"I don't know myself or what I want. I don't have a job, a life, a boyfriend, or even a pet. I'm a compulsive liar."
   This is what you want to tell your therapist. This is not what you tell your therapist.
   "How do you feel?" he asks, placating you with a bland smile. How could he understand? Would he even notice if you told him something new?
   "I had that dream again," you lie. You don't feel regret. "The one with the crow."
   "And how did it make you feel?"
   [I'm paying you money so I can lie to you. I pretend to work for UPS on Saturdays. I dress up like a drag queen when I go to gay bars.]
   "It made me feel sad."

   It's three in the morning, and your alarm clock is beeping. Your room feels empty, which is understandable. In the dim moonlight filtering through cheap plastic blinds, the walls are grey, the carpet is mottled, and the sole pieces of "furniture" look depressing. You seem frumpy.
   "Oh, oh, oh!" you shout, your mind frantically racing in search for a suitable male name. "Dean!" The platform shoe you've begun banging and rubbing against the wall squeaks obnoxiously, and you bounce on the floor beneath your down comforter. "Yes, yes, yes!"
   Tonight your next-door neighbor (an elderly woman with bad teeth) asks you whatever happened to Rick.

   When you see the man standing at the counter, your stomach explodes like a cocoon, bursting with newly-winged butterflies whose flight patterns are erratic and unpredictable. Your forehead feels hot below chick yellow bangs. He is beautiful, just like you remember him.
   His algae eyes pinned you to the cushioned restaurant booth, and he told you he loved you. You told him you were sorry.
   "Is there something wrong?" Patsy wonders, and you open your eyes again. How long have you been standing there? You are supposed to be looking for right hand rings that Fiance will buy for you. You glance once more in the direction of Rick. He is turned away. You put your back to him and tell Patsy you are fine. You request the right hand ring tray--Fiance is gearing up for three year anniversary.
   "Oh Angelina, I'm so excited for you," Patsy cries, energetically unlocking the glass doors and whipping out the hundred-thousand dollar display. "This one is lovely, and quite pricey, I'm sure you'll adore it."
   "It's beautiful, let me try it on."
   Lifting your pale ice hand, you let Patsy's pudgy fingers press the multi-banded jewelry over your manicured nail. You pretend to look unimpressed by the piece, but it is worth more money than anything you've ever owned. Patsy raises eager eyes to you, and she asks you the question. "Have you set a date yet?"
   "No, unfortunately. His mother is absolutely sold on July, and it's just not realistic."

   Paranoia has overcome you. Rick is back. You see him in many places, at Patsy's kiosk, on the inside of your eyelids, in Linda's living room.
   "Linda, is that Rick?" you ask.
   "Of course, don't be stupid. He's back in town, didn't you know?" she replies, giving you a lofty look. "I've been spending time with him."
   The tone of her voice, slightly challenging, tells you she has done her research. She knows. "Linda?"
   "Is there a problem, Angelina? I need to make conversation with my guests."
   You would like to tell her there is a problem. You would like to tell her you are in love with Rick, you would like to tell her you never had feelings for Rick. The tangle of your lies is so thick any word you say will ruin your delicately built web, and your facade will sit, wrecked, at your ankles.
   You leave. The door presses the air back towards you as it shuts, a physical rejection. It will be difficult walking home in spiked heels, but what else can you do? You are not going back inside that house, you are not. You will not face Rick. [I will not face Rick.] Tell yourself that. Say it again and again.
   You can hear the door open. "Angie?"
   You turn.
   "I thought it was you." His face looks older, weathered, like a wave-worn rock on a river shore.
   You stare.
   "I heard you're engaged." The volume of his voice is so deep and low, your hands tremble. His eyes are imploring, and you wonder if he knows it's not true. Your eyes are glued to his, like strings have been sewn between the two targets. You are both sucked into each other's pupils, somehow hoping they will expand and allow you to climb into each other's minds.
   Your mouth opens, and you feel prepared when you inhale. You move your lips to the correct position, and are ready to tell him the date is in July.
   "It's pretend." Your eyes widen, and he sees. He sees inside those black voids, beyond your retina and he can see inside your head. You know it's familiar to him, because his shoulders relax and he slumps a bit.
   "You haven't changed, have you."
   The blood rushes to your head and your cheeks redden, not in a manner that is apprehensive or complimentary. It is ugly, the result of being caught. His eyes look wary and yours begin to water. "But I love you."
   He sighs. Why would he understand? You are so stupid for telling him, and now you stand, vulnerable, and rejected.
   "I love you too," he whispers. Your mouth tastes salt, and you realize you are crying. He walks back inside Linda's home.

