Mark's Pages

April 27, 2010:

Sylvia, the tender foundling. Gentle nights, slow, she needed to be held, a lost and lonely child. Later she said, "I've never felt at ease with anyone before. Always I had embarrassment or shame over sex..." We had no birth control and we never made love once.

Sylvia at the kitchen table. She works studiously, chin in hand, using her copy of The Doors of Perception as writing board. German dictionary, Brod's Franz Kafka, a book of African American writers I gave her. Writing letters, essays, a piece on the black men she met in California.

A few hours after leaving she called to say she missed me already.