All of the things that I am, and all of the things that I am not, on tonight of all the of the last nights for rumination, when the moon is this close to being full and the night is that close to a perfect simulacra of spring, and the sky is just close enough, just close enough to grasp and pull close, and covet. And because the moon is waxing toward maddness, and because it is soft in February, we are pulled onto sidewalks and park benches to admire the magnolias and the first breath of night jasmine at dusk, pulled just as helpless as the tide, hapless and swaying like the fronds of sea anenomie, surf battered and wildly alive.

And all of the things that I am not and may have wished that I was. Because all of these years spent and all of the years half way accounted for and not yet lived, are going to slip down the drain like lovely incandescent soap bubbles and I will be lucky if I catch a few before they burst. Would I really be living if I were too busy archiving my own personal inanities, would I really be living if I were forgetting all of my own personal inanities. Where does it become momentus, or is momentus that slender moment where you tore blindly into a diatribe without a soapbox, or simply the moment when you rolled away when you should have been rolling toward, and how is anyone supposed to know in the absence of signposts, it's the information age afterall, give it to me then, give me fully cognizant and infinitely wise mile stones, all LA Story-like.

Because all of things that I thought I would be and am not. You could ask my thirteen year old self with the bad perm and marginally socially ostracized, all braces and banging the heels of her sneakers with the heart shoe laces on the stage of the auditorium. She had it all figured out, despite never have been kissed, she was on track, never again a hot lunch and never again neopolitain ice cream bars, because strawberry is gross and vanilla is pedestrian, no baby, it's the stars, the stars are ours. Twenty-four years later, I've cobbled some armor out the sloughed off skins of my armadillo heart, and whole heartedly fucked strangers and half heartedly fucked a few beloveds, and everything I thought was supposed to be blew up in my face, like confetti, like big fun, like liquor, like the onset of all tomorrow's hang over, monstrous and completely unbidden, because it was never supposed to end up here.

And is here really so bad. Maybe it's not. With my elcectic furniture and my rent controlled one bedroom, and I don't really own anything of value save my car. I've got a divorce under my belt and a passle of unsavory regrets, I've got no children and I am just getting to the age where I might never, I've got no husband, but that didn't work out so well the first time so I refuse to sweat the absence of my illusory mate, what did that thirteen year old girl know anyway.

She certainly didn't know anything about the glee and the reticence of falling half way in love, and she didn't know anything about brakes and brake pads, and slamming on the brakes, and she peeks out from time and again, bless her perpetual and unbreakable adolescent heart, because she is the one who is making ardent and surprising love to the engineer, you might be inclined to think anything, and then again you might not think anything at all. You might be outwardly a little cavalier, but in the quiet space between the the moon, the bath and those cool perfumed sheets, you're slamming unexpectdedly hot-as-a-bottle-rocket, you don't stop, you can't stop, then again you have lost your train of thought, because flesh is flesh and a moveable feast can be had anywhere, and that's like missing what you had good before you knew it might be lost.

So happy Valentine's day to us, all of us muddling patron saints to future shipwrecks, here's to the deep and guarded love I've got to dole between commercials, here's to the sweet spot where I surrender in spite of myself, where all of those old songs from my reckless youth come to fruition in a crown of love, dripping here and there falling almost asleep in the coil of this new body clad in my pink pyjama bottoms, reaching out with a furtive toe, recon mission, falling and falling when the well is still fresh and shallow.