   You feel alone, surrounded by white walls and the absence of furniture. You use a blanket on the floor instead of a mattress, and you keep a cardboard box as an all purpose table. You've spent too much time in this abysmal studio apartment, and it's only been an hour. You are thinking about how it will be tomorrow, boiling Top Ramen on a hot plate in the corner and dealing yourself a game of solitaire on the box. You are thinking how it will all fix itself. Your mind fills with vines of thoughts, connecting and twisting, like it does when you listen to music. Upon the vines bloom small poufs of blue and white flowers that burst in a puff of smoke when you touch on them, spreading seeds of new vines around your brain.
   You close your eyes and you see the inside of your head like a biosphere, filled with vegetation and life. You find this more appealing than a grey lump of stuff you can't understand. Refuge is interrupted by the abrasive blare of the telephone. It is your father, he wants you to get what you want from your mother's house. She is dead.

   Her photo albums are full to bursting with snapshots of her life, moments captured in pieces of glossy paper. Birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, wedding, motherhood, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, death. You wonder where your life is, photographically. You have a single picture of yourself. You reach into your wallet and pull out the strip of black and white squares. The curtains behind you are identical in every box. You are sitting alone.
   Below the photo albums boxes is a diaries box. Cigarette in hand, you move to the porch to relive her life the way you never knew it. You haven't cried yet, and you decide you are not going to.
   Beyond the porch railing are tall trees and a dirt road. The dirt road leads through a tunnel of trunks and boughs, a living pathway to the main road.
The first diary is thinner than the rest. You pause.
   Do you really want to read this? Do you really want to know why your mother left? Do you really want to know how she lived, much less how she died?
   You read the first few pages. She is twenty-five in this one. She is in love with a man and is afraid to tell him.
   The second diary, she is sixteen. She talks about her family. She doesn't like herself or her mother.
   You look up from the pages and feel oddly familiar, like a strange deja vu has come over you. Somehow you feel like you have written these words, since they hit so close to home.
   The third diary is red. The way it is dated on the front, she would have been sixty-five, but the first page says January 1, the year after you were born. You read the entry aloud.
   "When I was younger, the boys all came around. But now I'm older, and they've all settled down." It sounds familiar. "Control your mind, my girl, and give your heart to one. For if you love all men, you'll be surely left with none." You realize where it is from and close the book.

   You have cleared a space large enough to recline on the badly upholstered sofa in the dark. In your hand is one of your mother's diaries. You are reading them all. Upon the record player you have placed a single. A voice fills the room.
   As you read, you sing along, and you wipe tears from your soft cheeks.

   "Daddy, I'm going home now." You hold the red diary in your hand, and the record sits on the phone table next to the cradle.
   "You got everythin' you want? I'm warning you, anything that ain't more than a thou's goin' to the dump."
   "I have everything I want."
   As you drive home, the freeway is almost deserted. You prefer this. You wish in hindsight that you had brought your mother's record player. You sing to yourself instead. The black night is spotted with the presence of yellow streetlamps whose puddles of light illuminate the shoulders of the road. No cars' headlights mar the horizon.

   At two in the morning, you fall asleep in your blanket nest. Your alarm clock is turned off, your shoe replaced in the closet.
   You dream you are dancing, wild and free. A dusty cobweb surrounds you, and your arms slice through it like a knife through butter. As you throw your limbs rhythmically, the strands fall to the ground around you. You stand in the the eye of a hurricane of your disasters, a wide ring of falsities, a wreckage of perceptions. Among the rubble you tiptoe and pirouette, celebrating your release. You begin to untangle the mess, separating the silk strands and spinning them together to form a long rope. You follow the path of silk through the thickets, beneath the shade of the tall trees.

   You are late for your therapy appointment. When you walk through the door, a bell jingles, and he tells you how nice you look. He smiles at you, and asks you how you feel.
   "I had a new dream last night."