So you go eat an apple. Change CDs. Pull yourself together. Don't you always pull yourself together, in the end?

I think it might be nice to go to pieces for a while.

On the other hand. We're just friends. Aren't we?

Still. You don't read this and I don't tell you the worst of it. And I answered politely if unenthusiastically your hello-I'm-too-tired-to-write email. That's something, isn't it? I hate emails like that. It's a bad thing to admit to, of course. They usually only come after a long period of silence and repeated pleas on my part. I always feel like I ought to feel guilty and grateful - yes of course you're busy I should have understood my fault entirely isn't it kind of you to humour me at all - when usually all I feel is pissed off. Even if I were beyond exhaustion I'd have written to you, and something more. Something else. To no-one else, but to you. But that's not the way you work, is it? Possibly it's not the way sensible and decent and nice people work.

Alright. Alright. I know what it is I'm looking for in your letters and you'll never say it for all kinds of reasons, some of them good sensible ones, and each time I'll write some drivel in response because I can't possibly ask you to say what is it I want to hear. Language was given so people could communicate with each other, wasn't it?

am in the process of cleaning things up. my blog (therefore posting here temporarily). my bookshelves. in the belief that somehow, somehow, if i can find all the wintersons and put them together on the shelf everything else will sort itself out.

i hate waiting. have i said that yet? i immensely loathe waiting. and waiting for something that may or may not come - waiting to see if anything comes. like being dangled from a string. no, a wire, a wire running through you, that disturbs your sleep so you wake up every morning tense, and do everything you have to with that tension running through you, running under the current of everyday life.

i can't reply to your letter. it calls for sympathy and understanding (oh poor thing have you been busy well of course) and those are rather beyond me now. i want memory to slam you so hard you can't breathe when you walk in through the door. i want you to dream of me at night no matter how tired you are and wake up haunted. i want you to walk down the street with my eyes and start at shadows.

you see - if you were simply (simply!) very far away - things would be different. easier.