The loud music from the video flashes broken light and color sprays; faces change, lips expand and stretch across the screen, baring yellow teeth sparkling tobacco stains.  The bartender quickly slides from one end to the other, reaches below him, then  pours vodka in a long, thin stream into a
glass.
 Franklin, attractive in a blue sweater, gazes into her eyes.  I stare at them, but cannot approach.
 Fields of green blow against yellow pollen.  Voices echo.  Silence.  A young couple runs with the wind and settles amidst the mustard blossoms.  The band plays loud and hard behind the screen. The couple entwine, get up, then run toward the rocky cliffs above the ocean.  They stand apart, the wind gusting, the band playing.  Fading.
 Franklin touches her hand as she places her glass on the counter.  He holds it there for a beat then raises his glass.
 And here at this table, I watch them.  Do they see me?  I stare at them, but  am afraid.  Afraid for Albert.  Afraid of myself.  I follow a dead dream, yet I feel it strong.  I feel it between my arms, through my breasts, and into my heart.
 --Would you like another drink, Gloria?  smiles Franklin.  She nods.  He looks up to catch the tender's eyes.  Two more drinks.  They talk.  About my Albert?  Oh!
 Music beats numb time.  The patterns change; dancers sway uncontrollably.  Whale smooth skin glides in the current.  Breath holes open, close, open to spout their mist.  Waves unbroken undulate blue beats.  A left winged seagull soars wildly then slowly glides to a stop.
 He raises his glass; she hers.  Clink.  Sip slow.  Through the glasses the dancers bend, separate, break into prismed colors and reform.
 I watch myself approach.  They will be kind until I leave.  He will look up and smile.  My face will melt red and hot.  I will invite them over.  I need to hear myself tell the story.  Again.
 But Franklin will only look at me with his green eyes.  Tuesday at ten a.m., Martha.  We can't talk now, he will say.   Gloria will look down, impotently sympathetic.  And I will go home alone, past the dancing bodies, through the numbing beat, and try to absorb some of its novicane before I plunge into the dark.
 At home I fix a sandwich to eat the loneliness away.  I leave the house silent.  There is no music but the echo of the beat I heard in the bar.  I do not turn on the television.  I put red dye in my hair and stand beside the window.  In my mind I watch Franklin and Gloria twist into each other and roll themselves like soft dough baking in each other's warmth.  They rise and fall, heating from the inside out, baking well formed sweetness.  Their ecstasy must fill my mind.
 My head begins to hurt.  I try to concentrate on the brightness of the  moon, but the red dye rolling down my face, down my body, down my legs to the floor, reminds me of the absence of my Albert.  My head cracks open and I fall into the wet puddle, sobbing large red tears, wishing I was in the office telling Dr. Franklin.
--When I was little, I used to get nose bleeds.  My mother would get upset at the sight of the blood and send me to my room where I was supposed to sit in the corner until I dried up.  Fifteen years later, Albert found me in a corner of the library where I hid my first nose bleed in years from the intruding stranger.
 --But somehow he calmed me with his gentle eyes.  I put down the Edourd Monk anthology and followed him out of the library into the sunny streets where we walked and talked very little until we stopped at the edge of the ocean.  We watched silently together as the slow drifting tide beat endlessly against the concrete platform.  My nose had stopped bleeding.  I turned to him.  He smiled into me, then disappeared.
 Franklin's eyes sparkle green, like Albert's.
 --What happened then?  he coaxes.
 --Several weeks passed without him.  I got up each day, went to work at Miller Elementary, recycling the art projects from the last year's teacher.  I was still afraid to create my own, or couldn't create anything new--I often don't know if I can't  or won't.  But everyday after school, I'd go to the ocean front hoping to see him.  He didn't come.
 --One Thursday night I decided it was time to devise a new art project for the kids, one they had never seen.  I had graduated from art school less than a year and a half before, and though after nine months trying unsuccessfully to be a creative artist and  having had to take a job as a teacher, still, I knew there must be something  in my mind.  Some new thought.  Some new idea.
 --I sat for hours, staring out the window, feeling stupid, thoughtless, uncreative.  I began to feel myself falling into that familiar pit.  A pit I was often trapped inside of since I had left school.
Nothing mattered.  I had nothing to contribute and even if I did, it wouldn't have meaning--it would have no purpose.
