keep them safe they'll be lost forever.

They're in the building for a reason. It's where they belong. And there's a chance we can save everything but not like this.

This is the only way.

No, it's not.

Do you have a better idea?

Yes, I do.

What is it?

We leave it alone. Taking it apart before we need to isn't going to work.

I know that, that's why I'm trying to work with what I've been given, Ben.

Then try something else, Sam!

And he took off, back toward the building, back to return the memories to their places. To file them away in their locked cabinets in the locked room at the end of the hall where they would be safe. No one was in a rush to get the building torn down, structurally it was safe. He was fine with continuing to live on borrowed time as long as there was no more pain for her.

He got to the top of the fire escape only to find the window open. He entered and walked to the first door with the broken pane. It was open. He went in and sat down on the floor and opened the drawer closest to him and began to sort through the paper.

It would be a long night, but he would stay until everything was returned to its rightful place.

*****************

The sun had risen high in the sky when he stood and stretched, arms to the ceiling as his stomach rumbled with hunger. The mugger surveyed the room and smiled to himself. Job well done, he thought.

He called out loud, his voice jagged and hoarse,

It's finished. You're okay. You're safe now. I will watch over you.

He didn't hear a response.

The door opened and he turned, surprised. When he went out into the hall, he found that the building had changed. It was full, offices were bustling, elevator floors were being rung, printers buzzed, coffee was carried to desks in busy arms full of important business, and the building seemed new again. The floor was different, the scratched and faded covering replaced with muted grey carpet to keep the noise down. To his surprise, the window in the door was intact, frosted glass masking the contents but allowing the light into the hall.

His smile was a little unsure now, as he tried to blend in, casually walking toward the elevator noises. He got to the center of the floor and realized he knew a lot of the people working here. People nodded to him, a few squeezed his shoulder. One man, dressed in an expensive suit, came forward to shake his hand and thanked him for saving the building, because there was a lot of work to be done here and it was an important place and that the mugger was going to be very happy living and working here.

He nodded, saying nothing, as the realization began to sink in. He didn't have to save it alone, but neither did the thief have to tear it apart to save what he could. Everyone would work together.

That realization was fleeting, dashed to pieces as he got to the main floor lobby and saw cracks sealing themselves as he walked across the floor.

No, it wasn't everybody.

It was the building. It was healing itself. They only had to help. The doors to that room didn't have to stay locked now. The building was full of light and it had purpose.

He sucked in his breath and smiled.

Bridget wasn't a lost cause after all. He always knew that though, it was a risk he was glad he took. Even if he had to pretend to be the bad guy sometimes.

Drive-by Tuesdays.

I wanted freedom
Bound and restricted
I tried to give you up
But I'm addicted

There are three things I bring to the table today.

One is that I'm really surprised to see the fine spray of white paint on the brick trim at the back of the church is still there from a cold blustery day back in 2006 when Jacob had a very bad cold and was still trying to finish the addition before the snow started. I've looked at that mark every single time I have walked in and out of that church for the past almost-year and this morning I realized that it'll never come off unless they paint the brick (who paints brick? Not a church with a limited maintenance budget) or sandblast it (again, not in the budget) and so it will remain as proof that he existed in a tangible way and not in the way I'm forcing myself to keep him.

Which is ironic, considering the second thing I'll tell you today. I'm giving up Jacob's last name. It's part of re-imagining my life with Jacob in a way that is less-damaging to my soul. I have to let him go, just a little. This will be step one. Move on. Name change. Here we go again. Four last names in fifteen years. The fun part is I won't be sharing the new one here because I'm going to go back to being the uber-mysterious princess for a while because it's easier for me. So there.

Three, I bought a truck.

I know, big deal. Well this time it is because it was a rash, uncharacteristic decision in that it's....a really old truck. A '75 C10 in the most horrifying shade of milky minty green you have ever laid eyes on. It works, but barely. I plan to have it fixed so that it's reliable and then it will become my winter vehicle because my little brand new car isn't going to be so good in the snow and Ben's truck is HUGE and I don't think he trusts my driving all that much, which makes two of us. So the truck made a surprise appearance to the driveway this afternoon and I couldn't be happier.

