Reading Carole Maso in Starbucks on a Wednesday afternoon.

In this shoreline town where I feel so much at home; so simultaneously displaced.

Girls come and go in boat shoes, in shorts.

“Rare butterflies,” says Carole, “nymphets by the pool.”

At the table next to me a man in blue scrubs and white sneakers talks to a woman wearing only beige.

When I was seventeen, sings Frank on the first of sixty Sinatra the Golden Years tracks that will spin through this Starbucks this Wednesday afternoon.

I’m a mess.

Sad. Scared.

Dreaming each night of losing something essential. Something that disappears just before I wake.

It was a very good year for blue blooded girls…

And so aware, so watched … if only in my imagination…by balding men in their forties, drinking heavily creamed, whipped coffee concoctions and fiddling with their laptops. Humberts, all of them, I say to Carole before remembering that I am no longer Lolita young and feeling with this realization the faint flutter of constricting heartstrings beneath these rib bones…this thin skin.

Makes me teary, the beige lady says, she…she just doesn’t deserve it.

The man in the scrubs shrugs and pulls at the straw of his six dollar smoothie.

I think about Her.

About how tiny she’s become. About how angry I am that she’s forgotten everything that happened when she stretched out beneath bleached bedclothes and fought for her life.

About how silly that seems now that it’s all over. Now that I’ll be driving the vast distance away from it all.

Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today…track two.

Every night I wait for sleep and fend off the oppressive fears that come with so much suffering, so much unknown. Watch as they meld into misplaced spots in my mind – today I am dying of some rare disease. Tomorrow I’ll be murdered, of this I am quite sure.

I’m gonna make a brand new start of it, in ol’ New York…in new L.A.

Girls sitting outside on wire chairs under wide umbrellas smoke Marlboros. They must be just eighteen. Must be full of that illusionary invincibility all young people are supposed to have. Why can’t I feel it too? No longer Lolita young but not dying either. Not now, but still so anxiously aware of my own impermanence.

“When memory goes,” Carole says, “it is replaced maybe with beautiful, floating free, out of context fish. Orange in deep blue with tails like feathers.”

When SHE goes what will I replace HER with? And when I go, will I leave behind these pages of words that nobody reads? Or a series of compulsions that have ordered my only world?

Will I leave this place restricted or full of feathery memories – fluttering around me.

The leaves of ancient beech trees, breeze shaken but thick veined and full.

All Carole quotations from Carole Maso’s, Ava