 --I lay down on my back, desperate.  I lifted my head.  I let it drop and felt it bounce against the wooden floor.  I lifted it again, higher, and let it drop harder.  I pulled my head up by the strength of my neck, feeling the anger constrict my breath, and pushed my head against the floor.  I pulled it up
and pushed it down  and pulled it up and pushed it down so many times I began to choke in the blood that was gushing from my nose.  I lay back, exhausted, in pain, sobbing uncontrollably.  I couldn't get up.  Help me, I mouthed.  Help Me!  I wanted to scream at myself!  Help Me Goddamnit!  I looked up into Albert's eyes.
 I become aware of the office, the chair I am sitting in, Dr. Franklin's long fingers, his arms, his shoulders, then his face, and his eyes.  I become aware of the echo of my voice and try to walk bravely out of the office into the alien streets.
 The week is very long, very quiet, very lonely.  One night I dye my hair purple, and several nights I go to my favorite bar where I wait for the evening to fold into the deep arms of late night where my slumber cloud will envelop me.
We are back in the office.  We refresh the last week's hour.  Then he asks,
 --What happened next?
 Franklin looks at me with deep green eyes.  Eyes of Albert.  Coaxing and relaxing.  I melt into them, remembering.
 --I couldn't take my failure at not being able to create a new lesson for the kids.  I'd been repeating art lessons the students had done for years.  I felt especially sorry for the mothers with more than one child at school, mothers who had to hang their second, third, fourth glittered silhouette on their bathroom walls, fill their third wooden note pad with paper, or litter their coffee tables with their umteenth ceramic ashtray, trying neither to fill it with cigarettes they tried not to smoke, nor candy which they no longer wished to tempt themselves.
 --I tried to voice a new idea, yet there was nothing but the echo of my pounding head against the floor. Finally, Albert eased into the throbbing numbness and settled there for a moment, then gently smoothed the hair back from my face.  He looked into my eyes, closed them, kissed the lids and
took my hands.  You need to get away, he told me without words.  You need to go where ideas are formless, where you can be free to feel  the world around you, where words don't matter.
 I stop.  We are silence in the office.
 --Did you go away?
 --Yes.
 --By yourself?
 --No.  He didn't get in the car, but I knew Albert was coming camping with me.
 --Where did you go?
 --I went to a spot I knew Albert would love.  A secret place of mine in the redwood forest near the ocean.  It's peaceful and quiet there: a place where I always feel so alone yet alive among the trees.  If you walk a mile and half through the forest, you come to jutting cliffs above a turbulent sea.  When I stand on those cliffs I feel truly free.  They're magnificent and the sea below them is strong and determined.  The wind sails in gusts like the giant spinnakers of sailboats racing through the ocean.  The roar of the surroundings fills me speechless.  On the cliffs I never have need, nor
feel like I should have need to word ideas.  I'd never wanted to share this spot with anyone before--it was so special to me, yet I wanted Albert to see it.  I knew he wouldn't take it away from me.
 I notice Franklin's black shoes and am startled for a moment.  I look up, but then I see his eyes.
 --Are you afraid I will take it from you?
 I cannot voice an answer, but shake my head "no."  There is silence.
 --Are you afraid to trust me, Martha?
 I feel tears hot inside my eyes, my jaw tightens.  I let Franklin's eyes draw out my words.
 --I was alone that whole first night.  Albert didn't show up.  I ate bread and cheese and drank luke warm soup from my thermos.  I went to bed and watched the stars fall through the swaying arms of the trees.  I didn't think, didn't feel, didn't care.  Nothing layered onto nothing and closed me into
sleep.
 --In the middle of the night I woke and watched the flaming tail of a comet burn to black.  And then I realized how much it hurt to be alone without a thought to comfort me.  I tried to bring my sketch pad out but was afraid I had no ideas to draw.  I lay awake, staring blankly into the sky, digging my nails into the flesh behind my shoulders on my upper back, trying hard to create a feeling, trying to experience something.  There was pain but no ideas.  I kept digging harder and harder until I could feel the skin ripping under my nails.
 --When the sun peeked up through the dark, I got out of my sleeping bag.  I took off my shirt and the cold morning air burned my freshly scraped skin.  I put on clean clothes and had some bread and cheese, fearing that if I didn't eat, there'd be literally nothing inside me.
 I got to the cliffs and began to run.  I ran and ran and ran high atop the razor edge.  The sea below crashed and boomed.  The wind tried to push me backwards but I ran against its force, pushing and pounding myself forward.  The ground turned rocky, cracked and broken up by pot holes from some past storm, but I kept running, trying to feel the pain, trying to awaken my creative soul.