As usual, everyone else thinks I have lost my mind.

As usual, they're probably right but it's better than the mental paralysis of the previous eleven months and beyond.

Right now I'm going to go see if the truck will start. Place your bets and stop laughing.

Part Two: The Memory Thief.

As abruptly as the screaming had begun, it stopped.

The lights began to go out, in the reverse order that they were turned on, he could hear the heavy clunk of the switches shutting down one after another, quicker now until the building was once again steeped in blackness. This quiet darkness was worse than before, after the calamity in the room, the only sound now his harsh breathing and the feather-light sweeping swish of the last few pieces of paper sliding off open drawers to the floor.

The door slamming shut broke the silence.

He reached down to the floor, scooped up a handful of the papers, and smoothed them into a neat stack. He worked methodically through the night, gathering hundreds of them in his arms and bringing them to the space in the middle of the floor where a pile grew. Once he was sure he had every last one, he wrapped the stack in his coat and tucked the bundle securely under his arm.

The door wouldn't open.

He waited for a few heartbeats in the room, standing motionless before finally taking a deep breath and talking softly.

Open the door, please.

He heard laughter all around him.

Open the door now, please.

More laughter, and the doorknob rattled violently.

Please?

Everything stopped.

The door opened slowly, as wide as it could go and the a single word reverberated through his skull as it echoed through the empty building.

NO!

The door slammed shut again.

He walked to the door and tried the knob gingerly. There was no resistance as he turned it and he opened it again and looked both ways down the long hallway. There was nothing to see in the darkness and so he took a step out. He walked purposefully back to the window at the end of the hall, the same way he had come in and stepped out, back onto the rusted fire escape to make his way back to street-level.

He thought he could hear the faint sound of someone crying, softly like they didn't want anyone to hear. He shook his head as the sound was carried away on the wind and descended the stairs slowly and carefully until he reached the bottom, stepping off onto the wet pavement into the deserted alley.

He broke into a run.

Part One: The Memory Thief.

He slipped in during closing, when no one was watching, sliding a leg down through the open window and finding easy purchase on the highly polished wooden floor. He walked carefully down the dim hallway, avoiding the boards that might creak under his weight and then froze at the first door, silent and still.

Was someone coming?

He held his breath and waited.

No, there was no one there. It must have been the wind. Or the building. Sometimes buildings settle and make noises that only seem to be important when it's getting dark outside. Filling his lungs with air again he pressed on, trying the first door and finding it locked.

He moved on.

After several frustrating minutes he came to the conclusion that all the doors seemed to be locked and so he circled back to the first door, the one closest to the window at the end of the now-dark hall. It appeared to have a rather flimsy doorknob lock in a door that was half-glass, a large window set into it, single-paned, rippled with age.

Doable, he thought.

He took one last look around, just to reassure himself that he was indeed alone.

He covered his eyes with one arm and put his fist through the glass.

It shattered all around him in a deafening crash and he tore his arm away from his face to check again to see if anyone was watching him. The hallway remain deserted but now an alarm was ringing somewhere, deep within the building. He looked at his hand, watching as the blood ran down his knuckles and dripped off the edge of his palm. Any other time he would have been hypnotized by his injuries but he knew he didn't have a moment to waste now that the alarm had been triggered.

He reached through the window and unlocked the door from the inside, throwing it wide open. The door slammed against something on the inside, ricocheting back into his face. He kicked it open again before it struck him and threw himself through the doorway.

Inside he took a quick inventory of the room. There was a small window on the opposite wall that afforded better lighting than what was now in the hall and as he surveyed his surroundings he saw the room contained only a row of wooden file cabinets on each side, their drawers neatly labeled in her modern handwriting, a distinctive blend of capital letters and loopy lowercase, easy to read and impossible to duplicate.

He crossed the room with purpose now, and with rage roiling through his veins he began to rip the drawers out of the cabinets, two at a time, letting the contents fly around the room in a paper blizzard, a storm no one would ever want to be caught in. The beginnings of an evil smile began to tug the corners of his mouth upward and he started to laugh as all the lights began to come on, one by one down the hallway and then the room he was in was suddenly bathed in the harsh fluorescent light of day even though the day was long over.

