the habit of being

After returning yesterday afternoon to our campsite from the park, we sat a while and read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland aloud to one another, and our respectibe novels - Herzog and War and Peace - to ourselves. We soon heard a certain thwacking noise, which was assumed to be someone cutting down trees, because we had awoken the previous morning to that noise, which closely resembled the one at hand. Through the cluster of trees and bushes surrounding our campsite, which consisted of books strewn about and peanut butter and bread on the matted down grasses and leaves, we spied an old man with a golf club. The thwacks had been his swings, and he was now retrieving his balls. The balls we’d already found around the lot must’ve been his.

We got entirely silent as he drew closer and closer to our spot, and I was downright afraid, though I knew that even if he owned the property we were camped on, there wasn’t much he could do save asking us to leave. The property wasn’t posted and was unkempt. If he did spy us there and asked us our business, he might even invite us home with him for the night. All the same I felt dreadfully like I don’t something wrong, and looked round at every noise with wide distressed eyes. At one point the sound of the footsteps seemed to be coming from two directions, and my heart was beating rapidly as J. laid on his back and I sat huddled near him, hiding my head by looking down, as a child who sneaks into the kitchen late at night for cookie holds a pillow over his face, thinking that if he cannot see his family in the den, they will not see him either.

We did not say hello to the man with the golf club, and we do not know if he ever saw us or not, though it seems he must have, the rustling steps came so close. As for the other set of trampling feet, they belonged to a small creature with at least the top half of its body bright white - either a skunk or a cat or something else.

The night was a stressful one which found us laying side by side talking of things we cannot talk about: our ever-impending separation nd the reasons for it. I cried, breaking an almost three-day no-tears streak, and it went on late into the night, until we fell asleep and were awakened by raindrops. So far it’s drizzled only a little every night we’ve spent in the Denver area, and the one night we decide not to put up our tent, it rained a good deal. So we gathered up our sleeping bags and put it up as fast as we could in the rain, putting the fly in backwards and upsidedown in our hurry.

This morning we awoke and had sex for only the second time since the discovery of my pregnancy. As we escape from one another in one another we are basely happy, which is a shade of happiness none the less, if not one that is greatly respected. I view sex as almos a saviour, a pleasure in the most barren desert of sighs, an artform when all others are denied.

Afterwards, I patched up the seat of my old jeans and J. went out and collected golf balls. He found enough to spell out the word THANKS in alternating letter-colors, with an explanation point on the end. He put this message on the ground in what seemed to be the entrance to the lot from the old man’s direction, and we packed up our things and left.