Strange City

It’s a vacation but I can’t relax. Even here in this overly warm café, shattering a pastry made of air and butter, I know there’s something that needs doing. A dog at home waiting for me (but there is no dog), or something I’ve forgotten to attend to (but there’s nothing I can put my finger on), a responsibility abandoned (but which?). Maybe it’s the language here, which is a locked door. I grab onto words I know, repeat them to myself. Somewhere there’s a key.

Later, over our Michelin-starred dinner we talk about death like proper poets. We’re tipsy, everything is significant. Is death a strange city where we don’t yet know the words? I type on my phone: “I’m constantly remaking how I will leave” but later can’t recall what I meant. My life, yes, I’m constantly leaving, have left it to come here, this strange city where I know, I’m certain, there’s someone I’ve abandoned or I’m meant to meet, which is one and the same thing, because there’s only me, I am the dog.