The days keep coming when I have to say goodbye to people I love. They are much less frequently proper goodbyes, that is to say that very few of them come with death or those huge monumental fallings out that you see at the end of a tempestuous relationship, so I guess this one was one of those goodbyes*. "Take care of yourself, keep in touch! Goodbye!* [* We may see each other in the distant future. I will think of you much more often than you know. I will correspond with you much less than I would really like. I will miss you but I won't say so.]" A lady I know is going away to school - that is the point I was getting to - and today on the phone I got to hang a little asterisk on the end of our conversation.
How many people are roaming around this noisy trafficky city with whom I have lost touch but with whom I had promised to keep in very regular contact? Well a lot. I assume they're all still out there. Every few months I catch some information I don't really need with regards to the whereabouts of some soul whose name I hadn't spoken beforehand or since. If any of them die somebody will probably inform me. And I'll hang my head and project a few fuzzy flashbacks of the one or two laughs I had with the departed.
This lady is quite different though. She is a colleague, she is a co-conspirator, a fellow creative brain, a very very good friend. I like to think that in a parallel universe somewhere, she made different moves and I made different moves, and perhaps we set up shop. How that would have been stimulating, life-altering, all kinds of things. I almost went for it as well.
In situations like this when I failed to act when I could have, I catch myself thinking that I've actually been very generous, for I am forgoing a chance at incredible expansion and happiness so that the other mes in parallel universes can have that chance. What a charitable soul am I.
Meriwether McGraw's Life Story Pt 1
He was born to new parents from the Northern Hemisphere, but whether he was born on that half remains a mystery. Who they were also hangs in almost complete uncertainty, save for the fact that he shared their name. You would look at Meriwether McGraw and say that he had no childhood, for when could such a face beyond words, beyond description, beyond saving have ever been soft and ripe with discovery. His heart was probably an artichoke heart, in his veins were only full of dust and bad dreams. His face would probably crack if he smiled, if he moved it at all. His eyes were dark and they hid a little too far back in his head, in the same way that his real nature, his personality (if there was one) sat carefully out of view. If he had a mind in there, and thoughts, would they remember lost loves or amazing adventures, eerie bloodletting rituals or the untracked swaths of Science? All that can be certain is that a creature like McGraw never dwells on the future. Does his mind only want out of its cage? Perhaps he wakes up in the morning only to remark that he is still not dead, or perhaps he goes for a long walk when the sun rises to breathe in the gift of a new day. Or perhaps he never sleeps. And his wooden leg. People have seen him knock on it, as if for good luck. Was he a sailor? Was he a pirate? Was it hacked off and eaten by savage islanders with bones in their noses? Was it crushed in a fire when he saved the lives of eighteen little nuns? He was probably born with a wooden leg.
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