So, it’s late—“late” as: early hours of another “new” year.

I don’t know what all I said to the girl-woman at the bedroom door (Hylee Somewhere—ha!—didn’t get her name)—girl-woman on the floor by the door, after I’d slid off the edge of the bed (my back against the bed), talking on and on, as if we knew each other (and she listened—for no reason?), as if living in separate rooms of the same house we share with ten other friends. Hanging out in someone’s room is what we do—or did, years back when we took over big houses—a cliché now, not then. We’d often hang around until early hours talking about anything, everything, nothing—nothing like college dorming or just sharing a building in an academic ghetto. We were homemaking, creating “families” of choice that meant more to some of us than the strange, suburban accidents called “families of origin” (which chanced origining nothing at all in suburbia—yech!).

Our urban commune days were wonderful—inspired transience. We privileged “freaks” (often of some artistic, academic, or other impractical sort) were trying to make “intentional communities,” like re-familializing—no, it wasn’t retrieval of something lost or remedial. We were originals, seeking to immortalize our chosen netweave of friendship, so local then (before days of online networking), so embodied, so lived.

I stood up to leave. “Late,” I said at the door.

She stood, too, and left. It wasn’t her room! She’d popped in there to use the phone; then I turned up, intruded, and she suffered me. I was aimless curiosity.

“Whose room is it?,” I asked.

“I donknow. I came with a friend of somebody who lives here. I hope she didn’t forget me.”

I guess I was just so sweetly odd.

So, back here, I wrote “eve”; also printed it and added my e-mail address, then put it in an envelop, sealed and stuck it in the mailbox of the house this morning, as I left for work, addressed to “the woman reading For Derrida in the upper northwest room.”

She is Hylee Somewhere—very silly, OK—whomever, there reading For Derrida. “To H.S., who left reading For Derrida open on her bed to walk in the dark, cold night; or who was partying at a friend’s place; or who is out of town, but forgot to close her book when the airport van arrived, taking her to fly where one doesn’t read For Derrida.”

Actually, that house is dark tonight. I guess everyone’s split town for awhile, until the new semester starts.

It is Late: past eras of gods, etc.—and late in the life of one who would seek too much grand cohering without metaphysicalism?

Late, but not too so, I hope.

Full of myself, clearly. My posturing isn’t capricious or clueless or smug. But all the same, I’m on my own.