And that was when the alarm stopped ringing and the screaming began.

Dischord is such a pretty word, though.

The night is gone and all we get
A picture for a poem, and we lose her

There's something about a late-morning run that throws off my entire day. I don't know why it is, but it is what it is and this is what it is. Thrown, but in a good way.

Go rake some leaves and drink some mulled cider and find a good scary movie and a big warm blanket. I'll see you tomorrow.

Reeling and dealing.

I have a headache. A blisteringly painful stabbing noise that cuts my vision in half and makes me wince every time the car door is closed and the driver (Mike..I think) is doing a damn fine job doing it gently because he knows how I feel, having been chauffeuring me around for over an hour now, stopping at the pharmacy so I could pick up a bottle of ibuprophen to go with the Evian water Caleb has stocked wherever I'm going to be.

I didn't know I could post on the go but apparently I can.

I'm playing assistant again today.

I've already gone to the loft to inspect the work that was done over the last few days, I've gone to pick out a dishwasher because Caleb can't be expected to do dishes any more than he'll be able to do his own laundry (which will be sent out) even though I can't see him cooking either, I've arranged to have his movers on the right day via phone and now he wants me to go pick out linens for him to be delivered the day before his move. I've arranged cleaning services to come and clean his old condo, which he will be giving up and also to clean the new loft before he arrives.

I still can't believe he is seriously moving here but in his state of present mind he has decided that he needs to 'retire' close to family and since his folks have each other and he wouldn't dream of moving back to Nova Scotia anyway with it's rustic charm and unsophistication he chose to come and be closer to us. And since he's only technically retiring from his CFO position at his law firm, he'll still have all his other business interests to keep him busy so I hope that means he'll have precious little time to devote to his 'family', which is the children and I.

I won't say I'm thrilled about any of this, honestly. But Ben just tells me not to worry about it, and he strums another chord on his guitar and picks up the words to a song, singing them quietly to calm me. I'm trying to hang on to that memory of last night while I get through my morning, but really, I think I'm going to try to check off the next three items on the list and then pack it in and go home and lie down. The rest can wait.

The reading tree.

During dinner this evening, Ruth and I crafted a story about a tree that ate paper. It ate scraps of notepads and phone books and cardboard tubes and paper towels with pizza sauce and old forgotten Westerns and the books that fall down behind the tables in the waiting rooms at hospitals. It ate opened envelopes, coffee filters, concert ticket stubs and love letters too.

It grew to be many different colors, high above the other trees in the forest, in shades of green and brown but also in the pale pink of Aunt Merriweather's favorite stationery and the pretty blue of city water bills. It shone in the sun because so much paper is plain white, but there was nothing plain about this tree, oh no.

If you look very closely when the leaves begin to fall from it you'll see the faint etchings on them, discarded poems, grocery lists and abandoned stories too, a little math homework and a rough sketch of the very pretty girl you sat across from at the coffee shop, and smiled at so bashfully. Poem was her name, but you did not know that. You did not ask. Her name was Tuesday and Lyrica too. She invents all kinds of names, as many names as there are leaves on the reading tree. She will never tell you her name is Bridget. She doesn't want to be the last leaf still holding to the pretty pink bark of merriweather elm.

Do not collect the leaves and try to make your own story, just read them into the wind. This is iambic recycling and you are the collector.

Mmmmm. Phish and porn, all in one day. You are so lucky, internet.

Not my youtube, but good youtube nonetheless. Today's theme, if you will. And a really good jam.

Pantomime mixtures of heaven and earth
Jumbled events that have less than no worth
Time in the forest to dig under rocks
Or float in the ocean asleep in a box

Or sink just below all the churning and froth
And swim to the light source or fly like a moth
So toss away stuff you don't need in the end
But keep what's important and know who's your friend.

My beautiful husband rescued the disaster that was yesterday. When I couldn't put the words together anymore and nothing went right and everything fell apart in the most epic fashion ever, he took a moment and then refused to buy into the ruin after the initial exchange of words.

