686 days, 1 hours, 6 minutes, 46 seconds

So her husband and his brother and his brother's wife will head down to Florida over Easter, visiting their father and their other brother. Traveling a lot right now, she has the perfect excuse not to join them this year. Especially now that she realizes the airfare alone is costing him nearly $500. She tried to help. She found flights on Orbitz for nearly $200 less, but he couldn't make up his mind, wanted to check other places, and by the time he got back the cheap flights were gone (it said act quickly, only one left, but he refused to believe that). His money. Don't harp on it. Don't turn into the nagging wife. Don't turn into his father.

688 days, 3 hours, 50 minutes, 17 seconds

The woman beside her on the plane back from Atlanta doesn't seem to mind when she puts her coat then her computer on the middle seat, between them. They don't speak until the plane's landed on the tarmac (early) and has to wait before it can get to the gate. The woman asks first if she lives in New York, then says she used to live here, they moved to Atlanta a year ago. Her husband's building was destroyed in 9/11. He applied for a transfer just after that, but it took until last year. She's a reading specialist. The day she found out she'd been promoted to principal was the same day her husband's transfer came through.

She's coming back for a court case, the woman says. A student she taught in middle school seven years ago became a drug addict. Now the mother's suing her – not the school, her – because she taught the class Harry Potter and that was her son's introduction to first magic, then drugs. It was all over the papers seven years ago. The statute of limitations is about to run out. So now she has to spend a week away from her eight-year-old and her two-year-old. Six former colleagues have been called in to testify (two others have since died). And of course if she's cleared of the charges she'll counter-sue.

Stay tuned.

689 days, 13 hours, 1 minutes, 39 seconds

Slightly hurt books, the table at AWP says, selling them for $5 each, no matter what the cost. No matter what the damage, she thinks, not even walking over to take a closer look. This is in Atlanta, home of a Carter museum. But it could be Paris. It could be London. It could be Washington.

695 days, 9 hours, 52 minutes, 19 seconds

A performance artist, in town from London, is crawling Manhattan streets in a suit, knee pads, George Bush mask, and a sign saying kick my ass. Just wanting New Yorkers to feel good, he says. It calls to mind a Halloween parade over a decade ago. A man in a cart was dressed as Jesse Helms and a woman walking alongside him passed out rotten tomatoes for people to throw. It was her first Halloween parade. Clinton was president. Helms was about the worst people could imagine.

695 days, 9 hours, 59 minutes, 39 seconds

It's two o'clock and, if you believe her pedometer, she's taken 695 steps so far today. Not a very auspicious start to weight loss. There have been days when she doesn't even hit the 2,000 mark, and she's never yet made it to 10,000. Sort of a lame duck poet.

697 days, 6 hours, 34 minutes, 33 seconds

No matter what, no matter where, no matter when. It seems like her major computer problems begin after midnight. Long after her father's in bed. He said he was looking forward to retirement so that he could sleep late, but after a month or two he realized the whole day was gone by the time he got up. The whole day, by his standards. She needed to work late and sleep late, to prove her life wasn't his life.

Her husband's usually up until one or two. When she has problems like that he shoves toothpicks in his eyes and tries to help her. The last thing she wants is his help.

697 days, 7 hours, 0 minutes, 51 seconds

She pauses from work for a few minutes to watch her computer disk finish backing up, which still seems the most interesting thing she's done today.

697 days, 7 hours, 15 minutes, 52 seconds

George Bush even punched his father once, her father says. No way he could vote for a man like that.

697 days, 7 hours, 28 minutes, 36 seconds

Four years ago. December, 2002, to be exact. Or maybe November. Just before or just after her birthday (there was a blizzard on the day of that welcome party). She came home to find a message from her father on the machine. Upset not at what she'd written, but what a critic friend wrote about her poems. Most sensitive essay she's read, she told him. She has no right to write about his life, he told her. And she said it was her life, not his. But let's face it, they needed each other. Especially now, with his lady-friend dead also. Him in and out of the hospital. He still reminds her that reviewer should be shot. She still keeps him uninformed about her new work. It doesn't win his praise, anyway, he only knows success in terms of money. He clings to life hoping her novel's made into a blockbuster movie, like The Firm. Which reminds her that Billy Collins is Bush's favorite poet.

697 days, 7 hours, 38 minutes, 46 seconds

Some things are just naturally a waste of time. This new flash computer disk, for instance. Slowest damn write speed she's ever seen. She was up until 6:00 a.m. trying to cope with it, then lay in bed unsleeping. So okay, plan revised: use this for unchanging backup files, keep the old flash disk (too small for all her files) as her main daily backup. Over four years old now. She remembers the day he bought it for her – teaching, then meeting to plan a party for the arrival of a friend's adopted daughter, five or six now. Denting the car on the way. Then this disk wasn't the one she'd planned on buying. But it's served her, perhaps, better than the friend has. People's needs change. People's interests change. We have to set priorities. Sleep, for her, has never been one of them. Cursing every minute of work time sacrificed.

