I miss V, now thirty-two days gone, cigarette in her mouth, glaring at me—why would I miss someone glaring?

The truth about love is that we need it. I wake up and run to the kitchen to call B and then G and then S, and I cry and blow my nose. Later, after teaching undergraduates about epiphanies (rain again), I sit on the gray carpet and lay my nose against my knee and realize I don’t want to be in a relationship. I want family, I want community, I want interdependence, intimacy, security. But I don’t want sex or the expectation of salvation that sex brings up for me.

One day V and I went to the aquarium in Monterey and stood before the glory of jellyfish, floating orange plasma, the water passing through the film. I want that kind of spaciousness, the wind blowing through my skin. Green.

A Latina woman pushing a blue stroller, the baby sucking on a bottle, swinging her legs, being moved to the park. A man on a bicycle, pasty skinned, pedaling across the intersection ignoring the cars as if two tons of metal couldn’t hurt him—is that high self esteem or low self esteem?

The truth about romantic love is that it has little to do with peace or security. This is what I tell myself over and over. Security is illusion, my third therapist keeps teaching me. Peace comes from inside. People change, people die. The people I hate will die and the people I love will die and the people I don’t care about or know or think I’m better than or who think they’re better than me will change and die.

Jim Moe says god can take him anytime. This when we’re in a truck tootling out to Marin for catered food and he won’t put on his seat belt. But, I say, are you ready to live in a wheelchair as a quadriplegic for the rest of your life? Oh, he says. That.

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Nona Caspers’ book of stories Heavier Than Air (University of Massachusettes Press) won the AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Prize. A Book of One Hundred Days will be available from Spuyten Duyvil in Fall 2007. Her work has been honored with a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Grant and Award and a Barbara Deming Grant and Award and has appeared in Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills, among others.

The above is an excerpt of A Book of One Hundred Days.

Other works on Sidebrow: Day Three, Day Ten, Day Eleven, Day Eighteen, Day Twenty-two & Day Twenty-three