There's a reason I never checked out certain blogs, never searched for them with any real zeal.

Even on our best days, I wanted you to have a venue where you could write freely, without the feeling that you had to edit yourself because I was looking over your shoulder. Not that you didn't have alternate fortresses of solitude, but if I could keep a writing venue viable for you by staying away from it then I would have done something good by you. There was time, I had thought back then, and other means to cherish your thoughts, to know you better.


Because I've seen dissolutions like this happen before, seen firsthand how friends burn these bridges, wall up these avenues while leaving them completely open to other people. It's a knife wound knowing that they mean to keep you out-- the twisting and the serrations exist when there's a significant part of you lodged in those places and you can't get to them anymore.

There are reasons to stop by these places now though. It's just that I'm feeling that funny familiar queasy feeling, this knowing exactly what I'll find when I do.

* * *

If there's a reason I gravitate toward certain famous historically screwed-up dead people, it's because they know what this is like intimately. They also spent long nights wide awake thinking and writing and writing till it annoyed the bejeezus out of everyone or until they pissed off the Pope. (One of them died in the small hours, with a pen in his hand and I expect I'll go pretty much the same way.)

I'm thus ambivalent about posting this on the message board. It's not a rant, no (you don't exactly see me yelling.)

But it's something I feel you should know.

That, and this simple truth-- Yes. I still do. I have, albeit shakily, since our first date. Always.