I'm knitting mental bits into a scarf to wrap around my time. I got done giving a make-up exam to a boisterous 20-something, and before that handed out exams like prison sex, and before that were the usual lectures tinkling in my back pocket.

It's obscene how wonderful things are.

- - -

Out of some lightning crashes I've seen, by hilled midnight, some old souls coming back into the form of flesh. Old friends I thought who'd just be statues in one of my mind gardens.

Dean continues to live the real American dream. From aluminum-wrapped doors and 3 hour conversations about naming cats 'that', to introducing me to d-land. Past cold Princeton nights and Adonis talk, the 45 albums he's recorded. All the way to the degree he finished/stopped/somethinged out to a remote stretch of Utah. He's going to be a truck driver. It fits him well. I can picture late nights, out in the back bunk. A light scanning whatever fevered mind flares burn onto his notepads. He's like a post-modern dream.

- - -

And Colleen. I never thought she'd come to life again. It's been...years. She'd been so dear to me back in the day. From the way she'd crookedly smile, how she side hugged me on the train out to the visit place, how she'd say 'snot tortilla' when describing St. Louis pizza. The first time we slept in the same bed, appropriately soundtracked, feeling like loneliness had disintegrated in the dawn of each other. I still remember a night in denny's, chicken fingers, her looking into my eyes the whole time like she was breathing by drowning. Then things went to shit. Words and paths twisted away, I left for academic Vegas, and that seemed like that.

And now I found a letter. A story. An apology. Unformed men parked beside dumpsters with rotted minds, nearly doing her harm. The pervasive loneliness is still around her, the one I'd always wanted to leave a ray of light in. I found out whatever had twisted raw in metal and flesh didn't matter. She missed being friends. She missed being dear to me. I did too.

{Digression.

It's been 8 years that I've known her. She was the only voice around back that sophomore summer in Oberlin, when Mark had gone mad from glutin poisoning and stopped short of mauling me.}

- - -

And a new friend, Ally, off in Georgia and in a situation at once completely foreign but familiar. She asks for help in research methods stuff. And laughs her ass off at my (sometimes viciously dorky) jokes. Seems like she's needed some humor lately. You know my policy, so I can't say why. But it gives me a chance to get re-acquainted with early morning hours, while I try to impart advice or clarity.

It's an old coat with a coat of dust, but life sees fit sometimes for me to throw it back on.

Still fits.

And I'd be remiss to not torture you all re: Hill. Yeah she gets her own section.

In all my experience, I think I can count--no fingers on one hand--the times someone has followed through on knowing anything and everything about me. And she ultimately tolerates it too, which is cool. I've learned so many things. About myself, her, how the past and doppleganger visions don't mean you're always walking in a burning circle.

I've abandoned my tower of acetic serious for post-modern communion and sarcastic rib-poking or ass-grabbing with words. We thread conversations on picasso looms, into warm sweaters or PVC ribaldry. There's nothing passive about a drop of it. We've made it past misunderstandings, misstatements, an army of ghosts and come out as better friends for it.

We hunt on some borderline realm, exploring some niche that fits just right. A good friendship with phases like the times of day.

My eyes flicked open wide the first time I saw her. And every time thereafter I fight a little inclination not to, with a suitable mouth thing simultaneous. On some existential workbench there sat some being, and in a fevered late night its fingers must have trembled. The face, the eyes, the way the mouth and teeth broke against a joke or introduction. It wrought beauty out of its madness.

To say she's beautiful is to read one paragraph summarizing Les Miserables.

Her skin is quiet cocaine.

I'm off to eat chinese and move back to some less fabled state of consciousness. Brian and I are also meeting up at 9pm to talk about apartment hunting.

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