He rescued most of the evening and then all of the night in a wonderful, physical match of wills as his hands slid over my legs just before I fell asleep. He brought me back to earth with his hand holding down my head and his lips everywhere and then took me away again and it wasn't until I was writhing against him that I realized the little things don't matter and history doesn't matter and nothing matters once the mistakes of the day get sorted out. What matters is that we're here, we're together and that with the touch of his hands I can forget everything, which makes him half porn king and half mad scientist.

Snort.

Thank you, Benjamin, for saving the no good very bad awful miserable fucked up day. I love you.

Better in the end.

It's been 328 days, 37 to go and I'm lying if I tell you I'm not counting.

But I'm also living. Trying to choose paint colors and swim lesson times and distractions and words. Choosing words is the easiest and the hardest thing of all but here I am, the one saving grace in my life being this journal because nothing else is constant except maybe the sun or the moon but maybe they're total bullshit, special effects meant to make us feel less alone somehow. I'm not sure how that works but we'll leave it for another day to explore. I refuse to go down a tangent because I have things to discuss.

Ben didn't come back with us on Sunday evening, instead choosing to stay on with Nolan for a few more days and soak up the simplicity of life on the farm and maybe give himself a chance to get over the worst of his rage and his shakes and his cravings in private, because he got progressively worse as the weekend went on and he tried so hard but I still found myself flinching when he spoke too loud or got too close or shook too hard. He should be back tomorrow or Thursday and we are being babysat by Uncle Daniel in the meantime.

And I had dinner with the devil last night, which was interesting in that he was behaving again and that's almost more frightening than when he doesn't. He bought the last loft we looked at last Friday and then threw me a curveball when he announced that he planned to move in as soon as possible. They have about ten days to finish it, closing is on the seventeenth of October.

I'm noticing everyone is sort of doing that. PJ has booked his vacation for the first two weeks of November. Schuyler moved up his dental surgery. Ben isn't hitting the road until early December again. And Duncan hasn't made any plans at all. Loch took a six week work term here to start in two weeks and I'm so incredibly touched by what I see them doing it makes a huge lump in my throat and my eyes are swimming and I can't even focus.

I was going to attempt to ask for a medically-induced coma for November but I think I'm going to be okay.

Caleb asked me formally at dinner if I would be his assistant here. He hired me to work for him part-time this week, helping to arrange the move, oversee the builders and the inspectors and the financial aspect of everything and he kept hinting at wanting me to come work for him full-time because I'm good at it, or so he said, but I wouldn't be allowed in a million years and so I turned him down.

And please, before the feminists start the email campaign about what I am and am not allowed to do, let's remember we're talking about Satan here. And Bridget.

I would have turned him down anyway. I have no interest in being with him on a daily basis. I have no interest or plans to see him on a weekly basis. I'm snorting my face off picturing him trying to live here through the winter with our blisteringly frigid temperatures and endless ice and wind. A cold day in hell indeed. He wants me to pick out a truck for him.

A what?

Can you picture him driving a truck?

Cold. Hell. Yeah.

But dinner was nice and he didn't do anything stupid. I didn't either. For once. He did comment that my hair suited me at last, being shorter and much darker and he spent far too long staring at my legs whenever he could but otherwise, yes, I know. He's still up to something. When is he ever not?

And though it may cost my soul
I'll sing for free

Jacob, you're hilarious.

Really. This whole saving-Ben thing as a way for me to save myself is...well, it's genius. Fine line between love and hate, indeed. It's the exact same way I feel about you. Loving you desperately and hating your guts at the same time for breaking every last promise you ever made to me.

I kept mine to you. I'm still here. Still fighting my way uphill. Still making so much progress, finding footholds and grabbing weeds to pull myself along and then hitting a soft part and sliding halfway back down, screaming and cursing the whole way.

I've been hot and cold, cold cold cold, hot, cold and never in-between. I've been face-down in my own agony and floating on clouds I think I self-generated. I've known love and loss and more pain than death and still I have your stupid unrealistic, unwarranted hope.

Why is that?

Why, indeed.

I don't know. Say God if you will, if that works for you. Days like this where I can wake up and nothing much is different and the inside of my head is still a shambles and a shame too and yet I'm smiling.

It's got to be the mark of true insanity.