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I almost got a kitten in the black market when Todd and Michael and I went there. Oh dear, said Todd when I said I wanted to see if there were kittens. And there was one, a grey one with blue eyes and I wanted to take it home and after one second I said I have to go RIGHT NOW because I am leaving all July and that would not be responsible but it must be so hot and uncomfortable in the cage it shared with the turtle. The photos Todd took that day were amazing. Such sunlight. The black market is a bunch of shaded booths now, everyone erecting sheets against the sun, so that it could have been in Thailand. Sun all over the black pantyhose, and that color soaked it up like velvet. There was a monk ringing a bell amid the knockoff Prada sunglasses and baby phat shirts, holding the head of a kneeling guy. Blessing him I guess.

The sun is coming whitely through the windows. It's the first Sunday afternoon I have taken to write in a long time. Blood is leaving my body in bits and pieces, couches for the baby that will not be.

It's strange being in such an odd place for such a long time--strange in that it isn't strange, though I know that if two weeks in Russia would make me wonder on the floor in Brooklyn at the fantasia I had just been inside of, over a year in Mongolia will seem a long dream, an endless acid trip or coma where you dream of pink clouds while your diabetic body flips the fuck out.