and shortly i will be taking it and giving it to someone in the hopes that they will pay me to do work for them.

i'm in this odd slump right now. its the "hmm. i'm out of school for right now.." slump. but its still confusing. I've been the biggest space cadet. i find myself standing somewhere staring at the air. and it has been so cold. I forget that there have been times in the past two weeks when i actually felt warm. and time is moving funny. it's kind of like being sick.

I've been reading and reading and reading. Blind Assassin. and i have days and days worth of book head built up as a result. this can't help.

and I sewed some yesterday. I'm sort of winging it on a skirt that I want. i have some corduroy, and then I also have a bunch of old jeans and cords from downstairs in the massive GUFF pile, so hopefully some cool ass skirtage will result. DIY.

yah.

and well. I've had all sorts of things running through my head.

like my piano teacher's kid, Corey. He was autistic. She had him relatively late in life. he had a much older brother, Carl, who is a Sax/Jazz prodigy (that was a good couple years in general for the ELHS jazz band, what with Matt Collar and various others). and they had a family band, and i don't know, Corey might have gone along and played tambourine. And She rewrote her entire life so she could raise this kid. And she was doing amazing things for him, and i'm sure for many other kids in the area. and he was shaving by the time he finished middle school. and he was in highschool. and i found her a bit irritating when i was 12 and quitting piano lessons. Her entire way of relating to the world was molded by living her life for Corey. And a couple of years ago they were traveling in the summer. In Paris or London and they woke up one morning and Corey was dead.

This is baffling to me. And Carl is married now. and there's an empty spot in my childhood. they lived right down the street from me, a block away. it's taken this long to sink in. a year, or is it two now? And how has her life changed? What is she able to do for herself now that she hadn't done in 16 or 17 years. How much of her grief is dictated by relief?

and this story is playing over in my head. it is trying to tell me something. mute on the otherside of a window pane. maybe the window is blurry with rain. and why don't i just open the door and let it in, where its dry and warm and you can hear each other speak?

and also eileen wrote me again.

augh. i don't know what to do. I can think of lots of things to say. some much less nice than others. some that I just want to be bitingly accurate. but i don't know if they are, or if they would just fall mute around her feet, and prove me bitter and without distance.

she wants me to make her feel better and I don't want to be the custodian of her conscience.

she wants to gift me with things, and i want to wash my hands of her.

she wants to patch up the old world and crawl back into it like an old worn blanket. but I know that blanket has been buried for years now, warming the flesh of the dead.

and i am not dead.

she is a coward. or she used to be. and her cowardliness, and john's, were a large source of pain.

i only say used to be because i know that change can happen in a matter of months. So i give her the benefit of the doubt: None of this is set in stone.

but i am not interested in forgiveness. maybe if i were a religious person. or maybe someday.

for some reason my arm and back and shoulder muscles have been extremely sore, both today and yesterday. its like i did a bunch of heavy lifting, but they were phantom things. Only my body remembers it now.