It was like arriving too early to visit the Freud Museum and being forced to walk around the neighborhood on a cold November morning, trying to blow heat into your hands.
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It was like arriving too early, walking several times around the block, and wondering what psychopathology such earliness must reveal, especially for a person who is in her daily life chronically late.
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It was like trying not to over-interpret this instance of earliness within a pattern of lateness while blowing meaninglessly into your hands, knowing the gesture must in fact be full of meaning.
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It was like entering the house knowing your existence is a tangle of psychopathologies you will never unravel, and fixing your gaze on The Couch: so inviting with its velvet pillows, so roped off by velvet barriers.
Donna Stonecipher is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Cosmopolitan (2008, winner of the National Poetry Series). A fourth, Model City, is forthcoming from Shearsman in 2015. She lives in Berlin.