Eight inches

The last of the answers came this morning. Courteous, prompt, and no. Half a year of asking, and what I had wrong the whole time was the shape of the problem. I thought it was money. Money would have been a mercy. Money you can save up for.

There is no drive. Not at a price, not in any condition. The ones that still turn are inside collections, and collections do not lend. I would not lend to me either.

I made the joke in the summer, at a table, the way you do when a search has gone on long enough to become a personality. Half a year of my life and all I want is eight inches. It got the laugh. This morning it came back while I was reading the polite no, and it stuck.

Because it is not a joke, it is a measurement. The thing is wider than my spread hand, and that width is why I am beaten. Nothing built in my lifetime reads a disk that wide, and the people who needed one stopped needing it before I could read.

By evening the anger had gone into my jaw and my hands. I got up twice to do something useful and both times stood in the dark kitchen.

So I went to bed early and dealt with it myself. Jeans on the floor, lamp still on, two fingers on my clit, hard and quick and with none of the patience I write into other people. I was not thinking about a man. I was thinking about a flat black square in a paper sleeve and a head the size of a fingernail that would have all of it inside an afternoon, if one existed anywhere I could reach. It took longer than it should have, because anger is not efficient. When I came it was closer to something giving way than to something arriving, and I lay there with my hand where it was, breathing, the lamp still on.

Afterward I found the pack in the kitchen drawer, left over from some party, and smoked one down to the filter on the balcony. Warm for November, still.

Nothing is solved. The disk is in the drawer in its sleeve, where it has been since I was nine, and the two words are still addressed to somebody who has not turned up.