I found comfort in sitting next to you: the collar of your blouse was standing straight up. There was a dog named Sesame. You told me that you put your hand in the fur of all three dogs and they were friendly. I believed you but stayed as far from them as possible. Could I easily scapegoat the invasive, abrasive wind for my antisocial proclivity at the MFA party? 

In the early early evening, after our trip to the Walgreens, where you delightfully purchased an assortment of truffles, and the walk home where I used a recently purchased snow scraper to scratch you back and pull you from the path of oncoming bikers, you read me a study guide of Milton’s Paradise Lost, complete with estimated reading times and illustrations of major characters, such as God. 

In your office that afternoon, you wrapped yourself in an electric blanket. 44 was a hard year, you told me, for Milton who went blind and after his wife’s death was left with 4 children, including an infant. His wife was 17 when he was 35, and they were incompatible, perhaps, due to the age difference. She went to visit her family and did not come back. In response, I think, Milton wrote pro-divorce pamphlets and argued against celibacy in marriage. A husband and wife, he thought, have a duty to replenish the earth. Eventually, she came back and died, in childbirth, shortly thereafter. Milton’s house, which housed a ton of schoolboys, four babies and his wife’s family, was not conducive to his scholarship. His daughter’s sold some of his stuff without his knowledge. He was a Sagitarius which surprised me because he was so arrogant. Meanwhile, or before all of this Satan raped his daughter Sin and she became pregnant with Death, who eventually would also rape her, begetting Chaos. It was all so interesting. I did a wonderful job parallel parking and you told me so. We watched the Ravens beat the Chiefs, because Lamar Jackson played well. The Ravens, you said, are inconsistent. A team can’t depend on one man. We watched David Mammet’s Heist. He seems to win at the movie’s end because he knew his girlfriend would betray him. Her betrayal didn’t seem phase him. He drove away smiling, though his friend, Pinky, died, and he’d pushed his lover into the hands of another man. You thought she’d fallen in love because she said, You shouldn’t have sent me to him, Joe. But I thought she’d bet on the wrong man, or maybe she loved Joe and was getting back at him. There’s a flatness to the women in David Mammet films, a stylized and deadpan opacity. The men in contrast are rarely not acting. Character is desire and function. In bed you whispered that sometimes you don’t want to sleep. I call you Chatty Catty when you talk to me at five am until I wake. It’s so long to be apart, the whole night. I lay on my back and I held your hand and you said, let’s walk into a dream together, Jess.