I often wonder if others are as concerned with the fact that you can only be situated in one literal place; am I properly making the few choices about meaning and direction in my limited years of youth?

And I think about youth, because I have always been young, but not very often youthful. I've never, even in the most joyful, euphoric times, been able to shake the old woman who resides in me.

And you can't really laugh over Americans and their strange American poverty. I am healed by the abundance of absurd things, plastic bottles and the silk bags that shoes come in. This place and its excess of tiny plastic or metal or shiny things. But it is a different kind of healing, a masking of real symptoms. The odd delight in the cheap and useless.

In the attic of my parents' house is a collection of empty tin boxes, cookie tins, chocolate tins. Once, when I was home, I collected them to donate to the Salvation Army, but my father looked at the tins and hesitated. Then I remembered that we come from a different place. Money doesn't change anything. That's not bad. Even these little things, small hesitations say something poignant.

The one time I was laid off, I went straight to the grocery store and bought $100 worth of groceries. But I was not wise or strategic about this; it wasn't canned stuff that would last. It was mostly perishables: avocados, limes, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes. To have that privilege of manufacturing worries, the luxury of privately dramatic incidents that are later documented, painstakingly. I knew I wouldn't starve.

I've asked this question before: am I where I should be? Sometimes, I am one with time. Once in a while, time and I agree. And then it doesn't matter, the specifics of what I am doing or saying, or who I am with. A wedding in Malibu, picking cherries in an orchard, the ocean, the preparation of a meal. Sitting with myself. Maybe I am just dramatic. I am well more often than I am not. I am at peace more often than I am not. I write it all out. I pour it into a space outside of myself. This is how I survive. This is my only addiction.

And then, a moment that wrenches my stomach, the painful twist of time. And then it is gone. Breathe. You are not youthful. You are wholly too porous. You are not disaffected, even if you can pretend it once in a while. And you are not immune to life.

What does it mean, what does it mean? What does it all mean?