Solve For.

One more drive to Raleigh: ducks, small hawks strung across a phone wire, and, at the airport, a sunset. I don't know precisely where my life has been of late, inside of what rooms in the late evenings, but I literally stood there at row 2CC atop the parking deck and looked out west and thought, Oh, right, the sunset. It was a fine one. Not good or great. Entirely passable. Fine. Reddish, of course, and some clouds banked up underneath it, and huge, since as best I can gather RDU is up on what counts for a hill or plateau out east there. All I could see was the sunset. A fine example of a sunset.

Cold, still. And dry. AMR returns bearing fancy coffee, fancy scotch, her fancy self. The dog put on a worthy show. The cats took up immediate residence in the luggage. Easy enough to settle back down into those weather patterns, then, and happily so. The old rhythms of someone else in the house picking things up, putting things back down. Cabinet doors opening and closing. Sound of the shower curtain rings.

Mrs. Newell in 12th-grade calculus was always going on about these curves, these asymptotic curves, that would come right down out of the sky and curve around and almost touch the x-axis, would as they ran out toward the end of the board and well beyond, like into the next room and out the front of the school, come infinitely close to the x-axis, but would never actually ever touch the x-axis. Flip the equation and it's the y-axis. The problem with me in those classes was that I never for one second bought that shit at all. Like the old brain freeze where if you keep walking halfway to a wall, and halfway again, how you'll never get there. Half, and half, and half. You'll get infinitely close, but you'll never get there. For me and my kind, I figured, Hell yes, you'll get there. Hell yes, that damn curve will eventually touch the axis. I was a big hit in math class.