Sometimes you pace back and forth, desperately trying to find a way to stop time, or to return to yesterday, to relive what you know were some of the best moments in your life — moments that you’re losing with every tick of the clock — moments that will someday seem hazy and surreal at best.

But you always fail. You can’t go back. 🙁

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So I’m done here… I’ll hang around and see what happens for the end of the quarter and mebbe finish my thesis eventually, over the summer or something, but I’m out in the second week of June. Tonight: packing and thinking. I’m going back to SLC; I’ll check on the car, see a couple of people, and hit the road to recover a little, hopefully with a book deal in tow, or if not, to work on one.

2003-2004:

• Said goodbye to the dot-com world forever, leaving my last job in “the industry” in the middle of the night on May 4th. It was hard, like saying goodbye to an old friend that you may never see again. I felt tight with a few people there.
• Spent an academic year studying at the University of Chicago.
• Finished my fifth book while there — the most successful one yet.
• Stood up for Allen at his wedding. Leal and I are the only two bachelors left in our generation.
• Helped to preserve and translate what would be the last words my grandfather left for the world.
• Fell in love, more in love than I think I’ve ever been.
• Drank my first $1,000.00 worth of Absinthe.
• Saw New Orleans, Nashville, Birmingham, and a pile of other places.
• Finally made the career decision I’ve been trying my entire life to make.
• Did some of my best creative writing ever.
• Made peace with an old friend.
• Made enough new friends to keep me busy for a while.
• Made relative peace with a lot of things from my past.
• Said goodbye to the person I fell in love with, maybe for a very, very long time.

That’s enough, isn’t it? It feels like enough. I don’t want any more, I can’t cope with any more. I need a few nights by the ocean with a beer and a couple of friends. I need to talk about old times and skip rocks and burn shit. Maybe I need a few dozen such nights.

2nd week in June. Goodbye, Chicago.

Another well-crafted ‘blog entry, the performance art of the lonely and antisocial, last refuge for interminable denial. I’m in denial.

5.00 saturday, the only customer in a small basement college bar. I listen to Blixa & co. tell me about the historicity of Deja Vu. I’m too tired to be visibly or audibly hurt. I’m quietly embracing an old, familiar pain that I both hate and love. If I were simply heartbroken, that would make things easier… but nothing’s ever simple. I’m not heartbroken. I’m in love, and I may see her for the last time ever sometime soon.

I’ll give up on swearing that I won’t do this again; I know myself too well. Sometime next year, once I’ve admitted to myself that I’m a lone traveller once more, I’ll do it again. Sometimes they pretend that it pains them to hear me say it; it doesn’t, not really. It pains me more to say it, and to realize it. But I’ll do it over and over, a collector of my own insecurities, a specialist in loved ones’ understandable and always “perhaps” temporary departures, each time more broken and less able to believe than the last, until finally, someday…

And rightly so — the object of my belief is nothing more than a myth. The object of my belief is a phantom from another era and another life.

Always they tell me they’re afraid of how I might hurt them; always, in the end, it’s me in the bar alone instead.

But believe or no, I’ll do it again.

A thousand lives I lived, beneath the hand of the slaughterer.

I’m fundamentally a lonely person, impatient to hear what my own last words will be, desperate for comic books and plastic toys to come to life and prove that it doesn’t have to be so. But they won’t. I’m old enough to know it. They won’t.

I came to the bar because I knew it would be empty. I don’t want to call a friend. I don’t want to talk to family. I don’t want to see a familiar face. I just want to be alone, to smell and taste what is my nature — I’m a young, hopeful apprentice in an age of proletarian metrokids. I’m the skinny girl in the closet with the strangely large knees, raised without language and without culture and suddenly thrust into a world of monsters that I fear and love.

Everyone I’ve ever loved is still inside me, tearing me apart. Few of them know it, and few of them care. None of them are within reach. Just as well; I’d only hate them if they were, as much as I’d try not to — and it would devastate both of us to realize that that was how I felt. Then, once I’d driven them away again, I’d cry bitterly at having lost — once again — someone I love.

I want nothing other than to be faithful to the world… but in this world, there’s no place for faith.

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I love her and I will miss her.

Three hour set. Haus Der Luege und Neun Arme. Blixa said that he disbelieved the number of people claiming to own Drawings Of Patient O.T.. To Blixa: es tut mir leid, vis-a-vis SomeBizarre… but I do indeed own Drawings Of Patient O.T., und I listen to it often.

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p a s s i v e a g g r e s s i v e w i r s i n d

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Today: Chinatown. Alcho-hol. Arbeit. Angst. AAA.

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All.