Origins

Yesterday would've been nine years, though I very much doubt she ever would have made it twelve even if we somehow hadn't drifted as we did. I'm terrible at remembering birthdays, it's true - but this was one of those dates important to me. Back then, sure, but even now in preserving memory and the sense of from where I've come.

There are two conversations we've shared in particular that I think of most often. The first, in the laundry room on a break from school - how we remember things: for you, emotion creates memory; for me, it's the big physical acts (though with the caveat that emotion often as not creates the need for those acts...). I thought of that this morning - and if I can't quite still remember every mile of every race I've run, it must be close. The second of those conversations may well have been on the same break; we were laying on the floor at the bottom of the steps, and you were admitting envy of what I had with her. 'With the right woman,' you said, 'maybe I'd feel whole.' I remember thinking then it was the saddest thing I'd ever heard; when we split, eight years shy of that twelve-year arrangement, I wondered if in some ways it wasn't harder on you than it was on me, such had your faith in us been.

I still think about those conversations regularly, the two places where it feels like we are most different. I understand just enough enough to realize those conversations even less now than I ever thought I did then. And I wonder what you'd say in each of those conversations now.

But: women. She tells me a now mutual friend's posited that my heart was crushed by that largest implosion; I don't disagree, but neither do I comment. Those months are a thing I remember well - all those miles I ran, trying to forget - but it is what it is, something I don't much care to think about anymore, like the 'l' word or even the 'r' word. Trying to scare off an aggressively interested acquaintance here, I told her I was seeing someone; it felt as much a matter of convenience as not correcting my landlord when she asked 'so where's your girlfriend live again?' I wonder regularly what it is I'm doing at whatever intersection this is; I think maybe I lost my way, but that would imply I knew where I was trying to go. Fact: I didn't, still don't.

Another friend's going on her second year of something similar, she loving him and he liking her and all of it comfortable and fun and going completely nowhere. She's frustrated always, says 'I have to break up with him when he gets back!,' but never does. I'm playing with fire again, probably. A line I've loved more than most others: I'm simply a pyromaniac with a fear of fire; all that rushing blood's been known to get me in trouble. This - its second use - couldn't be more different than the first.

I've no idea if I'm writing less and saying more or saying more and writing less or even, for that matter, what the story is. I don't know how to say whatever it is I'm trying to say, which seems to be the case always as of late. I've realized, reading back, that the two periods in which I had my words most were also the two messiest - a troubling thought given that now, when in many ways my life is calmest, do I identify as a writer most. I've been stuck the better part of a month that was due two weeks ago. The prompt? Origins.

One more line I'll use a second time: Nothing starts, nothing ends. Everything starts, everything ends. In some situations I can't help but wonder if nothing isn't precisely everything.