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.

709 days, 22 hours, 42 minutes, 41 seconds

And, live on the Internet, the cheddar cheese has been aging for 50 days, 1 hour, 16 minutes, 25 seconds, 784 milliseconds. If she drops by the website at ten o'clock any morning she can watch as the 55 pound block of cheese is turned.

711 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 39 seconds

Stopping for lunch in Saratoga, she's lured by a clothing store with a huge sale sign, buys a top way too expensive that she can't resist, discovers her favorite restaurant is reopening soon in another location, grabs a bagel with lox, returns to find her car parked behind a minivan from Alaska with ELF 585 for its license plate. She supposes this is what life is like where we drill for oil.

711 days, 21 hours, 32 minutes, 42 seconds

Did you hear the story about the man who used to walk his dog past the White House every day? Every day he'd pause at the gate and ask if Mr. Bush was home, and every day the guard would tell him that Mr. Bush no longer resides here, Mr. Bush is no longer president. Finally one day the guard got angry and asked why he keeps coming back and asking to see Mr. Bush, when he tells him all the time that Mr. Bush no longer resides here, Mr. Bush is no longer president. And the man responds that he knows, he just enjoys hearing the guard say that over and over. And the guard snaps to attention and says yes, sir, see you tomorrow, sir.

711 days, 22 hours, 8 minutes, 39 seconds

711 days left until Bush is out of office. She can't even write that here without thinking of 9-Eleven. 911 used to be a call for help, but these days they ask people to call 311 if it's not a matter of life and death. 711. Iraq. Afghanistan. It's life and death, Mr. President. Convenience. Every Stewarts, Cumberland Farms, and 7-Eleven with at least two gas tanks out front.

711 days, 22 hours, 11 minutes, 43 seconds

Sick. Eating little. Out drinking with friends. She had friends then, thirty-eight years ago, some of whom she's still close to. But she was coming home sick night after night. The body she'd abused for years getting back at her.

711 days, 22 hours, 24 minutes, 43 seconds

Oh Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven. Don't make her sick. That jingle was introduced in 1969, the year she moved to New York. She didn't own a tv, she didn't listen to radio, she didn't have a car. God knows where or when she heard it. There was a Grand Union (willing to cash checks) and bodegas on every other corner. Those first months, living in a residential hotel, she bought a quarter pound of shrink-wrapped ham or salami, two rolls, and made that lunch and dinner. Once in awhile there was Tad's Steaks, $1.99 for a greasy steak and sensible baked potato. Edible then, as she doesn't think it would be now. Sick. But she was in New York. She was thankful. Don't tolerate, exterminate. That was her father's slogan.

711 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes, 51 seconds

7-Eleven. Convenience. Quick in and out. Open 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. back in 1946, that's how they got the name. But most are open 24 hours now. She would have said they're what she knew growing up in the 50s, but there were no New Jersey franchises until after she left. She knows there was Cumberland Farms, and possibly Stewarts, though Stewarts was only a hot dog stand, with root beer. Now, even in Granville, NY (population less than 7000) there's a 24-hour Price Chopper, with a 24-hour Super K-Mart less than 20 miles away. She stopped there tonight for batteries and garbage bags. Convenience.

712 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes, 38 seconds

Nineteen hours and nineteen degrees out her kitchen window. Once again she's watching frozen soup spin in the microwave. This is all she has to do for the next nine minutes. No red phone on her desk, no red Staples easy button, no Internet, no newspaper, no radio, no war. Make that ten minutes. Still not quite unfrozen, then too hot to eat.

719 days, 10 hours, 15 minutes, 52 seconds

She writes in the cab, headed downtown, the cabbie complaining about patches of ice, and how he can't brake. She writes mostly when they're stopped for lights, so as not to get nauseous. Two things she's always (and often vociferously) hated – political poetry and the day-to-day chatter called Art by the New York School poets. This blog is both.

719 days, 10 hours, 36 minutes, 38 seconds

Bush is in town. His advisors wanted a Wall St. setting for him to talk about the economy and blast the huge bonuses paid on Wall St., the discrepancies between rich and poor. Then, since he's right in the area, he'll drop by Ground Zero. Meanwhile, she has to take a cab down to 12th St., all the way east, and with traffic tied up because of the presidential motorcade, God knows how long it will take, the meter running.

719 days, 22 hours, 49 minutes, 19.2 seconds

This is getting ridiculous, but it's getting later and later, she's sitting reading news stories, absently fingering the anemic ball in her hands, fascinated by its pliability, its overall softness. And she thinks about silicon breast implants: if maybe some men like those better than the real thing, if they might burst and give out a dye like this. Food coloring. Baby's milk. What the hell would a baby do with silicon? In other news today, a farmer's cows suddenly started producing pink milk – traced to the fact that he'd been feeding them a lot of carrots. Those cows went wild for carrots.

719 days, 23 hours, 22 minutes, 17.8 seconds

The gel ball's losing weight. She hadn't quite expected this, thought with that tiny capsule gone it might still retain its thickness if not its color. She's losing weight as well, with nearly ten thousand steps today. She squeezes the ball again, hard, watching the red squirt up almost snake-like, curling around itself. Nothing but food coloring, and way too bright for blood. Years ago, her husband's finger sliced open in a deli, they went to the St. Vincent's emergency room, had to wait and wait (like last night with the computer). Finally a resident came in to stitch it up, and he saw her jump back. Hours later, and still the blood could squirt out and hit her right near the eye. She'd gone to the lobby to get a soda, so she missed the scene. But today she ordered ten more. Balls, not husbands. Don't get her started. It's nearly one a.m. Her defenses are down. Bad puns at this hour are falling as fast as snowflakes. The tv news says it won't amount to much.

720 days, 10 hours, 23 minutes, 26 seconds

Baby Einstein, indeed! It doesn't take a genius to realize that if you've got a small hand exercise ball, and it has dye inside, and you squeeze it hard enough, twist it every which way, eventually that capsule's going to burst, getting red ink all over your fingers. There's a news story she saved years ago, about a robber who realized the bills were marked with a red dye, and that they'd stained his pants. He didn't want to be branded as a robber, so he took his pants off. This was in 1995, when the whole world was more innocent. She finds the article instantly. So parts of this computer still work. She shouldn't trash it. And that ball, once all its dye's run out, might still be pliable. She holds it under warm water, recalling how that eases the blood flow.

720 days, 10 hours, 52 minutes, 29 seconds

Thieves race car through store, the headline reads. Swear to God, and this is CBS News, not some tabloid. A car with two masked men crashed the main entrance, tried to ram through the sliding security grill at the jewelry counter, failed twice, then drove out through an exit on the other side of the building. All she can think is that it must have been an armored car. Probably government surplus. Probably Florida. But no, this happened in Denmark.

720 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes, 21 seconds

And 144 days, 16 hours before the one-year warranty on her computer expires. On the phone yesterday with a Microsoft technician for an hour, him getting her to try installing Explorer again and again and again and again. Then, later, two hours on hold waiting for another tech, she on one phone line, her husband on the other, racing to see which one picked up first. Their two speaker phones blared music in sync. Sometimes even jazz. And her timing's a little better this morning, though she doesn't think minutes and seconds count.