This isn't something you need to read - it's something I needed to write.

I know Facebook owns posted shit, but I don't see myself particularly treasuring this one, so what the hell.

Maybe it's fiction.
Maybe it's truth.
Maybe those are the same thing.
Maybe it's romance.
Maybe it's lifeblood.
Maybe it's more than either.
Maybe it's less.
Maybe it's fleeting.
Maybe it's forever.
Maybe it's somewhere in the between.
Maybe it never was.
Maybe it's catharsis.
Probably it's misguided.
Undeniably it's painful.
Maybe it's unimportant.
Maybe it's all-important.
Maybe it's irrelevant.
Most likely it's misread.
Maybe it's heartbreak.
Possibly it's misdirected.
Maybe it's my only hope.
Maybe it's freedom.
Maybe it's captivity.
Maybe it's my last chance.
Probably I should get over myself.
Maybe it's something I can't fix.
Maybe it's something that will always be.
Maybe I can live with that.
Maybe.
Maybe it's a necessary hurt.
Maybe it's a useful injury.
Maybe it's a useless care.
But damn if it doesn't seem another way.

***

The nighttime roads blurred as she drove.
"Where's Wendy's?" Alton asked.
She shook her head. "Not hungry."
"I thought you wanted food?"
"I got pizza in the fridge at home," she dismissed him. Her appetite, ravishing moments before, had vanished.
She had to get over herself. She had to stop letting it affect her this way. It wasn't healthy. It couldn't be right.
Every time. Every single time, it hurt like this. Like a knife, directly through her chest. She struggled to breathe for a moment. Alton gazed at her concernedly from the passenger seat. The stars rushed by overhead, uncaring, and beautiful. Shining, faraway dots of light.
She hated being this vulnerable in front of Alton. He was kind not to acknowledge it. He saw her pain, of course. He was observant anyway, and he knew her. Knew her like the back of his own hand. Behind every movement, he saw the motivation; every glance, every word and inflection, had a twofold meaning for him as he read her like a psychic reads a crystal ball, interpreting her world as no one else could.
So she always felt vulnerable with him. He saw through her; her walls were no obstacle to him.
But he was good. Kind. He saw the extent of her current injury, and was quiet, stepping tenderly, choosing his words with care - because he knew, too, how she hated to be vulnerable.
"What can you do?" he asked, shrugging slightly, carefully not looking at her as the streetlights sped by, white, black, white, black, blinded, nightblind.
She nearly growled. She hated to be so angry, but she did not know how not to be. She hated being hurt, but she didn't know how to heal herself.
"Fuck him," she hissed, her voice nearly cracking.
"You don't mean that," Alton gently reminded her, twirling her brimmed hat in his hands, his head inclined at an angle towards her, so that his words were not stolen by the wind that rushed around them in the dark.
"No, I don't," she begrudged, "but he's been a dick for days now. It pisses me off."
"What can you do?" he repeated softly, shrugging again.
"Be angry," she replied with a snarl.
"What does that do?" he asked, in his undeniably irritable logical way.
"Makes me feel better," she answered, knowing already that she had lied.
He knew, too. "Does it, really?"
"No," she answered, and would have sighed but for the pain that curled into her chest like a trapped animal. "Makes me feel hurt."
Alton said nothing. She drank her tea and sang with the song that played on the stereo, all trumpets, saxophone and heart.
"You know, you have a really lovely singing voice," Alton said, gazing over the side of the convertible at the passing white lights strung through the trees. "I don't really remember it, from before I left."
"I didn't really sing, before you left," she answered with a small, pained smile.
"What changed?" Always blunt, Alton. Asking the right questions, the questions that needed asking.
"I'm a lot less reserved nowadays," she explained slowly. "I kind of just decided to stop being on the sidelines. Antics happen, right? Wouldn't you rather be one of the ones causing them, than one of the ones observing?"
They were nearing his car. She pulled slowly into the parking lot. There was a couple, a man and a woman, in the corner of the lot, standing beside another car, laughing in the streetlights. The woman shifted her weight back and forth, awkward and infatuated.
They sat for a moment next to his car, dully red shadow in the dark. He moved undecided for a moment, uncertain whether to exit the car through the door or by climbing over the side, as he had before. "I don't know how to get out," he admitted.
"There's a handle," she smiled and pointed. He opened the door and stood, tapping her hat gently back on her head. "Drive safe," he murmured.
"You too."
She sat for a moment to make sure he got into his car okay, and drove away.
The night grew colder as she headed North, but she didn't want to pull over to put the top up on her car, so she tolerated the chill air as gooseflesh rose across her arms. I give in gifts and words, she thought as she pressed the accelerator to its limit, to outrun the pain, and I receive in time and touch. How was one such as me designed, to receive love in the ways most difficult to deliver, and to feel discarded so easily?
She knew it shouldn't upset her, his otherwhile interest. But it did. It upset her a great deal.
"Fuck him," she said again as the road home became shorter.
She didn't mean it this time, either, though a part of her wished she did.
A single tear rose in her eye as the cold around her deepened.
You're crying for him?! a small, enraged part of her mind cried. For him? Fuck him! You don't need him!
But she did. She knew she did. She hated it, but she knew she did. He would always own a part of her soul, though at moments like these she wished it any other way.
She wanted to thank Alton for his understanding, for not accentuating her vulnerability when she was so badly hurt, but she didn't know how. It would have to wait for the healing of her heart that she knew would come - that came each time, not soon enough, but that would come, at some point.
She could never tell him how much power he had to hurt her. It was only that she loved, that she could be so hurt.

