"Since when did our personal problems become public discusion?!"

("Since you started considering me the problem, and stopped being someone I could talk to.")

How did it get to be October anyway? It isn't that time is flying, it's more like I'm flying head first through the days. And in the mean time, the reality of my life has converted to virtual, and the digital age is our heartless/brainless/unwilling accomplice. It's been exactly 2 months now, and so far somehow we're still holding on, aren't we?

This evening my plane will land onto a journey of 2 more hours of public transport before I make it home. Meanwhile, I imagine you're standing perfectly straight, but itchy in the rented linen of a groomsman's tux. After the succinct choreography of the outdated ceremony, I hope you can now revel in being gosh-darn done with a good deed, and maybe even drink a bit in the goodly company of the sweet folks we befriended yesterday--who will be joining you even as I cannot. And all the while I'll continue the journey back to my adopted home: mercilessly far from you, but mercifully lacking in absent memories of the us we used to be, and have.

I told you while we drove together--top down, basking in my father's mustang's borrowed freedom--that if you decided that we should see other people, keeping in touch all the same, that I would be at a disadvantage. I tried with all the articulation I had in me, (whatever was willing and able to be mustered at my beckoning,) to explain to you that the difference between being jealous and not, (and I mean real jealousy here, the knee-jerk, pure bodily kind,) seems to lie in the visualization of your lover's other choice (of lovers). To you, anyone I might meet would be a stranger; for me, there'd be a damn good chance you would fall into the company of a woman I already know--or at least know of. And i know it's similar to the way that you are still living there, while I'm safe in a brand new place. How you're in proximity to the places we loved so well together, littered as they are with our own sweetly shared experience. But the other side of that sharp-ridged coin says that I will suffer the same cruel familiarity if you let yourself love someone i could see whenever i close my eyes--knowing both that she wasn't me (hard enough), but also that she was her, and still managed to take my place.

I shudder at the thought, and hope truly that your being where we once were is not a pain to you, but rather an occasional relief, in that we have christened those places you still haunt, home--in ways that are secret to anyone else--and with a warmth that my present life lacks completely. Like everything, these swords have but two opportunities (not) to sever so cleanly.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/11/09)