Away we fly...

I have a request. But before I ask anything of you, I hope you know that not a day goes by that I don't think of each and every one of you. You have saved me from the world and from myself. For that I'll be forever grateful. So with that in mind, I beg that you read my words not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some entries are only to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Don't read it ironically. Read it as glimpses into a life of a boy who becomes a man, and is still trying to figure out what that means. Read it wholly, with diligence and attention. Read it because you care.

Having trouble breathing...

To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. At least it was for him. He noticed that people eventually get sick of waiting, then simply take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect. We act in such ways, because waiting has never been our strong suit, yet a waiting person is a patient person, and the word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden will manifest itself to us. Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.

Waiting for the fire to light...

A lone wolf out in the sun...

I'm not sure why uncertainty still creates tornadoes in my head - perhaps I will never shake the small timid boy who is so sure he doesn't deserve to be loved that he'd do just about anything to prove himself right. I need you to know that I never thought I could feel with such magnitude and conviction, and that my missteps are not a reflection of you, but without a doubt a shadowy mirror image of someone I thought had died long ago. I'm petrified of my heart, how it whispers and beats in rhythms I can't keep up with. I don't have things under control. Not in the slightest. Even when the daylight comes I feel so cold, as if the last year hadn't even transpired. As if I didn't love with all my soul, and live with every single piece of my body and mind. As if I wasn't alive. As if you weren't you, and I weren't me. As if all of this never really happened.

You make me want to sway...

I talk to you as to a friend,

I hope that's what you've come to be.

It feels as though we've made amends -

like we found a way eventually.

It was you who picked the pieces up,

when I was a broken soul,

and then glued me back together,

returned to me what others stole.

Reaching a fever pitch...

All of a sudden, as a splash of water to my face, I realised that I am nowhere near where I imagined I would be. Life comes at you with full speed and it whisks you away onto unknown plains. You find that you are a different person, doing things you never wanted, things you never even could form into coherent thought. When we began our journey, you led me to a peninsula higher than any before, perhaps even the highest I'll ever be able to climb, but as I reached the top of the summit, I didn't recognise my hands, my body or my heart. The man standing atop of the mountain is someone I couldn't have made up, Someone who escapes my grasp. Someone I'm not sure I like very much, or for that matter, at all.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. And now I’m looking at you, and you’re asking me if I still want you, as if I could stop loving you. As if I would want to give up the thing that makes me stronger than anything else ever has. I never dared give much of myself to anyone before – bits of myself to my first, to Her and Berlin, but it took years to do it – but, you, since the first time I saw you, I have belonged to you completely. I always will. If you want me of course.

Feel the love generation...

I want to cry and I want to love...

This is my call, I rise and I fall...

You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analysing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could've, would've happened ... or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the fuck on. Either way, I found that simply writing about something, makes it easier for me to understand it, because the most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them. They shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.

It's been a long day without you, my friend...

He could not tell if he loved you the first moment he saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But he remembers the first moment he looked at you walking toward him and he realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when he was with you. There is no pretending, he said with absolute clarity. "I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there's a life after that, I'll love you then." It was at that moment that he realised words were spoken that forever changed the landscape of love, for it is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where you are headed.

Underneath the fiery sky...

I want to take you somewhere so you know I care,

but it's so cold and I don't know where.

I brought you daffodils in a pretty string,

but they won't flower like they did last spring.

And I want to kiss you, make you feel alright,

I'm just so tired to share my nights.

I want to cry and I want to love,

but all my tears have been used up.

I brought you daffodils in a pretty string...

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

I find myself questioning my choices, and as I examine the people I allowed close to my heart, I wonder if perhaps I let my guard down too easily. It is not that I regret any of it, it's just that I can't help but shake the notion that I might be making a mistake. Maybe it was too much, too quickly, and all I need is the passing of time to create order amidst the chaos running amok in my heart. I have certainly come too far to let my self-destructive tendencies ruin everything I've built, yet not nearly far enough to simply give in to fear of being alone and abandoned, What I've learned is that I deserve to be valued - heck, I deserve to be adored, and if the people in my life don't believe the same, then perhaps it would be better to part ways while we still have the willpower to start over. I am not scared to stand as one, even though I can't quite pin-point the last time I did. I will survive, and I shall prosper. With or without you.

A string of blue lights...

My lost frequency...

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. The first week of July hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much colour. But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does, and then it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles into your favourite chair and fills the afternoon with stories of places and things and it feels as if nothing had changed at all.

Not just another love...

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognised. Then, later, they spring. It's a lot easier to say when something ended rather than when it began. Most of us can recognize the end from a mile away, but the beginning always slips up on us, lulling us into thinking what we're living through is yet another moment, in yet another day. Yet with you I knew from the second we first met, that this was the insemination of something beyond my understanding. I had this profound suspicion that somehow every path I've ever walked has been in preparation - shaping and moulding my soul to be compatible with yours. Perhaps such thinking is foolish, and I am far too old to believe in magic - but as it turns out, that has never stopped me before.

Ending a chapter, changing the book...