Similarly, a few weeks back I discovered that I was wearing my watch upside-down. Again, I knew that this was a message to myself, and I even remembered the moment, earlier that day, when I turned the watch upside-down. It was during lunch with Sohrab at S'nice. He noticed me do it, and we spent the rest of lunch discussing the capriciousness of memory. Later, though, when I discovered the upside-down watch, I couldn't remember what it was supposed to remind me of. In my frustration, I eventually I called Sohrab, but he couldn't remember either, nor was he certain I ever had told him.

I eventually let go of the upside-down watch, but I'm still stuck on the So Delicious wrapper. Accordingly, I just taped it to the top left corner of the bathroom mirror. This way I'm bound to see it each morning when I wash my face. My hope is that a repeated periodic encounter will spark my memory of the original message.

Addendum: On re-reading the above, I realized that I might forget, yet again, what the So Delicious wrapper is supposed to remind me of, so I got out a magic marker and wrote the following across the front of the wrapper:

Found on alarm clock. What was message?

I've been hounding K about this because I'm certain that if she doesn't enforce the rule, my friends will either ignore it or turn it into a running gag, as if to collectively say, "Fuck him, he's dead and he was a controlling fucker anyway."

Each time I bring it up, K claims that she won't let this happen, except she says it in the sort of voice one uses with an impossible child, someone you'll say anything to in order to get him to leave you alone.

I did leave her alone for a time, but then we spent New Year's weekend in Connecticut with three close friends, and over breakfast on the last day I described the problem to the group. In short order my request was cast as an attempt to control what gets said at an event which, while it would be about me, wouldn't actually be for me since I would be dead. K nodded the whole time.

I chose to mention it at this breakfast in large part because Andrew was there, and I long ago pegged him as a likely saboteur. However he surprised me by responding in a way that only someone who knows my heart ever could.

"I don't think it's a big deal," he said. "It's a minimal ask that challenges folks to skip the bullshit. You're asking to be remembered."

It was Lucy, though, who had the best line: "Can we start now?"

"Fuck you" is another. This I say when I remember having hurt someone. I say it sharply, like a command to a barking dog.

"I love you, sweetie" is another. I say this when I wake in the night. If I'm addressing anyone, it's K, but usually I'm just saying it.

I've been thinking about things. I mean things in the sense of objects. This was brought on by Seymour, by writing about him.

I had a stuffed monkey of my own once. His name was Zip. I would put on puppet shows with him. I know this because there's a photo of me doing it. However I don't remember feeling affection for Zip, and I certainly didn't talk to him or play with him. He was a prop, nothing more.

Seymour, despite his utilitarian role, is not a prop. Rather he's a source of connection -- to K's childhood, to her mother, to every place she's lived. In this respect, Seymour is not unique in K's life. Our apartment is filled with K's things. They take up every shelf we have, and if we had more shelves, they would take up those as well.

By contrast, I have few things, all of which are filed away, save for a few dozen books.

I keep a folder of photos in a drawer. I take them out now and then, but I would never put them on the shelves or walls. It would be distracting, and numbing too, in that something seen again and again recedes into the background.

When a space is cluttered, I feel unsettled, agitated. I used to feel that way in our apartment because of K's things, but in time I've learned not to see them.

I often say that things -- objects, possessions -- have a psychic weight for me. This applies to precious things no less than junk. When something is precious, I want to protect it, preserve it. This is how I feel about the photos in my drawer, and it's also why I keep them in a drawer, where I never need to see them.

My ideal space would contain few objects beyond the functional necessities. The idea would be to evoke and support a mindset of, for lack of a better term, meditative focus.

I recently asked K how she would feel in such a space. Her answer was immediate and certain: "Bored and lonely."

I don't doubt her. K's things keep her company, and having company means a lot to her. Accordingly, her only complaint about our living room is that it doesn't have space for an L-shaped couch, since that would open up more socializing options.

I'm not against socializing options but it's the last place my mind goes when I think of ideal spaces.

Here I return to the photo of Zip. It was taken in the dining room of my childhood home, a dining room that had no dining room furniture because my parents couldn't agree on what to buy: my father wanted to get whatever we could afford, while my mother insisted on waiting until we had enough money for nice things. Similarly our living room had no living room furniture, just plants. We called these rooms the dining room and living room, although little of either happened in either.

