He will tell you to plan a safari in Kenya. Three weeks later, he promises Morocco in the spring. An email from the middle of his UN engagement, and he is now visiting you in San Diego. In a month he will want you with him in Germany, maybe. You have to tell him that while traveling the world in your head has been fun, under a California sky there is a warm body and an empty bed that waits.

You will be laughing into teacups, dancing in the rain. A never ending train of dark & stormy's. The feint and jab of tension and truth. The delirious surprise of ever after. You will realize how already, that night, you were saying goodbye.

At the edge of desire, there is only restraint.

In a city of a hundred spires, you will find yourself alone on a streetcorner as he walks away. He does not look back. You do not call out. You wonder at all the lives you've both left lying by the wayside with nary a blink. It is night in a strange city and still you stand by the cobblestones and stoplight. He is nowhere to be found. You realize that you would not be better for the finding.

You will hear a story of expulsion, the neverending gunfire, the olive trees burning. The walk through the desert is long, the gold a heavy weight, the children abandoned on side roads as their caretakers grow weary, or die. You remember the march of your own people, across the tarmac, on asphalt, into mountains. You will imagine every march of the displaced, the soldiers unrelenting in their cruelty, your grandmother blinded by the end of a bayonet.

There is nothing more ominous than the gaze of a cat who remembers what the world was like when they were kings.

You will find him curled on your doorstep, reeking of days soaking in gin and sadness. His daughter in Daly City keeps a picture of him in fatigue in a shoebox at the bottom of her walk-in closet. Occasionally she will call Paolo, a man she keeps on retainer. His answer is always, "No, no word yet." She thinks California is a good place, always sunny. Where else would he go? She does not know that he is addicted to seasons, that he wants the winter to take him one day, as the jungle was not able to all those years ago.

Today you will find that you cannot even remember her face. Only her voice remains, the clear soaring tones of the recessional at mass, the soft almost-lullaby of her christmas carols. Her back is to you now, never turning. A figure hunched in her cubicle, with eyes you cannot see.