I felt tears stream across my face and pushed harder, faster, feeling like I'd never stop when suddenly my foot hit a small boulder and I went hurtling along the edge and smashed into a pile of jagged rocks, sharp and unweathered.  I tasted blood and reached to my face, touched my nose,
and felt the blood thick on my fingers.  I looked up... to Albert. He kneeled down to hold me.  He let me cry in his arms.
 Franklin's eyes sparkle.  I want to touch him.  Want him to hold me.
 --I'm sorry.  We'll have to stop.
 --Thank-you, I say, and leave.
 Outside is shocking.  There are people in the streets.  They seem so separate--separated like yokes in whites in one hard impenetrable shell.  I walk by them as they roll by each other and I reach into my bag for my mirrored sunglasses.
 --Today we are making ceramic ash trays, I tell the students.  There is little response.
 I hand out the clay.
 After school, a long walk to the ocean front.  I am not hungry but I fill up along the way with two butter croissants, an ice cream cone, a turkey sandwich, and a soda which I drink while walking.
 The ocean front is quiet, save the seagulls squawking and an old man with a quivering lip who pecks through the garbage and slurps from a dirty milk carton.  I look away.  Green eyes.  Oh.  I'd like to paint them on a canvas.  But I wouldn't be able to.  I shove a clenched fist deep into my pocket.
 --Hello Martha.
 --Hello Dr. Franklin.
 A long pause.  I clutch anger into the arms of the chair.
 --How are you feeling?
 --Fine.
 --Fine?
 I look to his black shoes.  Silence.
 --How was your week?
 --Where is Albert?  Months have passed since I met you and still I can't find him.  I come to you to remember.  I tell you of my encounters with him to relive our life together, but he is gone  Dr. Franklin, and you are not helping me.  You treat Albert's disappearance as a triumph.  But it is a failure.
 --Tell me more.
 --I miss him.
 I try hard to concentrate on his shoes.  I do not want to look into those eyes.  They are the eyes of a man who has swallowed a man--they are eyes that know but will not tell.
 The silence begins to grow uncomfortable.  I will hold out.  Finally he asks,
 --When did you last see Albert?
 --You know the answer.
 --Not completely.
 His words coax me into confession.  The same warm tone that drew the first truths from me months ago when he asked why there were bruises on my face.  They had given me an ultimatum at school, I had told him--To get therapy or stop teaching there.  They didn't say why but it was obvious that my lacerations were frightening the children and that the staff was worried, and convinced, that I was being beaten by a drunken boyfriend or father.  I needed to pay my rent and I needed to find Albert O.--the bloody noses weren't making him appear any longer--so I agreed to call the number they had given me.
 --Go on, he eases.  By talking we can learn more.
 I look to his green eyes, startled for a moment.  I feel as if Dr. Franklin knows, yet somehow doesn't mind the repetition of the story.  Like Albert, he is comforting to be with.  I begin to tell the story out loud.
 --I decided one night that I needed to clean out my apartment.  I hadn't been creating anything and the pain of stagnation was burning me.  I was afraid to let myself cry again, I'd been crying so much I was frightened I would completely drain myself of anything inside.  I began to search through
drawers, journals, sketchbooks and scraps in hopes of finding some spark to ignite imagination rather than hatred.
 --I remember consciously trying not to think about Albert.  I had seen an old friend from art school the day before.  She asked about the bruise on my face and I cowered in shame.  The bloody noses weren't even bringing Albert back.  I knew I  had to stop.
 --But while I was digging through the past, I kept finding things I wanted to share with him even though he was so beautiful and I knew it would hurt me to show him my ugliness.  I searched through piles, quietly hoping to find an unfinished painting, perhaps one I could now complete.
 --The junk was somewhat overwhelming.  Little scraps and fragments of so many unfinished sketches fell to the floor, like dry leaves about to decompose.
 --I began to feel disgusted with myself.  Not only was I not liking any of the fragments--so many things I had once begun but never finished, I was sickened by the idea of trying to finish something already started rather than create something new.
 --It was when the first tears began falling that I found my sketch book from my first semester at art school.  I opened it up and stared down at a red and black charcoal drawing I had done my first night away from home.
 --For a long time I sat and stared.  I didn't want to read the picture, I just wanted it to be a bunch of random lines.  To most people it would have been.  But as I stared, the tears rolling from my eyes getting hotter, I saw on the right, the black lines of my father falling down a steep cliff towards the rocky shore, and a spot of a sail boat distant on the sea.  On the left, I saw my mother in the corner, a lighted cigarette in one hand and a fiery red frying pan raised in the other.  I saw my little brother strapped to his high chair, screaming, and me, four years old, holding a bottle of warm milk to ease his cries.  In the middle of the picture, a small red pool sat quietly--perhaps the most noticeable yet ignored point in the picture, incomprehensible to the teacher and the students, dismissed as a mistake in class--yet to me, the deepest and most poignant pool in my life.
