From an old journal

Having nothing to post about (except my leave of absence - and I guess I'll get to that later), I was digging around in the closet. I used to write, a lot, journals - pages, notebooks full that now sit in a box in the extra bedroom closet. This was years and years ago. My journals though were more like stories, at least a lot of them. Every once in a while I pull them out. It is funny to read some of them, sometimes sad. It is very telling. Here are some paragraphs from different parts of a story that I wrote a long time ago in a journal. I can't put the whole thing here, that would be embarrassing. I never said I was good at writing, I just said I used to write journals.

Counting down the days, like every time before. Until she is left with nothing but the hours. In a moment that she has been in so many times. Wondering about how she got here. Marveling at the arbitrariness of it all. They both know that she is lying but in his world you simply take what someone tells you at face value, and you act as if you believe it. And so he does the only thing he knows how to do. He trusts her, walking out the door without giving it a second thought.

The truth is in the subtlety of our behavior though. It is those passing moments that he talks about that hold the most significance. It is what you think in a passing moment, what you say in that unguarded split second when you tell the truth. There are words with only one meaning, only one interpretation. One word changes everything. They share a bed, his hand on her thigh, and he is unaware of the distance between them that exists in her mind. A distance that she blames him for because of his words, but it is also her lies that have created it and she can't get over what he said to her.

The pause before hanging up the telephone was because she knew. It was all that she needed in the way of confirmation, to know that the beginning of the end was upon her. Not knowing how long it would take to untangle, to unravel, to untwist what had become comfortable and pleasant and predictable. She never was one for attachment or for endings for that matter. She knew that the process had already started unconsciously. The undoing would be her own. She would detach herself from him in much the same way as before, while sitting across from him, sharing a bottle of wine over conversation. So that the final severing of their world into two would be simply like him slipping from her existence. Almost as if he weren't real at all, except for the photographs in the box.

She feels invisible around them. Those in the other room whose lives make hers seem small and insignificant. The truth is that she wishes she felt otherwise because everything meaningful about the moment is lessened by the observation that it is temporary. Like all things. Reminding her that she is indeed among them, the replaceable.