Oooooh, it ain't me you're looking for, babe.

*

Today I received one of the greatest handwritten notes I have ever read.

I wanted to tell somebody about it. I almost mentioned it in three conversations. I can't tell you why I didn't. Because I don't know.

It's sitting next to me now, but I cannot open it again. My time with that letter has passed.

Now, thirteen and a half hours after tearing the envelope at its paper triangle, I'm cradling my own pride with an icey glass of sauvignon blanc poured from a bottle that I was given at work. I'm listening to a playlist I long ago titled LLORANDO.

With my heart laid bare, we'll leave it again, oh my darling it's you, as time's told...

You get the piano-playing minor key sort of anti-crooner's crooning. Love songs for people who often hate love songs.

I'm digging what I've put in this playlist -- it has a loneliness is less opaque in repetition quality. I haven't listened to it in a while. I've turned it up too loud. I want the room to recede, want my intuition to contain more doubt, want tonight to be a year of nights and not just one ridiculous experience of putting my head on the pillow and then closing and then opening my eyes. 

The amount of what we can inhabit in one day is too vast for one night.

While sitting at my computer desk window right now I watch the distant downtown skyline do nothing -- not blink nor fade nor incite sentimental memories. For the last eight years I could see the skyline from the opposite side of the city. I like this view better. There it is, a small row of hovering colors in the low sky. I could have looked at this view every night since I moved here, but I haven't. Why am I tonight? 

"And I slide slide slide downriver," sings the playlist. "Makes it all clear, makes it all here."

Silly song lyrics. Taken out of their climax or anti-climax they read as so obvious. Yet in the right mood, with the right lighting and the right company (none) they are wrenches, wrecking balls.

Silly body of mine, limited by not being someone else's, not being more than one. 

I don't know if I grieve not being more than I am or if I celebrate not being worth the comparison.

Sometimes I decadently imagine that I have a different body so that I can do more with it. Things I want to do with it; things you want me to do with it. I abhor the limitations I've set on myself, and yet I believe (when I'm not drinking wine and repairing my vanity) that these limitations, for whatever reason I've set them, are part of what comprise my singular identity, one of only a few set of markers by which I identify myself.

But that doesn't make those limitations easier to manage. I fear I'm not open enough. I don't even know what that means. I've cherry-picked how much to expose of myself (to the internet, to my friends, to the people who pay my bills, to my lover), and because it's somewhat uncommon, that makes me feel as though I'm whole. When maybe, maybe, maybe under different circumstances I would find how little I actually share charming, sorta in the diminutive way. The truth is that I want to share more with you, each of you. Something holds me back. Good sense, bad timing, lack of volition, fear of you letting go.

Then I stumble onto how other people manage this same risk. I am in awe, I'm jealous, I'm combative against it, against myself.

Whatever I go looking for, of course I find it. The internet is just a conduit; the answer is implicit to the search.

What do I expect? To fulfill mine and everyone else's fantasies too?

I am satisfied with what I do until I see what other people like to see other people do.

Today I can't distinguish between self-protection and self-projection.

I listen to this to make myself feel better/worse:

DM Stith's Morning Glory Cloud

And I, and I, and I, I've got my own policies.

But.

one week and one day ago