I am fraying at the edges and I am paint peeling, and I am a desperately poor metaphor. And that paltry non sentence is enough to sum up my absence, and yet there has been so much in between. There always is. There is the music of the television I catch in glimpses, there is the beauty of the phrases that I read............. and here I deleted a paragraph that I can't retrieve...........

I just want to fall, and I just want to disappear. I can take the money and run, I'm lucky in that regard, I could go and go and go for a number of days and maybe that would be just be enough to set me just a little free of myself, and maybe the fates... or barring that the lottery would intervene, or the stars, or a supernova, I could just go, leaving all of those old songs on the roadside for others, roadside currency, roadside karaoke, sing me a song, I'll sing you a lullalby, this is my breast and here is where my heart should beat, but in it's stead a metronome beats out the measure of my life... My heart was swallowed by Jonas, who was swallowed by the whale, and he navigates the depths of the sea without the slightest hint of regret. So courses my lifeblood, madly navigating the depths of the Marianna Trench, so many leagues, so much pressure, it's a wonder that I haven't burst yet, in my car or in a bar.

yes, but that is what the drugs and the preservatives are for, splash of additive and a dash of formyhehide, a swift draught of anti-freeze to ward of the night chills and the absence of love.

I see you, I feel you, my little reprobate, darkening my blood, blackening my dreams, squeezing, squeezing, you and your python's nature. You will cut me off and you will cut me down, pawn, prey, pray, dawn. It would be easy enough to stop breathing, maybe easier said than done, takes a certain discipline to be prone in one's bed and to command the self, ok that's enough, I'll stop breathing now, and I will stop eating, and I will stop drinking wine and water.......... and no vice and no caffeine, and no more fun, only fussy sanctity and all the sex you will never have again, and all the sex with him you will never have again after tommorow.

yes, it's true, tomorrow, it's the final farewell to the engineer, I have been biding my goodbye's for weeks and yet I continue to bead tears like dew drops, I continue to break and break again, I have shattered so completely that I am but the hazy diamond dust shading every frontier we ever crossed and ever will, I am but the gauze and you he is but the gossamer, at some point tomorrow, on some cue that I will know instinctively we will be rent, and that as they say will be that, evermore, or as the raven cried nevermore.

As of tomorrow, after the renting, I will be done with love. There are other loves, there is beauty, and there is friendship and there is family, and those are good and solid loves, the stalwart loves, the politic and the impolitic loves, forever and a day loves, the forgiven loves, and the loves that forgave. I am but the sum of what I love, I am only what I love, and so when the salt has been poured and the water has been doused, what else can I be but some refracted myth, living, breathing, farting - just a girl, only a girl, a woman by proxy, but only by proxy, heaving, dry heaving all of that loss, it comes up thick and viscous, streams of us, up and out, you purge, like a hamburger, like life, the last taste of the last kiss, like after I pulled you (unwilling) around me like the security blanket I never slept with, but I slept still nonetheless.

so farewell then. so farewell, then. I know how this story ends, it bodes ill for you and I, you can never go back.

But we will always have the tarmac....