Category: General Musings

It was raining when I arrived at her place, and it would be raining when I left.

It was a downstairs apartment, the bottom floor of a townhouse, and the entrance was along the side of the building. I waited in the small stone alcove, away from the rain,  and she greeted me at the door in a sheer nightgown over a pair of boy shorts that accentuated her curved hips.

Her living room was decorated with tasteful items collected from her travels; it wasn't a large apartment, but it was crafted with warm character. She offered me a glass of wine from the opened bottle on the stone kitchen aisle; I nodded, and she poured us both drinks, bringing them to the couch.

It was late, and I knew she was tired, but there was curiosity in her eyes and I could scent the lingering affects of our phone conversation forty minutes earlier.

I was here because she could quote e.e.cummings. And because she drew herself in the shape of a woman who knew the value of release.

An hour into the conversation, she stood and walked to the bedroom door. She assumed I would follow her; she had made it clear that were I to come over, she wanted me to spend the night.

I followed.

She was standing by the side of the bed when I came up behind her, slipping the robe from her shoulders. My fingers drew her short dark hair to the side and my lips found the curve of her throat. She leaned into the kiss, her head tilting backwards, and I drank in the warmth of her skin, brushing my lips across the nape of her neck.

Gently, I turned her around and pressed her down onto the bed, my fingers catching the sides of her white boy shorts, tugging them over her hips and legs, and then she was under me, soft and pliant. I learned her through kisses, slow lingering kisses along her collar bone, selfish hungry ones along the slopes of her breasts.

We slept in moments that night; again, and again, I woke her with a light touch along her hip, or the inside of her thigh, and I would spend the next hour savoring the length of her, a languid insatiability explored through the subtleties of unceasingly desire until we would fall asleep, only to wake again soon after.

Last week I stayed home a day, sick, and spent most of it in my study.

At one point, there was a strong wind and I looked out my window to see leaves falling steadily for twenty minutes straight.

It looked like it was raining gold.

Now the trees are almost bare, just a few stubborn orange leaves and one tree filled in bright yellow.

Winter is here, and I am not yet ready for it.

This past summer has been filled with some interesting challenges. In moments I have allowed my darker half full reign and then had to deal with the subsequent consequences; it is an axiom that we learn the true value of what we have only when it is at risk. It is an idea better left untested, for the hurt it carries, but in its cost is a fundamental understanding on where one stands.

The greatest irony of desire is that, sometimes, the more you want something, the further away it slips.

There were tears in my eyes from the wind.

The world is a different place at 5000 feet, and when your hanging from a glider, bleeding altitude in sharp turns and steep stalls, the world is a roller coaster of green and blue.

Leaning forward lowered the front of the glider and I picked up speed at the expense of height. The landing strip was now about 1300 feet below; I shifted my weight to the left, nudging the glider into a graceful turn that left us lined up for a landing, and then pulled back while leaning to the right to straighten us out and settle us at trim speed.

The landing, when it came, was swift and a bit bumpy. I extricated myself from the harness, feeling earth under my feet for the first time in an hour.

I was smiling when I walked away.

Perhaps there is some sadness; when one sleeps with a woman curled in his arms for the first time in years, there is a moment of loneliness, a half-remembered dream of what it is like to capture someone for more then a few moments.

There is nothing so painful as longing. It is the old sorrow, the ache that demands tears alongside anger, laughter amid indifference.

that which makes you happy, and that which makes you feel alive

are two different, sometimes conflicting, things

(both are necessary)

I made friends with your ghost.

Much easier, this way, to know you. 

But you refused to lay still. 

I remembered you in fits, a slow jerking towards a memory I thought I had put down; it had no subtlety, just the loud rage of your presence as it lept upwards, through me, past me, fierce and angry and so much stronger then the dream I thought you to be.

If only I could put my faith in the little things, perhaps then the magic behind everything would seep back in.

They were discussing equipment deployment strategies at the corner of 'Network Ave' and 'Engineering Road', so noted by the plastic signs attached to the corner of the cubicles.

One of the participants in the conversation held information I needed; having ignored my last several e-mails, which would have provided a painless solution to my informational needs, I was now forced to corner him face to face and squeeze the answers out of him.

Unfortunately, this required waiting for his current conversation to end. The topic of discussion moved away from deployment details and onto the more important area of the upcoming football season.

I'm a fan football; I've got the Sunday package that lets me watch every possible game each Sunday. I can name the starting quarterback for every team in the NFL. But at that moment, standing in the middle of cube land, six hours of work left to do, and two hours to do it in – the last thing I wanted to do was find out what these people thought of the Redskin's new coaching staff or their rookie wide receivers.

Yet here I was, listening anyways.

My hand felt its way into my pocket and to my keychain. I ran my thumb over the small red button that unlocks my car.

And for a moment, I imagined what it would be like if we all could carry around a self-destruct button.

How reassuring it would be to run your fingertips over it. In those moments of pure agony, when job or social requirements have placed you in a position where death by boredom becomes less of a euphemism, and more an impending threat – how nice it would be to have the chance to opt out in a singularly spectacular fashion.

It's just a day dream. But it got me through the next fifteen minutes of random conversation without resorting to violence.

I prefer to keep my violence at home, thank you.

I'm going to be in New York the first full week of August; I've got plans each night, but need to find something to occupy myself during the day.

I'll be staying in a hotel on Broadway; other then the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which I already plan to spend a great deal of time in), and the general touristy-crap (which I plan to avoid) what else is there to do in New York?