Why have I been less compelled to post here lately? There's so many possible explanations.

I've been very busy.

And I haven't wanted to go completely public with the things I've been busy with.

Because I'm afraid of failure, it seems-- of people asking me how something's going, and my waffling around my own way of saying it's not, not anymore. Anything big I plan to accomplish, I try to keep it a secret. Except that nearly everyone I talk to anymore already knows about this.

But what about the people I hope still read this, whom I don't talk to anymore?

And are they the reason I don't post at all? Because I have too much pride to admit any secret pain, in case they are reading? Or, more likely, because I'm too afraid that if I go out on a limb to put it out there, they'll never read it.

Maybe I'm not sad enough lately-- no pained inspiration.

Or maybe I'm so sad, so lonely and hopeless and spent that I can't even bare to think about it. This seems to hit home. There's a visual in my mind of the sand rushing through an hour glass, except how it looks from the top, falling through a hole you can't even see until the chamber is nearly empty.


I miss a lot of people. I don't have the strength to hide their names with clever references or hard-to-follow descriptions. I don't have the vanity anymore to pretend that anyone out there is piecing the puzzles together, trying to figure out who's who. But I still have too much pride to call them by their names. Trying so hard to play hard-to-get. Having become convinced that it's my eagerness to be with other people that makes them so disinterested in being with me, like a song that played at the concert Zack and I went to tonight. "You were looking for your distance and sensing my resistance."

It was Indigo Girls with Brandi Carlile, part of the L.L. Bean free concert series. One song was introduced as being "From Emily", and I was thinking that might have been the name of it instead of just who it was from-- didn't know, as I'm not more than a passing fan-- that Emily is the name of one of the two of them. Anyway, figuring that if it was called "From Emily", Emily would know that, I called her number and just held the cell phone up for a few minutes, hoping she'd hear it and piece it together that I was thinking of her. In reality, it probably just came off as really, really annoying. This is life.

Another song in the earlier evening caught my attention, and brought my thoughts to another person. Brandi Carlile, opening, ended her set with Hallelujah, and a ridiculously beautiful rendtion at that. I couldn't help but be effected, and though about dialing another familiar number, but there was no way to ask for Zack's phone with any amount of tact. He sensed the change in my atmosphere, though, and asked if I was okay. "It's our song." I told him. Then looked up, "Not ours."

"I know." He told me.

"I'm sorry."

"Why?"

"Do you know whose song it is?" I asked.

"I don't want to know." He said, keeping it simple, and light. Had this been a test, and it might have been, scores like these would have me convinced that this particular pupil was an emotional genius. Then other times, when he comes to class with his homework carved into his arm, I have to rethink.


He doesn't read this, not much, not unless I ask him to. I guess that could be a lie, but I don't think it is-- the way I figure it, reading this makes him feel the way reading his poetry makes me feel: when you read the work of someone this close to you, you never know what you're going to find out about yourself, whether it's there in the words, or, more often, in your own reaction to them.

When I heard Brandi Carlile's single, "The Story", the first time on the episode of Grey's Anatomy that launched it like "Chasing Cars" and "How to Save a Life" before it, the jury was really out for me about whether or not I liked her-- something about her look, as if it's relevant, and her voice. Something strange. It only took her one song tonight to convert me.


On another music-and-people note, they've been playing a bad Dean Martin version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" at work a lot lately. Clearly, there's no escaping your past.

As if the dreams I have once a week or so that everything was alright again with that particular memory weren't enough to prove that.

In my dreams, he shows up out of nowhere, and we fall into each other's arms without hesitation, and instantly, all is forgiven. All that was his fault, all that was mine. This is the reunion my subconscious wants for me, this pure, generous, unselfish forgiveness. This "love means never having to say your sorry" cliché.

Because, it occurs to me, that's what the most fundamental part of me feels should be, in situation like ours, with a friendship like ours. Was.


Ah, but it's cold outside.


On with it.