09.01.01 - 7:54 p.m.

I am slightly drunk after my authentic Italian dinner consisting of tortellini, garlic bread and wine (well, actually an Australian Shiraz/Cab because that was the bottle I had open and couldn't justify opening a Chianti just for the occasion).

So now I am burning my new candle, warm and cozy and fruity, listening to Van the Man and I am warm and cozy inside but it's nothing because I'm still missing you like crazy and wondering what I'm torturing myself for. For a second I thought it was Sunday and I was excited for it to be a pseudo-weekday again, one day closer to my trip and a day closer to having a purpose in life again, but no.

I heard Imperial Sound System coming from the doorway of this skate shop on Chicago Ave., the kind of shop I'd like to enter but don't for fear of the word 'poser' visible on my face, and I thought of the Egyptian zombie king and laughed and laughed and called my pupp. And I noticed the 'dano' graffiti is gone from the lamppost on Diversey and Seminary, like the city was waiting all summer to make sure you had seen before they obliterated it.

Eating a peach, wanting to eat the other but not doing so, dragging my suitcase down from the high and dangerous shelf, gathering presents and clothes in the living room, going through the motions with my brain fuzzy and blurred.

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin