Remember your first night here, when we called a taxi and just went across the Zakim bridge, over and over and over again? It was such a beautiful night. Finally we were too giddy to be sitting in the backseat of a yellow taxi that smelled like one too many customers threw up their meal in it, so we got off and sat on the railings above the murky water. We felt invincible. The skyline was nothing we’d ever seen before, and sitting there on the boundary between this world and the next was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It may have been the alcohol that overstimulated my senses. But having you by my side, that was the best night of my life.
I say I don’t miss you, but how could I not miss you? You were once my everything. Secretly, underneath it all, you still are.
It’s not just that though. I miss having someone know exactly who I am. I miss knowing that when I’m lost, someone will be there for me. Even if we can’t find our way, we’ll be lost together. I miss knowing that I mean something… to someone.
Then again, I miss knowing that someone else is mine just as much. It’s comforting knowing that you’re the one who can provide for another whole human being: that they’ve lived a lifetime without you, but that you could be a different “lifetime” for them.
I miss it all.
This morning my friend James and I sent my little sister and her friend off to school on the school-bus. We trailed them on our bikes for a while and they pounded the back window with their fists. They really got a kick out of that.
A couple of hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin shared with the world the secret of his success. Never leave that till tomorrow, he said, which you can do today. This is the man who discovered electricity. You think more people would listen to what he had to say. I don’t know why we put things off, but if I had to guess, I’d have to say it has a lot to do with fear. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, sometimes the fear is just of making a decision, because what if you’re wrong? What if you’re making a mistake you can’t undo? The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can’t pretend we hadn’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still sometimes we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug until we can’t anymore. Until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin really meant. That knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping, and even the biggest failure, even the worst, beat the hell out of never trying.
What the fuck, we haven’t spoken in a week. I keep waiting for him to speak to me first, but he hasn’t yet. Something is wrong, I know it. He never does this. Of all the years I’ve known him, the one time he withdrew from everything was when they had to put his puppy to sleep, and even then he reached for me.
Babe you know I’m here for you, why aren’t you looking for me?
So I have these two Spanish plays in the next week and I was staying after school yesterday with a few people to rehearse, but I had to leave early. Halfway home, I realised that someone took a $20 from my bag. I went back to see if anyone knew anything, but by then they had already left so I just went home. Later last night, a ‘friend’ texted me saying that she was missing a $20 too, and accused me of stealing it because I had left early. Fuck that, first of all that has no logic to it whatsoever. Fucking people…