The standoff lasted my entire childhood. For my sister it was a source of shame and embarrassment, but for me it was a boon. I would hook a toy basketball net over the dining room door and play by myself for hours, imitating the signature moves of my basketball heroes.

I loved that room.

K has a stuffed animal, a monkey, named Seymour. K's mother gave her Seymour when K was eight, which makes him a minimum of thirty-three years old now, depending when he was manufactured.

K sleeps with Seymour almost every night. She leans into him, wedging him into the crook of her arm and resting her chin on top of his head. If Seymour were a real monkey, he would quickly suffocate from this. Indeed, there's probably no better way to suffocate a monkey than what K does to Seymour.

Seymour has an enormous head; in fact his head is bigger than the rest of him. It's covered in finely-woven terry cloth and is firm without being too firm to sleep on. Miraculously (a word I do not use lightly), Seymour's head doesn't smell. None of him does, although he has spent more than ten thousand nights (I did the math) jammed into K's armpit and has never been washed. It's much like the miracle of Hanukkah.

The only time K sleeps without Seymour is when she's away. She says she does this because he's too big to bring anywhere, and I suppose that would be true if K went on backpack trips, but K doesn't go on backpack trips. In fact a few years ago, K put a large magnet on our refrigerator that shows a smiling woman reclining in bed under the words I love not camping. So I think it's something else that keeps Seymour confined to our bed. Perhaps it's embarrassment. Perhaps it's the idea of a forty-two year-old woman who can't sleep a single night without her stuffed monkey. It's not that people would know this was true about K; it's that K would know.

On the other hand, K did bring Seymour to college. However, as she explains it, most of her college roommates had some ridiculous thing like Seymour, so it didn't really matter.

After college K lived for a year on a kibbutz in Israel, during which time Seymour remained at home (in a box!), I suspect because K didn't want to be ridiculed by the hardcore kibbutzniks -- no-nonsense types trained in the use of automatic weapons.

A confession: Sometimes, when K is away, I sleep with Seymour. I use the same method as K. It's a nearly prone position, which normally hurts my back, but with Seymour's head propping me up, I wake without pain.

Also, when K's at home and I happen to get into bed before her, I sometimes hide Seymour under my body. Often K doesn't realize he's missing until she's about to turn off the light, at which point she'll sidle up to me in a manner indicating affection or perhaps even desire, then suddenly go for the monkey, crying, "Seymour is mine, my mommy gave him to me!"

When I asked K what people should know about Seymour, she said, simply, "That I love him." I love him too, in my way. He's a survivor.

Although Seymour was lovingly made, in a way few things are these days, his manufacturer had no way of knowing he would be suffocated all night, nearly every night, for thirty-three years. Because of this, and because time is kind to no one and nothing, Seymour is falling apart: his ears are split open; the paint of his pupils is chipping away; his goofy smile, a modest red thread, has been sewn to his face to prevent it from breaking (K: "I can't make him frown anymore"); and he has dozens of small tears, many of which K's mom repaired with dental floss.

The worst, though, is his paw pads. Seymour's brand name was Corky because his hind legs are stuffed with tiny bits of cork. Unfortunately his hind paw pads are prone to small tears through which the cork slowly leaks. In recent years K switched from dental floss to duct tape and then finally gave up and wrapped Seymour's leakier paw (the left) in a piece of fabric cut from an old sheet. The paw still leaks but the fabric contains the cork. Eventually K intends to cut open Seymour's paw pads and remove all the cork. This will solve the problem but at the price of eliminating the squishy crunchiness of Seymour's hind legs.

Such is life, I suppose. You do what you can, until you can do no more. In the best case, you succeed in bringing some joy and comfort to others, even if your own smile is permanently sewn to your face.

It's the first day of school and I can't find my classes.

I'm naked in public.

I die.

I put down the razor, turned off the water, and headed to my desk to send the email. On the way there I imagined myself standing with a group of strangers across the street and watching our building burn to the ground. Every few minutes or so someone new would join the group and then slowly realize (I would watch this as it happened) that I must live in the burning building because half my face isn't shaven.

