What is hardest is the knowing that you must stay in this place for a long time. That in awhile you will summon up the exact gray shade of these walls in sleep as well as in waking, their condition dependent on how the light looks just outside the one high window. You will content yourself watching the lacy patterns of mold overtaking a low corner of the north wall. The cold can become consoling, it is so plain. If you come from this tradition of old dwellings with shutters that adjust for darkness, if you come from a place that has been mesmerizing in its narrow offering of daylight, the beams direct from heaven, if you come from a place where spring is short and painful, and fall, a kind of bright and distant drunk arriving just before the cold sets in, then anything that lies ahead will be hard going.
Memory is the slow pang of desire turned on itself.
A cooperative hostage. A kidnapping that takes place calmly, in broad daylight, on any city street where the world, so large, won't notice until the story's printed. And only later, driving slowly on an unfamiliar road, when a phone call returns to you, the conversation lighting on your shoulder like some momentary bird, only later will it occur to you that there was a dark at all. That hunger drove you once to accept bread and water as the staff and sign of life. So that a banquet table could seem anything with one portion neatly set upon it.