Stop hoarding them, he tells me, use them, and what he means is stop burying them in my mind, in the back yard beneath a hunter’s moon or harvest moon or whatever burgeoning moon it is, because I’m rich with it, I’ve plenty, and burying doesn’t always have to mean the red, limp thing that happened so long ago, it’s all silly superstition anyway, this refusal, this control, and why are you so hung up on it, there’s no need to save, to be so sparing, so deliberate, so careful you have "limn" and "luminesce" and "oratory" and "misalign," you’ve got "restraint" and "parsimonious," too, and "halt" and "fear" and "notgoodenough" and there’s always "guilt," over what you did and what you’re not doing and— but all he means this 45-billed-as-an-hour is stop thinking so much, stop scratching after words, after the right way to say things, after the right glib sounds, the world is not just aural, not just careful, it’s not control and adept and right, it’s wet and messy, it’s the noises that sex makes, unpretty slapslapslap, it’s breach and afterbirth too, and here, just write something down, let go and just write. And he’s right, I know this with my thinking mind, but my unthinking gut feels cramped and twittery and it wants to go and turn on a TV somewhere and not do this, not right now, maybe later when the flow is going, when the rhythm suggests the lines, why not, because better to be careful, to be right, to be riding-and-not-ridden, control, control/alt/delete, start over or just stop, really, at a blinking cursor, at the blank screen. So I start doodling and thinking about movies and what movie I’d be, and I decide that it would be one of those French films with spare color where a red balloon means despair and the underwear are all old fashioned & everyone smokes, endlessly, smokes Gallois, or those other brown cigarettes that always make me think of Casablanca, and they all look unutterably bored and elegant even though they’re mostly smallish big-nosed men in their shirtsleeves. Tell me what you’re thinking now, he says, because he can see I’m not writing anything, and I’m feeling panicked, and he always can somehow tell and always asks that, what are you feeling, and I don’t want to mention the cigarettes,because now I want one and I’m planning to go to the bathroom and sneak one out the window, not a Gallois or anything exotic, just a plain old Camel Light, but I told him I quit again, and I’m afraid that if I mention the French smokers he might realize that, lately, I’ve begun to smell like tobacco, that stale, delicious smell that reminds me of hangovers and too much coffee and being weak. I want to be weak. I want to stop worrying so much about everything, to stop being the red balloon or at least be the kind of balloon that goes sailing off gaily, not worrying about being driven by the wind into a tree or impaled on a transmitter somewhere or that goes too high— I want to go too high and maybe even pop if altitude’s the reason, because what’s wrong, what could be so wrong about exploding from sheer height? And I stand up and look at him, sitting there with his pinstriped legs crossed one over the other and his comforting belly and his neat beard and his little pad and the pen that never scratch scratch scratches until I’m leaving and I tell him, I smoking again, you know, I lied when I said I quit, and he just looks at me, with that carefully nonjudgmental look he gets when I admit that I’m throwing up again or haven’t been to work or left bed in almost two weeks or was thinking maybe I should just go back to The Bastard, and I stand there with my arms hanging straight down, counting on that cigarette and feeling like a mime who’s forgotten her lines.