Coleridge's the infinite I am I lived inside that observation as a way of dealing with the sudden changes in how I lived in and saw the everyday world. It helped. Coleridge. Poetry. Music. A lyric from Bob Dylan: "Everything passes. Everything changes. Just do what you think you must do." I turned to art the way another
		might have turned to God. And I turned to Jessie. My skin against her skin at times that was all that could calm me. She'd hold me for hours. Afternoons in her bedroom under a heavy quilt naked side by side sleeping reading touching making love holding on being with and holding on until in time the bad time passed the days got easier and Jessie with me through all that helping me get through.

	As if I were watching a movie. Months like that. I was so separate from, so not a part of the routine, the daily. For months I saw all the stuff there's no time to see when you're straight when you're immersed in life: the cavernous expanse of the supermarket, the thingness of the things it was full of, looking at everything, seeing everything, so utterly not in the world, not among the things in the world, but an outside observer, all eye, all look, nothing primarily its function to be used consumed ignored but suddenly a thing to be considered and observed everything the way we see something when its out of place a piano on the beach a traffic light in the kitchen. Frightened. Frightened by it all. Months. Months like that.