It's like the way films are cut. In one shot a man gets into a car, and in the next shot, the next moment, he arrives at his destination. We're not shown what happened between the two shots because it's obvious. Films are constructed so that everything obvious is left out. The viewer fills in the blanks.

Stories are the same. Even music. It's all a collection of artfully arranged blanks.

But my blanks are neither artful nor arranged; they're just blanks.

I go nearly every morning. Most days this is the only time I leave the apartment, and the people I see at the gym are the only people I see aside from K and the occasional delivery person.

I rarely talk to anyone at the gym, but I notice everyone. I notice them and think about them and often make up little stories about them. I do this anyway, wherever I go, but the gym is ideal for this purpose because I see the same people over time, the regulars. I enjoy the regulars. I'm a regular myself.

Sometimes I'll spot a regular on the street, and if I'm with K, I'll turn and say something like, "The woman in the blue dress is a regular. I told you about her. She wears sweatpants that say YALE across her butt."

I tell K about the regulars each morning as we eat our oatmeal. I call these my gym stories. I have a new one each day. I believe K finds it both funny and disturbing that so much of my social life, such as it is, takes place at the gym, and that so little of it consists of any actual interaction with anyone.

"You had a bad dream," I say. "It's okay."

"No, it's not okay."

"It was a dream, sweetheart."

"It was real."

She's sobbing now. I ask her to tell me what happened. She says that her father came to visit and that we were sitting in the living room talking and having a nice time, when suddenly he said he had to go. "You mean back home," she said, and he said, "No, dear, I have to go back underground."

"He's never coming back," she says now. "He's underground and he's gone forever."

"No, he's here in your heart," I say. It's the only thing I can think to say.

This prompts more crying, and I hold her. In time she turns for a tissue, saying, "I'm getting better at this," meaning better at blowing her nose when she cries. Nose blowing is my influence.

Later she gets up to pee. When she returns she says she feels better and can go back to sleep.

I ask her to tell me more about her father. "He's always welcome at our table," I say.

In the morning I mistakenly believe I dreamt it all, but K sets me straight.

"I blew my nose," she says. "I never do that in dreams."

We parked in front of Bruce Goldberg's house. Bruce doesn't live there anymore – none of the Goldbergs do – and yet I still think it as Bruce Goldberg's house.

Once, long ago, Bruce's sister Rhonda, who was fat, sat on Andrea, who was tiny. I don't remember why Rhonda did this, but someone told me about it while it was happening and I came running. Andrea and Rhonda were on Bruce Goldberg's lawn surrounded by a crowd of kids, several of whom who were yelling and pointing.

I would like to report that I made Rhonda stop sitting on my sister, but instead I stood there laughing. It was Bruce who pulled her off.

Also, it was Bruce Goldberg's father who told me my first dirty joke. It happened in Bruce Goldberg's kitchen. Bruce's father was at the kitchen counter, drinking a beer, and simply started telling Bruce and me a joke. From the very beginning it was unlike any joke I'd ever heard. And then to top it off, the punch line included the word fuck – an amazing word for an adult to say to me, in a joke or otherwise.

Bruce became a doctor, but I don't know what became of Rhonda. Andrea says that Bruce's mother died of cancer. I don't remember her at all, which strikes me as shameful. How many times did I see her walk in or out of Bruce Goldberg's house? A thousand? I can't even remember the color of her hair.

Andrea and I made a circuit of the street, reminiscing about the former occupants of each house. It's always strange to return; everything is so much smaller than I remember. I tell myself to expect it to be smaller, and yet each time I'm surprised at how small it is. For some reason I can't reduce my expectations enough to match an ever-diminishing reality.

Also, the houses keep moving closer together. In memory there's enough room between them to fit another house, but those spaces are nearly gone now. It's as though the circle is slowly contracting.

And the people are gone as well. That's what strangest of all – that the circle is inhabited by usurpers who don't even realize they're usurpers. As we headed back to the car, Andrea and I watched a bald man walk into Bruce Goldberg's house. Bruce and his family left that house more than twenty-five years ago and yet it still disturbed me to watch this stranger simply open the door and walk inside. I half-expected to hear the muffled voice of Bruce Goldberg's father screaming at the man to get the fuck out of his fucking house.