Woomph! I'm gone. That sound, that woomphing sound? That was the vacuum suck of my absence in Madrid, the smack of her womby walls sealing behind me. Ick, agh. Distaste, distortion. I am fearing my memory, trying to remember everything pat in place, ha. Sending emails, trying to tie up some ends, loosen others. I've had several dreams which are neither nightmares nor not nightmares, in which disbelief and the less glamorous moments of polyamoury play against a backdrop of goblin parades, whooshed through with limey gibbering ghosts. I miss Madrid. I miss all the potential. Alfred de Musset is a young man with a great future behind him. Nico, who does not yet distinguish between Italy and his grandmother's house, California and his schoolyard, is tired of hearing about Spain. I'm no better, swooning over memories of nonspecific arms in specific bars and tea-houses, particular singing people in certain plazas, while the news, always on during mealtime here, shows the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Ah yes Spain, I say, I love Spain.

Yet I'm in Italy with a dear baby eating pizza on the beach, being driven past acres of wilting sunflowers. Can I put up pictures I cannot. I look forward to coming home, being there, and leaving again. I look backward prematurely and obsessively. Hymning and hemming and hawing.