I was lost in Paris, once, in 2000. I was too ill to be traveling, but my oldest longest running friend, which is another way of saying a woman whom I've been friends with since I was 12 years old, had won a trip to Paris through her job, the kind of job that gives perks like a trip to Paris for working very hard, for "hitting numbers", in which case "won" is not the appropriate verb but "earned" instead. We became friends in 1984. I was made unpopular that year by a girl who had been my oldest longest running friend up to that point.

I was very lucky to be my friend's +1. Not only was my flight paid for, but so was my every whim for one weekend in Paris. It was wintertime. My friend wore a faux fur coat on that trip. The collar came up, making her look classic and sexy in a Weimar kind of way, although the collar was also made of long strands of fake fur, strands that were fuzzy and wild, strands that often got stuck in her lipstick. When this happened she spoke in a lisped German accent, letting the strands stay stuck, and we giggled.

One day we got lost. I can't remember now if we had a map. I don't think we did. She relied on me to speak French so we could find our way in Paris. In fact, I had started to learn French the year we met, that year I was 12 and she'd befriended me partially out of pity.

This year I sent a Christmas card to my friend, to the address she's been living at for more than ten years. The card came back to me marked ADDRESS UNKNOWN. It came back in January, at around the same time another friendship of mine was bombing, at the same time my relationship couldn't keep its grip. I tried to call my friend after her Christmas card came back, but the number I had was no good. I sent her an e-mail after that, but it went unreplied.

Once, when we were 16 or 17, we'd been out on a typical weekend night -- maybe a football game, maybe a party on a parcel of land where kids smoked pot from a four-foot bong. I was with some other kids in the backseat of a station wagon. We'd just dropped my friend off at her house, and when the car pulled away, I saw my friend crying under her porch light. I was the only one who saw.

I'm trying to remember now how we found our way back to our hotel, that weekend in Paris. There was the panic that sets in as night descends. No, I don't believe we did have a map. The words wouldn't come out of my mouth right, and the panic had made it impossible for us to remember that in France some people actually speak English. How did we back away from panic's ledge?

I still have the returned Christmas card on my desk now. And I am trying now to articulate the pain of the returned card, our separation made manifest, just like I am trying to articulate the pain I felt when I saw my friend crying under the porch light. It is something like trying to articulate a child's cry, the sound a whale makes, a howl. The very word "lost" might work, but only if you, like me, hear a ripping sound in your mind's music as you sound out that final "t" following the "oss" sound. [Lost.]

We kept walking, that's what we did. In Paris we just kept walking through Paris. We remembered we were in Paris, after all. It didn't matter if night fell. When night fell, yellow streetlights came on, I remember them being yellow. When night fell, the metro stations' bulbs lit up, looking prettier than they do in postcards.

There is a difference between loss and lost -- living through it vs. having experienced it -- that ever important ripping -- the final "t".

This is not to say that I am content to have lost my friend. But perhaps it's possible that my life is made more articulate, put into relief somehow, now that my friend is lost to me. I don't know. No, I am not content to think of my friend crying under the porch light. The image of her there will occasionally enter my mind for as long as I have a memory, and the image will forever remind me that I failed to see what was happening in my friend's heart, that I failed at being her friend. But I must accept this image of her crying beneath the porch light, for I cannot stop memory any more than I can stop children from crying, wolves from howling, or the numb density of a whale's sound.

Interior Winter

Scavengers have been out in the night again. They leave only an outline of themselves -- a colander, a curtain. Look closely and you can see where they trod, to what lengths they sought sustenance in this cold.

To say my interior winter is cold is to say a lion is fierce. How do we measure our interior seasons? Not with blunt tools that call cold cold. Face-numbing, organ-gripping howl, ice so thick it's no longer clear. Most of us survive winter by waiting her out, knowing that spring will come.

The last time I experienced winter -- and by "experienced" I mean I did not just travel through it by going from A to B as quickly as I could -- I woke to the splendor of each morning, blinded by Our Grand Dame's making. I don't know who "our" is when I'm talking about Our Grand Dame, only that she is not my interior winter alone, no matter how personal winter can feel. I lived that winter in a barn on the edge of the earth. Each morning I had to shield my eyes. Spring was not a hoped-for, foregone conclusion; the word "loam" was nowhere in my vocabulary. It was only Our Grand Dame and me, her sun and her moon casting oblong shadows on snow. She held me in the cup of her knotted hand, talking of tasks and barriers. She was trying to tell me that to live fully is to forgive our scavengers their nature.