I wake up when you normally wake me, lie in a quiet room back home, still waiting to catch a cold.  I slept with a two-year-old all weekend, lay beside his little body clammy with fever.  And he’d clamp one model scale hand on to my cheek and watch me through delirious eyes and your texts came some time in the night. But what does a text mean compared to this?

Every time I think I know.  What I’m chasing. What I’m avoiding. It shifts.

So I thought I’d established a willing truce with the uncertainty of this. With no expectations and no understandings and nothing bankable. But maybe that is only so easy when you come around and come around and come around and I know underneath any bravado, you’re here because you want to be.  But now it is the brevity of digital communications and I wonder, can you really be the kind of guy who won’t call a woman with his buddy in the house? Or is it more.

Last night, I wait too long to return calls, beg off going out.  Come home alone and read a line in a book:

“Look,” he said, “I fall in love every five minutes. I might be half in love with you now.”

And I wonder if that’s my problem. Know it’s not. I suppose it’s that I fall in love so so so selectively and remain there too long.  Make me loyal to the anchor and I’ll stay through rising water forever, it seems.

So you don’t call and I’m out considering - really, literally using my brain and energy to deduce - what kind of ice cream you might like. Making sure, covertly, that your arrival is met with the food you eat so that just temporarily, this might feel like home.  Surely, I think - so pissed at myself - this would not occur to Joan Didion. Or to you.

Today, it is not sleepwalking or patience or this sincere Zen lack of want. Suddenly, it is too far out on this branch and I am not just annoyed, I am angry and weary.  Angry that I miss the sound of your voice; Wanting anything that does walk to me on its own and set itself at my feet is more danger than I can tolerate these days.  Weary, because I remember how you come and go.

And I am tired of tides.

The boys say my writing is endearing and I know they mean the sweet quirky neurotic days.  Because I bet this territory is less charming, this space where I stamp my guts on to the page and confess that I am scared. Of investing more in something so vague. In anything so intrinsically emancipated.

I am afraid that you’re coming and afraid that you’re leaving, scared of wanting you and of Not. Of distractions and cowardice and other paths.

At 5 am, I wake up and stare up at a bright ceiling in a dark room.  My father has a prayer bowl that rings so loud it’s impossible to understand how the crystal holds.  How does it not ruin itself with sound?  This morning rings one question: Did I get too comfortable in the height of you?