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something out there that has no respect for my life. With the exception of my night in the woods, since I’ve been on the road, those middle-of-the-night panics have not been happening. I wake up and think about where I am, I lie awake for a while, but I am not afraid. I am just—Well, I don’t know how to say this to you. I am just realizing. I guess that’s what I’d say.
    Watch out when you pay the milkman. The last three times he charged for cottage cheese which I never ordered.
Love,
Nan

I spent the night in the woods last night. I wanted to end up feeling calm and safe and a part of the orbiting earth. This was a romantic and completely unrealistic notion. I ended up feeling like a tidbit being dangled over the jaws of a wolf. I was so afraid the whole night, stiff with fear, literally afraid to move. Now it is five o’clock in the evening and I am in a filthy motel, but I don’t care. I only need sleep, and this will do for that. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to bed so early in my life. It feels very odd, yet very comforting, too, turning to pajamas in my time of need .
    I will write for a while, then sleep as long as I want to .
    I tried saying the rosary last night, to calm myself, but it had no effect. So I tried to remember every lover I’d ever had. This was a very interesting thing that did not lessen my fright but at least kept my mind occupied. Martin and I once did this, sat at the kitchen table and tried to write down the name of every person we’d ever slept with. It was my idea, of course. I thought that it would … well, I don’t really know what I thought it would do. Maybe I just wanted to know. Anyway, my list was longer, which surprised me. Men’s wrists should be bigger than women’s, and men’s lists of lovers should be longer, I guess that’s what I believed. We told each other about all our lovers, too, which we had never done before. We were very careful to paint them all in an unflattering light of some kind or another. Every story about every person ended up with some unfortunate inclusion—my favorite was Martin telling me that one woman snorted the first time he made love to her and he just couldn’t stand her after that. He demonstrated, snorted lightly in a rapid, rhythmic way and we both laughed. It was, in a way, a very good experience, but we didn’t tell the whole truth, I know we didn’t .
    You are where I unlock myself, where I say that I have often put down my wooden spoon to stare out the kitchen window to see the men I thought were magic for their storytelling or their way of walking, or the ones I was so strongly sexually attracted to, even though they weren’t good people—at least not for me .
    There is one thing I never told Martin about. When I was in high school, I met a twenty-five-year-old man who said he would teach me everything I needed to know about sex—without actually having sex with me. You can be a pre-bed student, he said, winking. I was at a burger place with a girlfriend of mine, she’d introduced me to this man, Joey was his name. She had dated him, she always dated older men. He was obviously not the brightest guy in the world, but he was very handsome. I had a reputation—entirely deserved—for being extremely naive sexually. I got teased a lot and I was tired of it. I was off to college in the fall; I wanted to know something when I got there. On senior skip day, I told my mother I was going swimming with my class, but I went instead to meet this man, who was going to take me to a motel .
    Isn’t it funny, I fell asleep last night after I wrote the above, the pen in my hand. I woke up around four, put you on the bedside table, got a drink, and went back to bed. But you, open to this page, felt to me like a spectator dressed in black. A silent presence standing too near, crowding me. I closed you, moved you to the bathroom floor, then shut the door so that I could not hear you calling .
    I never told Martin about this event, and I