The first real job I  had was telemarketing. I was seventeen, optimistic and stupid. I honestly believed that the Better Business award on the wall meant something and that my boss, a lamp tanned slickster, was misunderstood. The product was a nation-wide business directory, a glorified phone book. It contained a useless spectrum of geographically and thematically isolated contacts, from strip joints to law firms. We were provided with a standard script, no deviations allowed. Making a sale depended only on smooth delivery and tone of voice and the familiarity I trained into my voice implied some kind of relationship. I quickly discovered the minimum number I needed to unload in a given week to not get fired, sold exactly that many and spent the rest of my time dialing wrong numbers and talking to myself.

She had committed herself, as much as she knew, to getting to know the ghost. It had taken years off her life and still she sometimes felt that she was no closer to its true nature than she had been on that frigid December day, when she was first penetrated by its coldness, biting into her much deeper than the weather had. It was something like love or weakness and from that day on, she sometimes barely but mostly completely welcomed the iciness, the isolation that flooded her insides, stole her wind, or felt like it anyway. Her relationship to the ghost, not that it was a relationship but it sometimes somehow resembled one, was something she felt she had to keep a secret, but with sadness, she realized then that when this cold wind was finally past, no external mark would be left and everything between them would well have never existed.

She walked down the sweating city street. Along the pavement, liquid seeped from curbside, plastic garbage bags was boiling. Her appearance was almost  typical for a woman of a certain age and place.  Tight, tapered dark blue jeans, a fitted, patterned babydoll top and flip-flops. Carefully orchestrated casual dress. Trying too hard, or even looking like she tried too hard or took herself too seriously, or seriously at all, was to be avoided. But still, she did take care of her appearance, in some manner, except for her hair, which she maybe would have styled and reigned in, if she hadn't already been beaten back by its dark chaos countless times before. She was killing time, with nowhere to go, but still walking briskly, with purpose, to insulate herself from the invasive, urban approaches which she had still not gotten used to after 5 years in the city.     

I spent the past hour having my tarot read, out in the open, on a pedestrian street by a middle aged,  frizzy blonde haired tourist trap. Sitting there, it hit me, things, like life, were not going well at all. I mean, did I really think this new-aged, crystal eating Hagitha would actually have anything meaningful to say to me? It was a disappointing hour. I learned little. Haggy's boyfriend had cheated on her but she opened her heart wide and let him back in with forgiveness. Somehow this was supposed to mean somthing to me. I was nowhere closer to understanding what I had to do, to dealing with what had been asked of me.

In the beginning, being with you, even just thinking of you made me shake my head from side to side, a gentle build up to a violent scramble. I looked crazy, I felt even crazier. I was literally  trying to knock you out of my head. I knew even then that your smile didn't  hold the usual things and that I was making a mistake.