And now that most of my day-to-day life has changed with being single again, I better appreciate your calls during the day. Or at 3am, although you haven't done that in roughly 3-4 years. You don't get a hold of me just when you are having a crisis, or because I remind you of someone who reminded you of someone else. It's like I actually matter to you instead of being just an incidental, convenient life accessory.

You're the only one that keeps regularly calling me for the sake of just wanting to talk. I suck at shooting the breeze. You know this. But despite that you still do it.

I remember reading about a friend of yours that'd only turn to you when she was between relationships. That she perpetually seemed to use you as a narcotic to get by until the next dick fix was firmly embedded, likely some indwelling catheter that occasionally talked about sports scores and bought groceries on Wednesdays.

And I think: how shallow are the relationships with people we typically have. How perpetually semi-ephedrinated but otherwise meaningless, like a carton of caffeinated 82.5% dark cocoa ice cream or a spare half tab of acid left idle while booze and blow are still laying around.

I feel like at some point I failed to realize something. Like I fucked something up. I'll go back to the literal conversations we used to have and think: "this person loved me very deeply." It'll just get me. Not like I'm pining away in the valleys of depression, just that something really great was there and, somehow, it just faded.

And it's just got gone. Like somenoe was scanning for a channel for something interesting to watch, and somehow buzzed through to a game show when something else far more interesting got passed over.

We never did get to really talk.

Like how I'd keep something back or just defer to the same topics as always. "do you have a job?", "how's your dog?", "is your roommate still an emotionally unstable bitch?", "do you still give people shit for being hell of such as ignorant?"

You do come across some damned stupid people. It is hilarious.

I know better than to think just because my life suddenly changes other things and people magically compensate. I still grieve for the first healthy long-term relationship I ever had in a long series of poor dating decisions. I still look over the horizon at my 30's and wonder how some guys my age have kids already.

I feel like I'm starting over again. I am. I haven't made sense of it.

What sucks is that you haven't found a stable break. Something that you can build on. Like you're perpetually swimming through a storm-tossed, baleful black maelstrom of rage and teeth and crashing waves. I see water crashing on you again and again.

What sucks is that you almost find something that seems like it'll work out, but it really never does. I don't know how that is, but I've been around long enough to just wonder.

It's a cliche, and referring to the cliche is likewise, but I've always wanted to hear one day some day--on the phone--that suddenly everything turned around, and you were on top, and your years of struggle were done.

A guy can still hope.

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