I am once more writing from West Virginia. There is something about road trips and the need to report on things to imaginary loved ones back home that always prompts me to post entries while I'm here. Also, of course, there is the separation from the more ordinary and efficient methods I've grown up around myself in the midst of my everyday life for distracting myself, or channeling the anxiety, or the need to create.

I have neglected this journal for months now, even going so far as to password-protect it, to keep imaginary people from getting a full view of my writing, filled as it often seems to me with a petty and self-indulgent agony. I want people to like me, after all, and yet I can't hide from them my mood, which makes me think the worst of every situation. I constantly feel pity for everything around me. Or I am gritting my teeth and smiling through a deep, unyielding impatience which makes me long for escape from every situation. I'm sure this must be detectable, and I know it can't be pleasant for other people, and yet I have no idea how to do any better at hiding it, and despair all the more that this impatience keeps me separate from other people when what I want most is to feel like everyone else.

I have to re-cast the character which is this journal: for it is not simply a mechanical repository: I can't pour out my feelings to such a thing. Nor do I fool myself that anyone reads what I write or ever will (except my dear husband). Instead I must animate it, give it a persona, or I can't maintain perspective in these scribblings and they quickly degenerate into something resembling a shopping list. Mostly these words are for my future self, but mixed with other identities, other genders, becoming, in fact, the perfect lover: someone to whom you desire most fervently to be known, understood, and appreciated; someone to whom one's devotion makes sensible the recording of all the tiny details of one's thoughts and experiences.

Our journey here was comfortable and uncomplicated, after we were able to resolve the matter of Ginger's care during our absence, a situation become unexpectedly difficult, thanks to our regular veterinary hospital's decision to stop boarding dogs and the necessity of Ginger's twice-daily insulin injections. But thanks to Alison's recommendations, we were able to find a nearby facility that caters to senior dogs in particular and so, despite the added expense, things came together in time to afford us both the freedom to travel together and an improvement in Ginger's diabetes treatment.

The scariest thing about the journey, in fact, was not the altitude or the speed but the food courts, and their endless offerings of edible porn, the great common denominator drug of the modern American populace. I can certainly understand the thrall of cinnamon buns and french fries but ultimately food is a bad drug: excess makes one ugly and sick, and like all drugs, it cuts you off from other people.

We arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm. Lightning split the sky in two as we scrambled around the parking lot, looking for our rental car. The air smelled warm and humid and carried with it the sharp smell of water hitting dry, hot pavement. It smelled like home.

I consider that I am so deeply nostalgic, so attached to the way things are here, because it is only here that I can experience things which I can remember experiencing before the pain started. In Seattle, there is no promise of anything ever being different because every day I've lived by the waters of the Puget Sound I have been disregulated, deranged, and living in survival mode, going from one means of self-medication to the next, and sometimes achieving ecstacy, but never contentment.

Would it suck to be uncontrollably happy? If it is true that I am feeling the effects of something grown diseased inside me, will I feel better if it is removed? No matter how much I may question the outcome, I am committed now to moving forward with a second operation, by means of Dr.Norman in Florida. I have contacted his office, submitted my insurance information, am in the process of collating all my medical records, and I am about to pay him twelve hundred dollars to examine my information and decide whether or not he will treat me.

How frustrating it is to have so little control over one's destiny.

The next thing about being home which struck me deeply were the lightning bugs flying out of the warm wet grass in the empty field near my mother-in-law's house when we arrived at dusk. I felt the old, familiar thrill, the same feelings which must have filled me as child at my grandmother's house in South Charleston, when I can remember evenings spent hanging out on the stoop as night fell, a little free time before bath and bed, when the adults would make small talk, sitting on the concrete steps, while I ran like mad in circles in the yard, my feet enjoying the cool, soft damp of the lawn while I chased after the tiny bugs with the orange heads and the long antennas and the magic in their rear ends, the glow that made me want to catch them and hold them, so they could set me to glowing, just like they did to the deepening dark around us.

On Friday night I caught one and held it captive briefly. Then I opened my hands and it crawled to the tip of my finger. I lifted it up like a tribute to the wildness around me and it glowed once, briefly, while still touching me, and then it took off into the night.

Like I always say when I am here, the smells of the trees and the air are the things that touch me, as something I cannot clearly recall when I am gone from them, only to overtake me again when I come back with a feeling deeper than recall, more primitive than visual memories. Smell is our most intimate sense: it is the world rubbing little bits of itself directly onto our nervous system. I think it is my favorite sense, which is why it bothers me so much when people feel the need to contaminate the air with artificial smells, noxious in their simplicity and the way they overpower everything else. I think this is why dogs are always happy: because they experience the world as it is, not as they think it should be.

Today we walked down by the river and fed the ducks and geese. There sits on a hill by its banks an impossibly blue outdoor swimming pool that I hope to visit tomorrow. While we were standing by the river we spotted a large turtle with a long tail floating near the water's surface. Sometimes one or the other of its front legs would move and you knew you were looking at something alive. I've never seen such a thing before. It seemed a trenchant metaphor: come to the water and look long enough and things you've never seen before will begin appearing to you.

This is why I can never achieve true resignation; hope springs eternal and all the pain in the world is still worth more to me than a void, a ceasing, an absence of yearning.

My Aunt Roberta died this weekend on an operating table in Israel. Her blood pressure went too low and they were unable to bring it back to normal. She was sixty-six years old. Her mother is still alive and will remain in Tel Aviv but they say they cannot make her understand that her daughter is dead. I had a conflicted relationship with my aunt, chiefly in the sense that I loved her and wanted to be close to her but except for brief, glamorous, and isolated moments of concern and attention, she kept her distance from me.

Mostly what I remember about her is the way her laughter filled me with joy when I heard it as a child. I am sad that she is gone and that the possibility of contact has been extinguished. I knew when we were all together in Great Neck several years ago, on the occasion of Emau's accident, that it was the last time we were ever to all be in the same room together, me, my mother, my father, his sister. We were cleaning out closets and making polite conversation, and everyone seemed uncomfortable except me. I was happy to belong, if only for the moment, to a tribe of some kind, to something larger than myself and my limited set of actions and reactions. My tribe has become smaller now, forever, and the world seems even more to be full of strangers.