A cafe window on Franklin near Sutter

I live in a world in which someone is always looking up at me, as if from an iPhone or iPad, like they're lost in something else and really not looking at me at all.

More and more I live with the feeling that I'm not meant to be in my body. The episodes in which I feel my body drifting away from me increase. I don't know what to do with this loss of gravity--this feeling that I am in the midst of losing my life--other than to stay very still, hold on to something, and take big breaths until the feeling passes and I can return to the world of the merely living.

On one side of me is the music of the street--that is, whatever I've just heard that's made an impression, Hindemith's Octet for Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, Violin, Two Violas, Cello, and Bass--and on the other side is the pane of glass that silence insists placing over my eyes so that I have a chance to see things as they are.