"The law of averages maintains there must be other people out there like me."

I have written and rewritten this next post so many times I don't even remember what I was trying to say.

I just had a really amazing experience of knowing someone wonderful. Someone who was so like me, someone who made me laugh and renewed my faith in intelligence and caring. Someone I already miss, someone I feel somehow smaller, less without. One of the things that brought us closer when I asked these two questions - "What do you fear most?" and "What do you dream?"

My answer to the latter was I dream of the end of the world. Of an apocalypse. I dream of the coming plague, the sun dissolving on the horizon, of reality falling away like puzzle pieces to reveal another reality beneath. I dream of utter horror and loneliness and I dream of the world reborn. Mostly I dream of knowing it will end, that the power of a thousand suns will be released on earth, that what we have created will end us, and we will die in a nuclear holocaust, or worse survive.

But that's not what I fear, it's what I dream. When I asked what you fear most, I didn't have an answer to my own question. But now I know.

And even saying it turns my spine inside out, knowing who helped me find the answer turns my heart to shadow because what happened between us made it even more likely to be true.

I fear being alone. Not temporarily. I love living alone, I love being on my own. I love dancing in my car, staying up curled around trashy disposable fiction, passing hours on my own. What I fear most lead me to ask what I wanted most. And what I want most is a family. A partner to share my life with, someone committed to seeing the next day with me, and the next. And the next. Someone who knows me, is overwhelmed by love for me and the whole world, and maybe wants to adopt a kid with me. And we have friends.

That's what I want most. Stupidly simple. Maybe just stupid. Because I can't do it on my own. You can't have a dream that depends on someone else because there's no guarantee that it can happen. In fact, the law of averages maintains it cannot happen. And so that's what I fear most, dying, leaving this world, and not having had that.

A Message

I want to scream my throat raw, collapsing in the street. I want to say I feel nothing, to laugh at the mention of your name. I want to saw away at ice for hours before I find your face, surrounded by a shimmering blue halo. Instead there is only an echo, an ache. I wake up, your name on my lips, and feel (instead of anger) only want.

I turn your kindness and comments over and over again, shuffling what was said and unsaid.

Even now, I only wish for the silence before your nervous laugh.

What New Orleans was Really Like

Of course, it was wonderful, squeaks the plastered smile.

I wrote this while I was there.

I could die here and no one would know for days. Maybe I already have. I wasn't able to resist, hooked one heel over the railing and leaned...

I am in a sort of limbo, clearly neither heaven nor hell. There are too many beautiful things here - exquisite snuff bottles etched with bats and butterflies, but it is a sort of hell, each room and restaurant as faceless and unfamiliar as the last.

I Never Learn: A Follow-Up to Three Conversations

Here is the problem with resting under the hand that could strike you. Sometimes, most times, it does. Whatever the blow, it is always a shock. The explosion of light upon impact, the bursting of warm metal in the mouth, tasting iron and fear.

Without knowing it, he was

Coaxing out whatever was left, a paper
heart, carefully folded and
Refolded, easily torn
Is as rotten as
silk drapes dropping into dust.

Off to the Big Easy!

I am destined to spend a week in the real Sin City - New Orleans. Three days of work, three days of play. This is my first vacation on my own, so please send me good luck and safety.

I think it'd be a gross simplification to say I have mixed feelings about going. Some say it's the wicked stepsister/evil twin of my beautiful, twisted hometown, Charleston. Some say it plays hostess to a very stylish cocktail party at the end of civilization. I know it's the last place one of my best friends lived. She committed suicide in New Orleans, while we were planning my first visit. I've still never been. Will I wrestle with her ghost or her madness when I'm there? I don't know. When she died I saw her face everywhere, but it's been years, and her features have faded into a haze, I can't pick them out in my mind anymore, much less in a crowd. The reality, the bone-rattling rawness of her death is gone, in it's place only a weight, as cold and immovable as iron.

For SR

The story you told with fluid hands and tumbling awkward pauses killed me long before you died.
When I taste vodka, I kiss your mouth.
I see only your white breast, scented with clove.
How could you have left me with those witless junkies?
Did you think their chatter would be my balm?
I reread your letters, realize you were only there to chronicle the sinking ship.

How Much?

How much can change in a week?

How much? A handful of days that the swift unceasing planet dispenses with in only 7 nights. So much can change. Patrice Lamumba slid from saviour to corpse in as few days. Tulips will fail, their petals turning into a stiff memory of their vivid selves, littering the table below with a fragile shell bursting into colored ash at the touch.

Or, in a week, after the prayer for rain there might be the river running wild over the parched desperate skin of crackling dust.

There might be the chance, the distance, the transparent joy of blooming.

This Fear

That bright ribbon of trust, the delicate thread of sweetness that connects us is so fragile that someone clumsy like me can break it and not even know.

I keep moving forward, knowing that it can't last. Hoping it does.

This relationship can only end in lung cancer.

It's true.

I get weird when something wonderful happens. It makes me very nervous. I can't eat, I can't sleep at night.

No Bravery.

James Blunt's protest song.