18:04 - January 01, 2003
a year
I keep fading away in my memories of him and then having them return with a vengeance. A painful heavy vengeance. What I need to do is to hide this stuffed black folder in a better spot. The drawer of the desk won't do anymore, not since I've been back home roaming around and searching for relics; this isn't the kind of relic I wanted, not really. Just now I curled up in a beanbag chair I haven't sat in since I was ten, with the new heating pad for my leg given to me for Christmas and lost myself in him again. Nothing has changed. We are still indescribable.

I was smothering and I was dramatic and I was juvenile and I hovered. I was someone I would gladly shove down an elevator shaft now if I were to meet me. How did I do that? How could I have even possibly wanted to speak to someone, and not just speak, but pour my heart out to them, every single DAY? If this were required of me now it would be like a gas soaked rag over my mouth. It would make me sick and it would drain me of whatever I would have had. I can't remember now what it must have felt like to be so full.

He, though not short on faults by any means, was very level. He was so easy to hate and so easy to love. But most of all he was so easy to talk to. When something would happen which under normal circumstances would induce taking a break, I'd just want to talk it out. This is not me. The only thing I can relate to that now is always needing closure and wanting to turn away with the most accurate face put forward. But now I'm willing to just shut up, and I actually prefer it most times. How could we have forced so much into so little time and space? No wonder he would disappear. He couldn't breathe anymore. I don't know how I could.

This is the true mystery, really, how he either made me more truly myself than I've ever been or how he made me someone else entirely. I'm trying to not look down on it, but just to look at it. I am reading my own words, and I don't think like that.... don't think I ever thought like that. Though even if I hadn't thought like that I might have said I did, or wanted to think like that for some reason completely unbeknownst to me, since it now feels (despite all attempts not to) so YOUNG and STUPID on my end, and sometimes on his. Two years ago is what I'm on. I think I felt the same way then, or at least I remember feeling the same way then, but I must be wrong. It doesn't make sense.

My mind is here in that I miss him so much. I almost start believing in it all again. I go back to having no doubt in my mind that he existed, as close to who he said he was as it was possible to be, considering the circumstances, and if I were to drive up there into those snowy mountains in my car, the same old car with the falling off roof, he'd be there, tangible and maybe even smiling. My mind is here in that it isn't empty. He and I filled it up without even trying. It would spill over into sleep and it would still be there the next morning. My mind is here in that if I had a chance to have this friendship again, I would hope that I would know how to be better at it, better enough so I wouldn't look back and cringe. The cringing is outdone though by the smiling and the laughing so hard I punched through the cloth outsides of the beanbag chair and the styrofoam cubes spilled out. Everything good outweighed everything bad. At least to me. Maybe not to him. The only thing I almost still don't believe in is his ability to be honest if it weren't the same for him.

My mind is here in that I miss him so much. (reprise)
reprise.
reprise.

it's been a year.
come back.

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