-Avalon

The light only stays on for as long as you move.

Saw a man in Manitou tonight, riding his bike along a dark alleyway. There was a halogen light attached to the front, and it shone, illuminated, each time a pedal was pressed down. Because he was riding on a hill, the light was blinking on and off as he paused at the apex of each stride, hovering for a moment, just an instant, before pressing down again, bathing the pavement in blue glow. I paused in my step, ginger beer raised to my lips, and realized: the light only stayed on for as long as he moved.

Isn't that true in every area of human existence? Don't we only understand things as long as we attempt to understand them? Don't we only see when our eyes are wide? Don't we only love when our hearts are open? Don't we only give when we are filled up?

Spoke with a friend on my driveway tonight. He was very sad. He was sure that all there was to life was tolerance - "You find somebody who wants to spend their life with you, and you put up with them, because they put up with you."

He asked me what the most important thing in life is. "Is it how you impact others?"

I told him, "Love."

He said, "Or at least tolerance."

I shook my head. "That's jaded and cynical. It's love. Love is the only thing we never run out of, no matter how much we use."

We spoke of philosophy, of universal balance. He said, "There will always be a foil. Yin and yang. Evil needs good to exist, and good needs evil."

I said, "Good can exist independently of evil, and that's what makes it stronger."

He said, "But evil can exist independently of good, too."

I said, "Evil independent of good is entropy, and nothing survives entropy. Evil needs good; good can exist without evil."

He said, "But there has always been a balance, since the very beginning of time."

I said, "There is no such thing as balance. One scale is always heavier than the other. It's like human life: you're never standing still. You're always moving forward, or moving back."

We spoke later of chance. I said, "I thought you didn't believe in chance."

He said, "Well, when you don't believe in God, you have to believe in something. Everything's either predestined or it's not. So, chance."

I said, "To the Greeks, chance was a god. Her name was Tyche."

We spoke, too, of the importance of conversations that occur between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. I said they were the best of conversations, the most relevant.

He agreed. I said, "It's when night falls, when everything is shrouded and small, that people can hear themselves think."

He said, "But not during the day, when there is so much to do, when you're always moving."

My neighborhood was quiet, still. Dead. The mechanized silence weighed on me. There was nothing human about it, its detachment, its dispassion. There was no love, and it was very cold. Our world is dying, and we are the ones killing it.

My friend asked me why I bothered. Why I'd looked him up, checked up on him after so long. I said, "Because I love you. Friends take care of one another. It's what we were made for."

Ray Bradbury wrote a book about our world. It's a very short book - when there is nothing human left, there is very little to be said.

"'Are you happy?'...
Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on to further darkness, but moving also toward a new sun. ...He glanced back at the wall. Hoe like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for many people did you know that refracted your own light back to you? People were more often - he searched for a simile, found one in his work - torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How long had they talked together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time seemed now. How immense a figure she was on the stage before him; what a shadow she threw on the wall with her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink. And if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would.
Why, he thought, now that I think of it, she almost seemed to be waiting for me there, in the street, so damned late at night...
...'Sometimes...I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?'...
And she rain off and left him standing in the rain. Only after a long time did he move.
And then, very slowly, as he walked, he tilted his head back in the rain, for just a few moments, and opened his mouth..."

I told my friend, "The human heart's a very tenacious thing."

People mold us, shape us, reflect us, define us. No human is independent of his world, of the people who surround him. Sometimes all it takes is someone different, someone found, to show us who we really are, to show us who we've forgotten in ourselves along the way. Someone to think we're worthwhile.

People go to great lengths to remain themselves. Sometimes they just need to be reminded. Sometimes they just need to be loved.

A friend jokingly called me a lost cause today. I replied with a grin, "Just because I don't know where the hell I am most of the time doesn't mean I'm lost."

Think hard. Look closely. Love bravely and too well.

Are you happy?

-Avalon