 --Many minutes passed.  I felt the hot tears against my face.  I reached up, my sharp nails extended.  I wanted to dive into that pool and swim its bloody comfort once again.
 --I'm not sure exactly what happened.  I think I might have fainted.  I woke up and Albert was softly wiping the blood from my face.
 I look at Franklin and though I try to avoid it, to the face of the clock.
 --It is time to stop?
 --Yes.
 I am terrified but I ask,
 --Can we find Albert O.?
 --We will talk next week, says the Doctor.
 Sometimes the nights are almost too lonely, but I'm finding ways to cope.  I've recently begun calling my old friends  now that my face has healed, but tonight, no one is home.
 I go to a movie, a pleasure I have rediscovered in the recent months.  I had  hoped Albert would become my movie companion.  But now, after months of seeing Dr. Franklin and realizing Albert may never reappear, I have learned to find comfort in a movie theater, alone.
 The theater is dark, cool, verging on cold.  Not many people have come to see this film.  It is a new release but its subject is that of struggle.  I choose my favorite place, on the right aisle of the center set of seats and watch the waves of red curtain sway in the air conditioned current.  I have popcorn in my lap and though I am not hungry, I eat  rhythmically, hoping the film will start before I reach the bottom of the container.
 Sometime near the end of the movie, I hear whispers and turn my head to see whose voices they are.  I see Franklin and his girlfriend I have named Gloria from the start.  They are cuddling.  He must have been answering a question.  His green eyes sparkle, warm and knowing, through the theater.  I try to watch the end of the film but see only the pulse  of deep green eyes.
 I feel afraid to go home alone right now so I go to my favorite bar where colored lights prism against a background of hanging tapestries; where dancers, inebriate and loose, swing and sway with abandoned ease; where a screen above the bar counter flashes digital tones.  I hold my sketch pad.  In here no one can tell it is blank.
 As I watch the video, the real people in the room, the cigarette smoke curling through the air, and the lingering images of the movie I have just seen, the blankness of my sketch pad begins to seem absurd.  I am drawn by the motion of color, line and composition.  My hands quiver.  And then I watch them.
 He wraps his arm around her waist, whispers in her ear.  I can hear her giggle, hear her lips press against his cheek.  They hold their glasses high then clink them together.  I hear the chiming of a crystal bell.  Dancers, lights, and colors rise above them then push out between them like a school of colored fish, scattering.
 I hold back the urge to approach, to interject myself into their wave of passion.  Franklin's eyes sparkle the sea.  The music rushes in and carries them out to the dance floor.  I watch for several minutes, but then am drawn out into the stream.
 My body strokes the beats.  I am an eel against the tapestries of spring.  I am lost in the electric echo of sound and reverberation.  The music gets louder, my body moves faster.  The floor is filling with bodies moving quickly.  I am pushed and pulled against them.  I catch Franklin's green eye sparkle, and twirl away into the deep center of the crowd.  The music beats faster.  Waves roll upon each other in a mad frenzy of power pushing onto itself.  I twirl from the green sparkle, hope he does not see me, and madly thrust into the rapid movement of the bass beat.  I feel a sharp pain splinter against the middle of my face as I watch a flying elbow loop the rhythm and land by a large man's side.
 My face hurts.  The pain stars out from the center of my nose.  I feel a warm thick liquid run over my lips into my mouth, and as elbows fly, I quickly scurry from the crowd before Franklin might see me, notice the blood, and swim to help me.
 I grab my empty sketch pad, run as fast as I can several blocks away from the bar, and finally collapse at the base of a hazy yellow street lamp.  I sit a long moment, feeling the blood from my nose slowing.  I hear voices approaching, they sound familiar, and looking up, I see a green sparkle.  Franklin holds Gloria close as she lays her head upon his shoulder.  They walk past me,
absorbed by the night.
 I sit beneath the waterfall of lamplight.  A twinge begins to resonate inside me.  I reach out to feel the light.  I do not want Albert, Franklin, green eyes, nor pools of blood.  I want to voice the past, shatter my inner silence, and paint together the scattered fragments.  I want to draw ink, not blood.
I reach into my pocket for a tissue and a pen, and stroke the paper under the pale mist of the night.