This is for Her but its not about Her.

It's called "The Dungeon: Home Is Where The Heart Is Left".

I buried The Dungeon.

I called you to say that I'm almost done fixing the tiny studio I lived in when I met you. I met you in October 1997. Less than a year after that, I'd collected enough dark poetry and painful fiction to fill a moving company cardboard box that neatly, geometrically houses the most profound dissappointment and loss I'd known up to then. I was able to fill a liquor store paper bag full of all the letters I wrote you that I didn't send. I picked up 8-gallons of broken glass that rained on me after you read the ones I did.

Most of what was in the box was the Nineties, a decade for me unkind.

Almost eighteen months ago, I left the room you called the Dungeon. In it, I left lots of broken pieces of me there. That poor, little abused room was loyal and steadfast but soon tired of me and the things you and I left inside it. But a couple months ago, about a year after that last and final time you dumped me, I told myself to get over you once and for all and by the way why don't I clean the place as I should while I'm at it ferchrissake? One paper bag each day no matter how busy. One day at a time, I wore down those piles of neglect and mattress dust. With only my bike and bunji cords for help, I cut up each futon and hauled it to some faraway bin. Large portions of damaged furniture, unfortunate dozens of "lucky shirts" and shrinking pants found their way to dumpsters in special parts of town where I knew they'd be emptied the next day.

As long as I stayed away from the box in the closet, I would be okay.

I can now reach and violently separate from the chronically cool concrete beneath, the sticky-back tiles of Easy To Install squares of unmatched carpet we installed. The first July I knew you I thought we were together but you hadn't yet noticed that the first half of that calendar year we saw each other every day your husband was seven-hundred miles away. I tossed all my belongings outside during the Fourth of July weekend you were in San Diego. A couple days later you came back to the Bay Area; coming to visit me after getting off work. That was the time you used to come see me a lot because I lived right in-between where you worked and where your husband was now staying for a few months acouple blocks away. I remember you used to let me drop you off at the place where your husband was to spend the night. We were so close then. On the nights your girlfriend was helping your husband move in temporarily for a week, we giggled slurfully that last July week to lay 14 tiles over five nights of unmatched carpet on the cool cement in-between glasses of schnapps and impatient mirrors. You shouted to the world and my neighbors that you were through with your husband.

That first summer that we were single together, we were so happy to be with you.

The air in the room cleared with each bag of fossillized corn tortillas I quarantined. With every empty bottle of whatever I put in the garbage my heart felt less heavy. Every charcoal rendering of someone's hair without its face, each sawdust-filled floppy disk and water-logged poetry journal was yet another broken promise, an undelivered present, another "F" in homework and in Me. Pieces of tools, parts of machines, phone conversations with you served to remind me of my failure. This is almost unfinished, that is almost half-done and it had itself the trigger to launch the silver bullet of lonely guilt I'd treat myself to when everyone else is with the one they love.

I have lost the Game Of Life.

The individual objects that is collectively known as the garbage in the Dungeon was getting smaller and a lot lighter in the guilt department. I'm picking at a hundred torn, empty packs of uncooperative soy sauce, rolling the metric equivalent of a cord of pencil nubs. With empathy, I mercifully ended the life of two dozen rejected or abandoned, bachelor DC-power supplies missing their battery-powered, female-device soulmates. Wow, I said to me. I have definitely lost It. I find I have too much in common with a pile of old battery chargers.

I purposefully refrain from looking at the mover's box in the closet.

After trashing the dried up bottles of expensive acrylic paint your husband gave you to give to me I suddenly felt I should throw away the little red book you gave me for Christmas. The Catcher In The Rye had escaped the flood-induced mold, the possum that lived here for three days or so, the neighborhood street cats and me. It didn't take up much space and it was, at least for the first half of my life, my favorite book. It was the first Christmas present you ever got me, the second Christmas after we met. You grabbed it real quick from the top, deep part of your closet when I started to walk back in your room. You tied a ribbon around it to give it that Xmassy look when I made noise to let you know I was coming back. You made sure I read the loving caption you signed right under the "San Diego Library" stamp.

You were never insincere. I can honestly say that and for that I am truly grateful.

Something made me want keep your husband's Catcher book. I now felt that I had enough time pass between us and now I had the courage to either call you or go through the box of toxic emotional waste. And so, as luck would have it.....

2:48 PM 11/18/2006