The Ghost of You

I had a dream last night about someone I haven't thought about in a very long time.  Not really, anyway.  There's a stock paragraph that I always repeat when I'm talking about this person.  How I wish I'd met him a year later, or how I wish we still talked. But I haven't thought about him in a very, very long time.  The only thinking I have done about him in the past three years has amounted to a brief remembrance and a fantastic rush of nostalgia that overwhelms me too much to think further.

But that dream was strange.  It took me so thoroughly out of the present, and separated itself so distinctly from the past.  And it's weird, because the most accurate thing I could say would be that I miss him, but I know that in reality, I don't miss him at all.  I don't even miss what he represents.  I think that what this dream is really telling me is that I miss meeting new people.  I miss the adventures that you have when you're never quite sure what's going to happen, what someone is going to do.

And I do.  I do miss that.  Maybe that's why I'm clinging to desperately to these ideas of getting to know someone, of having strange conversations.  Maybe it's why I keep staying up later, in the hopes that something falls away at that time of the morning and someone new lets me in.  But it's not likely to happen.  It's simply not how life is shaping up.  Or rather, it's not how I am shaping my life up to be.  And that makes me sad in some ways.

The only reason I ever think back fondly on those years of my life is that I messed up.  I let myself mess up.  I took many chances, and I fell flat on my face many, many times, and I broke things.  I broke glass bottles and I broke hearts and most importantly I broke myself.  I let myself live wildly and recklessly.  And I think that it was the absolute best time of my life that I could have picked to do that.

But now that it's over, it sometimes makes me sad.  Fairly often, actually.  Because I think back on the unbelievable things that happened and I realize that I have to grow up.  I have to move past them, even though they were brilliant and foolish, terrifying and beautiful.  I need to learn to leave that part of my life in the past, but I have not yet figured out just how to do that quite yet.

So I have these dreams.  About these people I will never see again.  And all of the things that could have happened but didn't.  And never will.  And that is my choice.  But it still makes me a little bit sad.

Smile tonight in this sacred light

I wanted to ask last night.  By last night I mean at almost five in the morning today. Okay, technically yesterday.  Whatever.  The day doesn't matter, and I think there's no question about that.  I asked something, because I wanted to know if you were purposely avoiding the topic or if it was just slipping your mind for one reason or another.  And you didn't exactly take it anywhere, so I'm left to assume that it's intentional, one way or another.

I don't know how much you do or don't think about it.  But I think about it often.  I think I will continue to do so for quite a while.  What baffles me is that I don't know your thoughts on the subject.  I don't know if you care or if you don't.  I don't even know if you think about it anymore.  Or if you ever really did.  I hate not being able to know your thoughts.  And I'm too restrained to ever ask.  If I couldn't do it at four in the morning, I certainly can't do it at a time when I'm more awake.

Yes, there are people on that list.  On any list you ask about, most likely.  If I say "not really," it probably means I at least have an idea in mind.  If I really don't know, I'll just say "no," outright, or I'll point out that it really isn't anything I've spent much time thinking about.  It's funny that this is what drives me back here after over a month, when it's surprisingly close to the thing that started me writing in the first place.

On that note, I know I've fallen off the face of the earth lately.  I've been busy.  Which I know has never been an acceptable excuse before, but it's the only one I've got.  Largely, I ran out of things to write.  All of my problems have been work-related or caused by my extreme workload, which isn't really worth blogging about. I blog about things that make me think or cause me distress in my personal life, and I've simply been too busy (or too stable, but we all know that's not possible) for any of that to be going on.  

So I'm sorry.  I'm sorry I've been gone for so long, in case anyone cares.  I'm sorry I've been awful about keeping in touch with anyone and everyone.  I'm sorry this post is so bad.  I'm sorry I'm so bad at keeping my life in order.  And I'm sorry I can't get certain things out of my head.  So there's that.