Good Morning.

Finally I'm sorta-caught-up on LJ. I can sit down without feeling that I have too much to say for the time I have to type. This means that last night, for instance, when I went over to CrazyChris' for Korean Movie Monday, that I didn't have anything to say to him that I hadn't already said on here. Well, mostly nothing.

I really treasure this account now. It's years and years of my life, full of lots of little things (and big things) that I'd never remember if it weren't written down. There's just so much more here than my memory could ever hold.

I feel much more level when I sleep properly. Imagine that.

I have some quiet things to say, You know the self-reflective, sitting-around-when-it-isn't-yet-light things? I have those to say to someone, while we're curled up somewhere warm with cups of tea, and with little tiny house-noises all around us because it's the quiet time of day when no noises creep in from the deserted streets to mask them. I don't *know* anyone who gets up at this hour, though. Oh, well. I suppose I can talk to you. Pretend my voice is hushed, pretend the air is chilly and the sunlight that pale almost-invisible blue that it gets before the sun rises.

I'm really happy with the way things are going. I keep saying that, and I think I'm learning to trust it finally. Things keep coming up that I view cautiously for awhile, and then accept. My sense of family, for instance, is expanding: it includes Tillie and CrazyChris now. It includes my other brothers now, thanks to the Thursday dinners where I see them regularly. Family. It's very important to me, you know.

What does it feel like for you to have family? Now, with winter coming, I remember the days the power would go out and we'd all gather around the wood stove and be people together. It must have been difficult for mom (four kids beating on each other, likely) but it's what I remember-- warm forward, cold stealing in around the edges, and the presence of everyone. Otherwise we rattled around the house and never saw each other.

It's useful to me to seperate family from people-I-love. Family is people who are there. It's people who have some sort of understanding of me, and that must be a reciprocal thing. It's being able to rehash memories, and being familiar with people's faults. It's all the daily actoins of love, the things that speak so loudly suddenly, where emotion storming around inside me doesn't, really.

Family is very important.

So now, because everything is so good, I'm a little bit worried about change. You see, I have the terrible suspicion that I'm falling in love again, and that feels like it should upset the boat. Right now, for the next year or two, I am SO DONE with conventional relationships of any kind. I don't feel, therefore, that I should be approaching people. I mean, what I have to offer is not what most people are into, and so why should I even bother? I'm not going to operate that way, but it does slow the whole thing down and down and down. Most of my relationships start within two or three days of the first real conversation with someone. I never could stand the build-up, the lead-up, before-- especially when I didn't know if anything would come of it. Now, I find it most comfortable. Even if nothing 'comes of it' I'm happy. That in itself is a startling difference in my life.

(Colin, no, not you, don't worry ;)

I worry, too, I think, about moving on. I worry thst someday I'll run across Kynnin, we'll both be in our seventies, and there will be the most overwhelming wave of regret. That's not fair to ffer to anyone, is it?

And yet, these worries fade. The sheer amount of good in my life washes them out over time, rendering them things to muse about here, before dawn, in an idle sort of way while my toes get cold. If you were here we'd be lying with a blanket over our feet and waiting for the kettle to boil. Tillie's alarm clock is going off in the other room. There's a cat to pet, idly. Putside, there are tree branches against the iron-pale of the sky. How, given all that, can I really be worried? Each moment is such a treasure.

Life is such a joy.

On The Subject Of Regret.

Khammie was talking about regret down there in the comments, saying that he doesn't feel it. I used to be in that camp, the young, fresh, new no-regrets camp. It was common to say to each other, "I needed to live through what I did to get here, so I don't regret any of it."

Well, yes, it was one way of getting here. I think there are likely better paths to travel to get to good places than the one I did, although I've not done so badly. Certainly, there are things that I wish had been different. Certainly, I will do things in my future that I wish I had done differently. To a certain extent, I think that's part of the learning process. Sure, it doesn't make much practical difference. You can't actually change stuff. But! To never wish it, how arrogant is that? Now hard is that on yourself, on the people you've hurt, the things you've missed, to wrap it all into a bundle marked expedience or necessity and throw it right away? No, my regret is real now.

I should watch the Last Unicorn again.

On a related note, Greatpoets continues to perform. This almost made me cry.

The God Who Loves You

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week--
Three fine houses sold to deserving families--
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

-Carl Dennis