The used car quest was ultimately unsuccessful. One gains insight nonetheless. It’s useful to practice haggling, for example, even if the other party refuses to engage participate. Also, it pays to notice tires.
I am back home and wilting on the couch. Beside me is a man whose company today qualifies him for sainthood. On his only free weekend day and for reasons I can barely fathom, my Mister voluntarily returned to the same Beltway purgatory he endures every Monday through Friday. He accompanied me as I waited for mechanics and tracked down Craigslist contacts and passed a fruitless hour in the DMV line and missed the bank by 15 minutes. He fueled himself on my meager supply of diet coke, store-brand hummus, and apples that grew steadily warmer in the August heat of my dying Saturn.
Now that we’ve limped back to my place and collapsed into our frayed knot of disappointment, he offers to stick around for the evening.
This is his big chance. Movie? Sports? Video games? He’s earned more points than I’ll ever be able to repay, and also, my own tank is too tapped for carousing. Such opportunities are rare. We’ve already made our annual trip to a movie theater this year, and the last time we turned on ESPN at his place, Doug Fister was still pitching for the Detroit Lions.
Out of the whole deck of options fanned out in front of him, what lights the spark?
“Let’s go run around JoAnn’s Fabric and buy a bunch of random art supplies, stop by and pick up kabobs, then come back and make stuff.”
And so we do.
The music swirls around us. The dog rests in soft bliss on her blanket. We fall in. We forget to talk.
How do you know you’re in the zone?
You don’t.
It’s when you blink up and out, glance in disoriented wonder at the clock, and feel the curtain fall behind you.
You know when you’ve been there.
And you may think you need a new car.
And you may check the movie listings.
But you also know the only way to get where you really want to go is to immerse yourself in your joy, to create or move or explore your way there.
Play is the ticket.
Surrender, the key.
Shannon E. Williams 
Kissing again, after a long drought of
not kissing—too many kids, bills, windows
needing repair. Sex, yes, though squeezed in
between the minor depths of anger, despair—
standing up amid the laundry
or fumbling onto the strip of rug between
the coffee table and the couch. Quick, furtive,
like birds. A dance on the wing, but no time
for kissing, the luxuriant tonguing of another
spongy tongue, the deft flicking and feral sucking,
that prolonged lapping that makes a smooth stone
of the brain. To be lost in it, your body tumbled
in sea waves, no up or down, just salt
and the liquid swells set in motion
by the moon, by a tremor in Istanbul, the waft
of a moth wing before it plows into a halo of light.
Praise the deep lustrous kiss that lasts minutes,
blossoms into what feels like days, fields of tulips
glossy with dew, low purple clouds piling in
beneath the distant arch of a bridge. One
after another they storm your lips, each kiss
a caress, autonomous and alive, spilling
into each other, streams into creeks into rivers
that grunt and break upon the gorge. Let the tongue,
in its wisdom, release its stores, let the mouth,
tired of talking, relax into its shapes of give
and receive, its plush swelling, its slick
round reveling, its primal reminiscence
that knows only the one robust world.
“Kissing Again” by Dorianne Laux
Oh, to be in the zone!