So. Failure. That’s the plate of eggs I’m making. I’m hauling it from the kitchen to the table. From the table to the trash, half-eaten, half-sitting there with another failure heaped on top of it. These days, failure is self-reflexive. Iterative. Like counting your hands when they hit you.

And no one is more nostalgic than Failure. She finds a summer lake in the middle of another summer’s lake. She hangs on the edge as if it were a cliff even though the mountain is on top of her. Failure knows everything. Knows what kind of ending will end it, but she chooses to string it out, to play Beethoven, to swim and swim.

The whole thing looks like a bird looking down on me: this small breakfast, all the coffee in the microwave, smoke. And Failure, she’s here, staring at the ceiling. So the ceiling’s lower now, more like the time you called me a pretentious—and there was something about how you said it and ducked it—a pretentious writer.

That’s what put me here. Placed my failures on the table. But before I knew it, you left, making Failure look more like a door, or the kind of sound a door makes when it’s written. Because writing and failure are the two faces of the same insomniac. The two talking walls. It’s the two people who made love and later wished they had said something—anything—to break the silence.

So there’s Failure, lakes of it, filling my mouth. And there’s your mouth, on the other side of the lake, not coming near me. And writing, which has always been a hand reaching for a body, is pouring bucket after bucket into the word love. And it’s not romantic or modern or postmodern. It’s last week. It’s yesterday, when I killed two butterflies on my windshield driving away.