I woke up in the middle of the night and realized right away that something was missing. When I couldn't feel the light switch
my brain had told my fingers to find I knew it was my hand. My right hand. The last I'd seen of it, it was resting on your
thigh as you drove me home.
I thought about calling you but lay like a body at the
bottom of a river instead. It wasn't just that I didn't know how to dial with my left hand (stuck in a routine like the rest of me)
it was also that I didn't quite know how to ask for my hand back.
The permutations and combinations of the conversation traveled at warp speed through my supposed mind.
"Uh.yeah..hello…I think I left my hand in your car…….yes yes……on your thigh…….how will you know which one is
mine?…well,it'll hopefully have bits of your flesh gripped in its talons."

Wanting to postpone indefinitely the embarrassment of admitting I left bits of my anatomy with all those I loved (hair in food,
nail clippings on living room floor, hand on thigh) I spent some time trying to convince myself that not only did I not need my
hand back, I was actually better of without it.

I didn't need it to cook. I would order take-out and ask for a fork with Chinese. When that grew stale I would stop eating
altogether. When starvation gnawed at me I would chew on the paint flakes peeling off the window sill till my stomach
caved in, my eyes bulged and my intestines were just the coils of the python of my sickness squeezing my life away.
I didn't need it to shower. I would stop, do my bit for water conservation, grow friendly fungus under my armpit when people
stopped talking to me. I went out with somebody like that once a long time ago. He kept spiders in his shower and gave them
names like "Adolphous" and "The girl who sort of went away and never really came back". I left him because I felt that
whenever he looked deep into my eyes he was seeing the back of someone else's head. How we run from our ghosts only to
seek them in other peoples bodies.
I didn't need it to drive since I didn't have a license and wouldn't need one now that I had decided to wall myself into my
room and die a splinterish , bitter woman with no shadow.

I think the kicker was the fact that I didn't need it to hold your hand anymore because yours in turn had been hijacked by
another whose sylph-like presence was probably, at this very moment, lighting up your life like the hydrogen bomb I at some
point in time intended to mail to her.
For a second there I could almost feel my hand as it tightened around her neck.
The other woman.

There. I'd said it. I made a little mantra out of it and set it to violins. As I sang I waited for the
understanding-acceptance-transcendence trilogy self help books and well meaning but hopelessly unintelligent friends had
assured me would kick in.

I tried to understand but couldn't and for a second felt as if I'd been lying immobile like this forever trying to digest the first
line of the first chapter of a book I didn't particularly want to read. I couldn't accept because I didn't understand.
I re-read an article on evolutionary psychology and realized that reason in a relationship is just emotion chuckling quietly to
itself in the armchair in the shadows as you spew your guts to a stranger you're not even particularly attracted to.
Try as I might I couldn't transcend the horror of the razors slicing my insides.
I diverted myself by tracing the route a piece of sheep brain would take as it, Pied Piperesquely, led a million and one mad
cow germs into the gaping maw of the other woman. I wanted her to die with you by her bedside, smelling of naphthalene
and ammonia and the lust of a fat, jaded wench infected by one of her own.
I wanted her to live in your house till the onions in your food and the flatulence in your bedroom as you fucked her robbed
every moment of possible sensuousness. Eroticide by gas. I liked that.
What really consumed me as I lay like a body on the bottom of the rapids you were rafting on memory was the need to feel
my hand in yours.