Where was I born? I don't think there was a time or place, only an identity placed together with every breath, from pictures of pictures of the need for comfort. As if the primal need for such a place pieces together a womb where you could retreat to. Only sometimes the womb isn't safe, but instead a place of fierceness, one that beats and sings and hunts and smells and sees.

I've forgotten exactly the process from which you learn to keep from being a stale picture in someone's memory. Although I suppose that we are all pictures to someone else, still frames of mixed sensations - the smell of your fists, the rough of your scent - held still in an unmovable but fragile place. Some people are houses, still, with dust accumulating over all the empty desks, but if there is anything calling me to the whirlwind of pulsing tides - never stopping to breathe - it is the jungle in our backyards, darkness lending into fury. It is the jungle of walking trees, leading the follower into the heart of itself, and if I were anybody's frame, I'd burn it. I'd burn it in the jungle.

This, of course, I'd thought of while stumbling out into a highway of aching sun, too many cars and not enough buses, and of too much smog threatening to kill my baby. I have no baby, of course, but that's besides the point. The point is, if there's any way out of anywhere and into a jungle, I guess the first step would be the highway.

All the while no one turns with their signals on.

Last night I [woke] up, and it was dark. A piercing dark that brings with it a permeating cold, whispering up against the frosted hair of my arms and the brittle joints of my knees.

It took a few seconds to find the problem, all the while my fumbling increasingly brought my surroundings into focus, as if the slow defrosting of my awakening was bringing raw flesh through ice; an acute tenderness.

My fingers found it first: my white noise had been stopped, and now silence was taking over, talking to me in the blank night. I flipped it back on, and slowly I dissolved back into my sifts of dreaming, my form allowing itself to conform to the crevasse of my subconsciousness.

For a second there, I was afraid. I had almost remembered who I was.