How It Adds Up

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean. And the day I quit the job my father got me. And the day I stood outside a door, and listened to my girlfriend making love to someone obviously not me, inside, and I felt strange because I didn’t care. There was the morning I was born, and the year I was a loser, and the night I was the winner of the prize for which the audience applauded. Then there was someone else I met, whose face and voice I can’t forget, and the memory of her is like a jail I’m trapped inside, or maybe she is something I just use to hold my real life at a distance. Happiness, Joe says,is a wild red flower plucked from a river of lava and held aloft on a tightrope strung between two scrawny trees above a canyon in a manic-depressive windstorm.