I'm in the middle of the wilderness, so to speak, which makes for brief posts. It's not an exciting or dramatic wilderness, sorry. No good story there. It's work, work, work.

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In brief moments of downtime, Meghan and I have begun a conversation about time and memory in writing. She's a poet. I'm prose. And, for the record, I'm a terrible poet... unless limericks count. The conversation is in its beginnings. We have established that it functions differently in fiction and nonfiction prose, and that nonfiction has an unknown quantity of similarities to poetry in this sense. Last weekend, the two of us met a poet who wrote a book about the sudden death of her father. She put it aside for years. Then, one day, she wrote a poem. Eventually, she figured out that the poem was THE POEM, the one that bound that book together. And thus, the book was whole.

Once upon a time, I was obsessed with the following: Augustine waited 10 years before being able to write his confessions. I thought so much about post-conversion writing that I started to write as if devout myself. Made for interesting, if perplexing, pieces. I fantasized about wearing the cross I'd been given in ninth grade after my confirmation. I argued the Christian view in my classes. Fetishizing Christianity may not be exactly what I did, but it's how I see it now.

To be clear: I was dreaming of early Christianity - the world in which scholars spent their lives writing about the genitals of pre-fall man, and in which everything was exciting and new. Where Christianity was not the establishment for gentiles.

A Christian told me I'd be Born Again three years from when we met. We met three years ago this coming summer. At the time - this was during a thunder storm - I nearly bought it. She was crying, it was late, I was tired.

She told me I'd call her, or write her, and the time would be right, and I'd KNOW. We've lost touch. I'm sending her a note, already written, from a month ago but it still holds up as true. I can't find her address. Although time is precious, last night I dreamed of hand-delivering the note in the middle of the night, no return address left.