Robin goes out and has adventures all the time. She was on top of Mount Olympus with an acoustic guitar, she wrote me letters in Arizona. She said, on a phone rooted in the sand, the ocean is orange, (she said that in California). Then she was in Spain, her bracelets moving in the wind of a window of a blue car on a road stretching North from Malaga. Robin goes to Tokyo where she is the most beautiful person in a crowd of a million people.

She’s saving up her money to go to space on a spaceship. She stopped to be with me in Philadelphia (she was passing through). I was busy staring at her thighs (I don’t get to see them often). She was looking around the yard we were in, noticing that everything was concrete, but there was grass upsticking, and we had a view of the skyscrapers beyond, and the small stream and fountain built in the yard was pretty for her too. We both had our beers, and occasionally we looked up into the sky to wait for the next star to appear through the light-dark clearing. Then we are talking about her adventures — she leans in to me, her knees against my thighs, I’ve got a mouth of beer to swallow, the Allman Brothers are doing Lord I Was Born A ‘Ramblin Man, the best song to listen to while you’re moving down an afternoon highway on vacation or trying to get the hell out of your hole and see what not being stuck can be like, and it’s a guitar right now, and her knees are on me — she tells me when I go into space, I’ll be a lot older. So when it’s time to go back, I’m taking over a pod and ejecting it and I’ll get to fly out there. I don’t believe her, of course. I say Robin, nobody like us is going into space, besides you’re not going to do that even if you did… I’m cupping the beer and the conversation changes. I notice the stream very well, and as we talk and we become drunk, I notice more things, like how everything is just made out of concrete and grass and plastic. And it does not bother me, because Robin has told me: it doesn’t matter what you make the planet out of, just so long as we can live here and be happy. And she didn’t mean it literally (she was whispering) but she said it, and it makes me feel happy. We go to bed and Robin lies with me.  In the morning she is gone.

To Omaha, to the Mississippi River (Just like Huckleberry Finn! she writes (with love)), to Alaska, to Russia, she keeps going up. Then she turns and goes back down.

She writes to us, all the old friends. She keeps up with the world, with the neighborhood. She writes to us her adventures. Her life is in the context of adventure. But otherwise she says It is just like everyone else’s life.

I do not think that is true.

I do not know what it is like to be what Robin is.

I imagine things are so strikingly beautiful that it has become much like what music wants to be, what everything deep down wants to be.

She tells me, it is scary sometimes

But the end of her letters have so many exclamation marks. And now whenever I listen to music — at the fondest moments I would only laugh — but now when I laugh I think about what it is like for Robin to listen to it too and laugh. And I always have this idea that we are on a train. And the train has shot through a tunnel and is now shooting toward the sun.  Racing it, the music is beautiful and the window is flashing and we smile and our faces move together, and she’s so beautiful, and so is this life,

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