and someone else will set your clocks
2004-07-31 & 2:34 a.m.

the traffic lights give off a surreal light; at two in the morning the man with the long gray hair keeps taking pictures of his coffee and bob seger keeps playing on the radio. sitting on the hood of my car, i wonder when the fireflies stopped staying out so late.

i stop to get a strawberry soda and think about driving straight through to montana. but i'm looking at a place i could be calling my home for the next year on wednesday, and my new job starts this week. i hear a friend's voice from tucson and she tells me about sweating and registering people to vote and twenty-five cent drinks and writing a northern african travel book for women. as always, i'm too inspired by everything and how exactly does one move beyond each overwhelming breath?

there's another round of goodbyes. we've had years to think about the last line and so we rush and say them all, without the commas. we don't get to brush the strand of hair away, or touch the other's hand, so we can hang up the phone, disattached.

my bed doesn't feel so big anymore; i can't find your phish album; the letters are somewhere in the continuing unpacked mayhem. i remember you through the uneasiness in my stomach, but, then again, that has been there for years. and so, like so many others, you become a lie and a truth, a no-longer horizon.