This is how I count the days

A suggested that we have coffee before I leave for California. We have not seen each other in almost three months. If I see him now, I would have to start another tally.  And counting days, much like counting sheep, is not the most fun a person could have.  So I said no.

One day, I will stop keeping track of how long it has been between meetings, and that is the day I get to tick off “not pathetic anymore” in my mental list of things to strive for.

My ex secret friend and I spent the evening in my little apartment.  We drank beers and had mediocre Mexican food.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that is seemed as if no time had passed but it was a relief to know that our present lives fit into our conversations so that we didn’t spend our time together with nothing but nostalgia to keep things moving.

We used to call each other secret friends because we met though CC and her ex husband.  We used to sneak around, uncomfortable to let the people who introduced know that we’d formed our own sort of team.

I am hoping to pay a visit to Vermont one of these days. I would like to see how she lives now with a daughter and a husband in a town that seems so quiet. I can’t even imagine that sort of life simply because I’ve only ever lived in cities.

Secret friend told me that she wanted my life.  I laughed and she retracted her statement – part of my life, she corrected herself.  That made better sense and I told her that I wanted part of hers.  The good parts of both our lives meshed together would make for the ideal existence.  Drunken talk of course.

But it did make me realize that everyone is always looking left and right, that we spend our lives figuratively crossing the street. Forward, even though to the right and to the left might be where we’d prefer to go. Or where we like to dream of being.

I think I just fucked up the road less traveled cliché and I don’t even know what the point of that was.

Today I worked toward the front of the bookstore. I saw everyone who walked in, I saw the snowfall starting in the afternoon.  First it was nothing at all, as if someone had upended a boxful of packing popcorn.  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to snow.  It always delights me. 

Delight is not a word I would use easily but that is the only way to describe how it feels when I feel ice touch the tip of my nose. No matter where I go, always an FOB.

After the bookstore gig, I tried to go Christmas shopping but I walked out of every store empty-handed.  It’s pretty simple -- I don’t want to give anyone anything.  I mean that in every way that it can be interpreted even though just the other day, I baked cookies that I gave away and last night I shared my apartment with someone who was almost a stranger (isn’t that true when you don’t see or talk to someone for many years?) and now I will spend a good part of this snowy evening in a bar talking to a friend about everything with much affection. But I don’t want to give anyone anything or take anything. 

I want only to tend to myself.

‘Tis the season.