A memory. A regret. A hope.

The taste in my mouth right now is burnt coffee, as best I can identify it. It is beyond bitter. Roasted, burned, smoky, hot bitterness.

I am standing in the doorway and I block none of it. I am thin. Frighteningly thin. More so than 1998, more than I ever imagined I could be. It is a frail thin, not a powerful healthy thin. Wasting away. I stand in the doorway looking towards a road that is atypically quiet and untraveled. It winds away from the house, from the doorway where I stand.

I am wearing Old Gringo cowboy boots under an ankle-length brown skirt that rustles in the sporadic summer breeze. A loose, ill-fitting white t-shirt skims over the shape of me. What's left of me. I stare at my toes for a minute, then pull my eyes back to the road.

The sun sets and still I stand here. I am rooted in this place and I refuse to yield. I will stare at this road until it changes, until it rises to meet the threshold I am standing on, until I can step from this doorway onto a road that takes me where I need to go instead of circling back and around again to the same ol' place I'm standing.