The edge of the great precipice. The fear he feels when all is about to be lost. The flicker of candlelight and the salt of tears.

The dreamcatcher, yes do you remember it? How you crafted it with your long fingers, wrapping leather around the ring until blisters formed upon your hands. How you sat for hours, weaving with magic the web that you hoped would keep him safe. Do you remember the astonishement of finishing it, when you held it in your bleeding hands, the love you had manifested into the world? And when you gave it to him...

"Since I won't be there to calm you during your nightmares, I guess this will have to do instead."

And inside of yourself you screamed.

"This is it, this is all I have to offer, inside of this is everything I feel for you, this is my love."

And though you wanted to say all of this, you kept silent and knew that none of it needed to be said. It was already known.

And then the song...honey and the moon. The notes and words drew open the crying heart, and uncontrollably, yet so freely, you gave in to the world.

Journal Entry March 4 2006

"We went out. did things we'd never done before. Sat and drank at Backroom Vodka Bar listening to drum and bass and discussing the state of the world. Went to the Purple Onion to play Stackers. During these moments how I wished that we'd done these things while we were still in love. I just felt that I didn't get enough. It wasn't long enough. The beauty. The eternity. Only an eternity of being in love would ever be enough.

We smoked pot in a back alley. Talked about our separation...how it seemed that seeing each other go was like leaving home for the first time. All the while I could feel the pain in my chest. The tension. The knowing that we would never be together again.

...we slept finally, in my bed, as friends. Sex would have been too painful...

I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and knowing that I felt like total shit. Then bawling, trouble breathing, trying to scream/cry out the pain in my chest. Navid held on to me. In his distant voice he told me "come back to me, come back to me." And I did.

He couldn't connect with the pain I felt that night. The absolute despair. I wanted to dig into the mattress. dig myself into the cold earth. Escape...

But I did sleep. And when I awoke, our relationship had ended. And that was our last night together. "

True love

Like a tilted camera, waits
waiting for Bresson's decisive moment
to slant into your view

to click, to capture to enrapture you with it's passion
descending over and under
slanting, winding, and blowing down the doors of
your heart until reaching,
and yearning past the gates of your keepsake locket
filled with the faces of those you've touched

True love

is a man in a black sedan who swirled around you,
curling you into the shotgun seat,
and shared the patches of his broken quilt
while speeding over bridges and under glowing streetlamps,
Hurling you forward into the stars that somehow, for a moment,
you catched in your glittering eyes.

How could it be,
all this, on a spring night, on a designer couch,
behind a salt lamp and above the velvet covers
True love, waited
in a moment that existed purely for the purpose
of passing, of living and then dieing

And the shutter of your heart opened and closed
decisively, but not permanently
setting you free to love on this one windy night,
then reeling you back, and painting another face,
another photograph to the patches of your quilt and his.

In the dream, I stride freely forward without hesitation. A quick glance behind me reveals a post-apocalyptic wasteland of industrial ruin. Are these the remains of our generation? Are these the memories of my past? I look forward to where I am heading and in the short distance I see the forest. It is a Seussical landscape, with vividly colored trees, crowns in a full bloom of vibrant color. When I arrive at this new place, skates have appeared on my feet and people bustle around me. I walk down a small slope with a child's determination to skate on the frozen water, to forget that destitution from where I came.