It's so strange seeing pictures of P online, married. It's strange. I feel intimately familiar with her but also very distant. It has been years. More and more I find myself with the sensation of meeting milestones I'd never anticipated: the milestone of year 3.5 with another person, contemplating that life forward with that person, weighing the costs and gains, and now this: seeing a past lover (of sorts—our sex life was terrible) getting married to another person. It's all new to me, unexpected, and yet it has a familiarity, the kind gained from indulging in fictional accounts of what it's like to be here, one human being making the best of a sorry situation. Past loves move on. It's just weird to see it in the flesh, as it were, thanks to facebook etc.

I like Lyzard, the special ed teacher I work with. I want to be her friend. I talked at her today but now I feel sort of bad about it, like maybe...she didn't want to. I'd love to be her friend. I'd play basketball with her.

Maybe I have the cat toxin. Maybe that's why I'm more insular than ever. I talk to people, rebuild things...then fall off the planet. Lately. The past 3.5 years.

Thinking of P makes me think, oddly, of Twilight. Not because of the romance of us (which was pretty terrible, awful, harrowing), but because of the trees. I miss the redwood forest, towering, palatial, creating chambers within an expanse that seemed to go on perpetually. The park in Arcata that started with a lawn for ultimate frisbee players and simply dropped off into hundreds of square miles of wilderness. All sounds finding queer channels through the trees.

The man who stood in the forest playing his violin, the strands seeming to come from all directions the way they bounced off the corrugations of the tree trunks. For me, oddly, Twilight is a recognition that the forest is secret and sacred, and very easily quite dangerous. The feeling of disappearing behind a stand of trees and never appearing again. Mortality, love, and shrooms...