You are the silence in between what I thought and what I said.

The grocery store gives you stickers, a number of stickers per hundred dollars spent.  You stick the stickers in the pamphlet so you don't lose them.  When you fill the pamphlet full of stickers you bring it back to the grocery store and give it to the cashier in the Customer Service booth, and she trades it for two beer glasses.  

W is a former student who works at the grocery store, and when we go through her line she gives us more stickers than she is supposed to.  "I'll hook you up," she says.  Our sticket pamphlet books are full, and full, and full.  Our cupboards are busting with beer glasses.  "At last," says Shawn.  "Your career is finally paying off for me."

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SZ has gone to Korea to teach English.  She was a counselling project when I was a Masters student, a verbal sparring partner who told me I was not particularly helpful, and later I took her shopping to show her how an asexual person could dress for a job interview.  And now she writes to me when big things are happening in her life, like cutting off all her hair, or moving- indefinitely - to Korea.  My sense of what is healthy and what is functional has continued to evolve with her help.  She bakes me cookies.  I pick walnut shells out of my teeth and tell her I think she is perfect.

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