it happened when i needed it to

so, i'm back and i don't know when i'll see him again. he took me to the shore where he spent his childhood. we played carnival games and rode on a ferris wheel, ate pizza and drank orangeade. at night, right before we left, we stood by the ocean one last time and looked at the hopelessly long coastline, the silhouettes of people still in the water, the silky black waves turning a foamy white and then turning back. he said, let's be endless and i thought, could not help thinking, so this is what it's like to be young and in love, to want something and to think that maybe it is not impossible.

i expected to catch up to sophistication

today i'm going to make mexican wedding cookies in preparation for my trip up the east coast.

i never meant to leave it any way at all, though i wanted to. i used to believe that things by their very nature were impossible to leave alone, that they continued with or without your will, not as they were but through the changing scraps and threads that comprised your belief for them in the first place. now i doubt these things--that indeed make up the bulk and beauty of our lives--ever even existed in their thingness as such. if you are able to catch one and suspect its existence as a thing, please tell me. i would never have ran after them, if i had known.

Why did we live like that, with all that mean, incessant tallying?

Before Xmas one year my dad said we had to give some things away. I remember crying about a 4' panda who was off to Goodwill. I have so many memories of school, Vicki, and I'm so sad that I won't be able to keep all of them. To stay in Chicago only for that one moment when there's snow on the ground, and you realize it's winter. A flower in my freezer that I'm keeping now to remember the feeling of first wanting to keep it.

How I had to end things with G. with such a swift motion. It closed, in my mind, with a little click: I heard the sound of thread snapping against a PAM bind, which is the kind of binding we do to paperbacks in the lab. Two pieces of thin cardboard, really, and some string. In comparison D. has been one of those hulking old books, awkward to work on, with pages whose edges crisp off in your fingers when you try to turn them and a leather cover that leaves redbrown stains on your clothes if you accidentally lean against it. We're preserving these old books because they're important?