700 days, 22 hours, 50 minutes, 42 seconds

Seven hundred. That's what her blood sugar readings seem like tonight. Two hundred or seven hundred, one's as bad as the next. Before dinner and again at bedtime. The lowest possible dose, her husband reminds her. The lowest common denominator. Sometimes she feels there's just no use in counting.

703 days, 8 hours, 16 minutes, 6 seconds

The mayor decided alternate side of the street parking was in effect yesterday. After all, there were only two inches of snow. And the streets had to be cleaned. No room for wimps in this city.

703 days, 10 hours, 10 minutes, 40 seconds

She's determined to tolerate Glucophage, despite everything seemingly stacked against her – the pharmacy requiring special permissions (from insurance, of course), the doctor insisting he doesn't want generic, the abdominal pains, the possible nausea, the huge snow mounds, the uncut corners, the possible loss of appetite. Other meds might make her gain weight, she's told. And this is only at bedtime. Two weeks and most of the side effects should vanish. There were none at all the first night, though she lay there imagining her stomach coiling into fists. She's got to tolerate Glucophage, has to make its lowest dose work for her, has to prove she cares enough, loves enough, trusts enough, is trustworthy, is worthy of love. Don't tolerate, exterminate – her father's words.

704 days, 12 hours, 42 minutes, 58 seconds

Maybe twelve minutes away from seeing the doctor. Diabetes medications start today. Or tomorrow. This is the day she's been dreading for the past five years. But she's past controlling. Three inches of snow on the ground, and it's crippled the city more than a foot normally does. It's insane. Leaving the apartment this morning, she saw a penny on the hall carpet, got as far as the elevator before going back for it. Maybe everyone's luck will change.

705 days, 6 hours, 2 minutes, 20 seconds

A man comes in with a large bouquet of flowers. With coat, scarf, and computer case, it's hard to know what to do with them. She recalls another man she saw with flowers. It was in October 2000, at the airport, in Minneapolis, and they'd missed the connecting flight. These were for the lady back home, a single rose. They chatted on the van to the hotel -- he, she, her husband, and two Arab pilots they picked up at the Mall of America.

705 days, 6 hours, 15 minutes, 40 seconds

As Hamlet would say, the play's the thing. Still, they like to eat well. She orders wine, gets the bread, waits for him. A Valentine's Day menu, then the regular menu. Steak, she supposes. Sirloin or rib eye. Outside, on Central Park South, a man delivers flowers. It's early yet. Tulips, not roses, on the table, but at least red tulips. Filet mignon is only on the specials menu. And no chateaubriand. She remembers, forty years ago, the country restaurant and the boy-man who tried to teach her this steak for two was what love is.

705 days, 23 hours, 20 minutes, 41 seconds

Valentine's Day. And off to another roaring start. Remember the Tylenol murders? That's all she can think of. The first person killed was a woman at her fiancé's mother's house. It took months for people to believe that he (or his mother) hadn't been trying to kill her. And she doesn't know what to believe. That he was out of vitamins, yes. That she ran out of the Tylenol in her purse, yes, but that was because he kept taking them. Then she saw the bottle on the kitchen counter. A pale brown capsule, not the expected red and yellow, but it said something about a new, quick-dissolving formula. It certainly wasn't quick yesterday. Unstoppable headaches sucking out all her energy, she could barely hold her head up. How easily the body remembers. And if, as he insists, these were the vitamins he'd kept in his suitcase, why didn't they at least give her energy? Ultra Man vitamins. At midnight he hands her sugar-free Godiva chocolates. Her voice sticks in her throat as she tries to say I love you.

706 days, 8 hours, 41 minutes, 15.2 seconds

This pedometer screws up. If it's not placed exactly on the hip, it might not count the steps. Thus a walk to the mailbox on Broadway, stopping in the bagel shop for a low-carb muffin, doesn't count. And sometimes longer walks, such as yesterday morning. She can't be checking and rechecking it every minute, especially when she has her coat on. But she walks fifteen steps in the apartment, watches it count eight or nine. Other times it seems to count more steps than she realized. Going to the bathroom, pulling down her pants then pulling them up again, counts as two steps. Standing up from her typing chair then sitting down again doesn't count, then counts two steps the second time, one step the third time. So she supposes she has to accept it all as just an average. And she looks again at the Backwards Bush clock.

707 days, 4 hours, 35 minutes, 17 seconds

Four hours, thirty-five minutes until VD Day. The countdown begins. All the large pink and red animals have disappeared from the window of Duane Reade downstairs. Computer sites warn not to open any email that even hints at love.

707 days, 4 hours, 55 minutes, 9 seconds

She thinks she's okay, with both hardware and software firewalls, plus the antivirus updated every other day. Today she feels like shit. She takes Tylenol. She runs all three spyware checks.