Except relief seems to be far from where I am. The web space around this entry, currently, is pitiful, all black and, from time to time, red X's.

It's 3:45 in the morning and I can't sleep. I've read two books and I'm still here, awake as anything and maybe just blending in with the rest of the smear of online insomniacs.

I sleep with an "L" shaped pillow that a girl I dated mailed to me because I enjoyed it so much when we were together. I remember walking past a small oriental stand on Broadway and taking a left at University, and trying to be as quiet as I could as I stepped over rocks until I reached her ground-level window. She'd sleepily part the shades, give a knowing smile that surfaced from some odd hours of sleep, and let me in. I have a shoebox now of our collected memories and other more tangible items. She's getting married soon and I don't know if she'll ever read this. Tonight I almost want to throw the pillow behind my bed and try to forget about it. I end up curling up with it because the L shape of it fits my sleeping patterns. She isn't a girl that I pine over day and night - she's one that comes in sharp slivers at times. Certainly we're friends, I'm friends with a lot of my ex's. But the What Was will always exist as just that in memory. That's what makes you burn at night sometimes. That moment of perfection. And me, spoiled brat that I am, have experienced said moments of perfection with more than one person.

I still have a flower that another ex gave me hanging from my ceiling here, in my room that's watched me come from a boy in 3rd grade to a college graduate. Do you have an old room like that, that is all your own? Amazing, how it feels like walls can love you. And to the flower hanging from a pushpin, to a flower that has long since turned to a crisp husk, from the hand that gave it to me, I swear I could see your indention in my mattress if I willed it enough. At these early morning hours, that's suicide in tiny amounts.

"Because everybody knows... this ain't heaven." -Lali Puna, "Faking the Books"

I have a necklace from another ex hanging from a seashell that I collected a long time ago. I think about her a lot, and the memories are tinged with goodness all around: that is, she's still a fine friend. The kicker: her mother gave it to me. Both are good people, and I feel as though both have found their place with other people, which is good. No, it's better than a measly "good".

I'm no stranger to seeing the sun rise, but this time around my bed is uninviting and I suddenly am tremendously aware of the artifacts that I've gathered from the love of other people. There are many things that I could do with this, just as anyway could do with their respective secret items. I could crumble the husk of a flower and act defiant in the face of it, as if to say that the relationship is OVER: but I don't need to do that. I could curl sharply around the L-shaped pillow and pretend that it's her, but that's nothing but memory and another man has her, and I knew also that he was right for her even when her and I were together, which left me, long ago, with no lasting biting regret.

I don't believe in fate, particularly because of the somber note implied, but in Stephen King's masterful series "The Dark Tower", the protangonist refers to something of the sort as ka. I'd like to believe in that.

On my desk here (a drafting table, actually, left over from my youthful ambitions and obsessions with drawing) are a halfway melted candle with the Chinese symbol for "love" still on it and a frame with a picture of me and a girl. Tonight/this morning, it seems as though I can't look a single direction, a single angle, without finding some semblance of love. Normally that's wonderful, and I can verify that, during days, my room has a terrific amount of comfort. In my room at what is now 4:00am, though, while the people around me suture and come together with each other, I feel like a stray thread.

Wonderful - this has climaxed to a complaint. I don't mean it to be. The girl in the photo is the girl outside the lines, I suppose, of what trajectory I possess in my collection of woo'ing. And sometimes, more often than not, maybe that's ka working again.

And there are others. Some have done something as simple as not return phone calls, others I wait for with a gun-shy heart. Goddammit, just rain down already. I'm too young to not be able to sleep because I miss something and I don't even know exactly what it is.

But I know that it's a blend of everything I've written about. I went down before this entry and hung out with the puppy, who, if provided a body, will flump himself down next to/on it with mostly total disregard to his limbs. I love him. And I hope, very very much, that if I love you as well, I've made it known.