I.   

I once knew someone who yawned in her sleep.

I don't know if I need to go into that—the impossibility of it. You get it, right? We yawn to stay awake. To rush blood to our head. But I swear she yawned from the depths of full slumber. Whoever she's with now has discovered this quirk too. Or, maybe they haven't. Maybe even she doesn't know. I've forgotten her last name, I haven't thought about her in thirteen years. I don't remember whether she smoked cigarettes with her right hand or left, or what brand. What she did for a living. What bad TV shows she liked to watch before bed.

That's the point in getting to know people, in getting to know anyone at all. Become familiar enough with them over time and you see a little of their programming. The way their wiring is different. They're little gifts, these curiosities. She yawned and she stretched and she was dead asleep, and the blood shot on up to her brain, before what, sheepishly returning? Or maybe it stayed. Maybe it stayed and the dreams she had were more spectacular than any you and I could imagine.


II.   
   
Fire turns everything white. Counterintuitive, no? We have these modern appliances that have been refined over decades of use and yet you still have to manually wet your finger, run it over the lint filter, check and check again before each load, and even then some neighbor can mess it up and the whole apartment building finds itself washed in flames.

After, they wouldn't let me back into my apartment. No. They let me back into its ghost. My black walnut kitchen table turned to chalky ash. The exposed wooden beams reminded me of soft teeth. The landlord had laughed when I asked if any of my things were recoverable. But the reclamation crew did find something. They were gruff men, men who spent their days finishing a fire's job, gutting everything it left behind. The sprinklers can do just as much damage as the smoke and flames, they told me.

They wanted me to see something. After throwing out my spices, my shoes, my silverware, they'd hesitated. In the mottled shell that had once been a closet, they presented their discovery to me without explanation, indicating where they had found it, where the fire and smoke and water had spit it out, apparently untouched. I didn't even recognize it at first.

It was one of the small notebooks I'd briefly been in the habit of filling out years before, its red cover almost sinful in the ashen room. That color. I don't know how to explain it except to say that it looked like the thing that had started the fire. They wanted me to open it, almost as though afraid of what might happen. When I did, the pages were still intact. But the words, whether I'd written them in pencil or ink, were gone.


III.   

I'm looking back on things, nose pressed up against the glass. I'm straining to see beyond a bend in the road. Once, I stayed up to watch a woman yawn in her sleep, to confirm that I had not imagined it. At just past 4 a.m., it happened. As if there were another level of sleep she was in danger of descending to. I don't remember the rest of her apartment, and I don't remember how things ended between us. But years later I saw her on the subway in a city I was visiting. Beyond a metal pole and the eclipse of other bodies. It was only a sliver of her face, but I recognized that sliver. Or I wanted to.

It was past the point where I could have approached her.

I want you to understand that I'm not longing for her but for the things in my life I should have paid more attention to. Which is to say, all of it. I've seen what happens to memory. If you don't figure out how to clear out the filter, it can burn, nearly everything, leaving you with a hollowed-out shell, with the bones, almost nothing left living inside.

And you have to be careful with things that survive the fire. Sometimes I still take out that red notebook, certain its blank pages will contain something more than the lingering smell of smoke. Before I open its cover, I picture the lines of text as I once set them down: intricate, fevered, ecstatic—written in a language I was determined to one day master.


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