it's been a good while
this is nathan. we had both liked each other a long time, and then, one night. in late november, not long after my 21st birthday. not long after i watched the way he watched me, walk into a room.
here is a picture of a particularly hot and humid night. after failing to get in to see the kills. we wound up slugging local beers at lovejoys instead, a place full of the pierced and tattooed, but extraordinarily friendly bartenders. my new camera took some photos, but later i found the data was corrupted and this was one of the few to survive. when nathan went out to smoke a cigarette, he came back with a rose he had bought off the street - pale yellow, with flaming pink tips. i took pictures of gabi holding the rose, at different angles and perspectives and focuses. i lost all of those, too.
what i've lost is not what is important though. there have been many things i have tried to gain, and many times in which i've known to myself, quietly, that my motives are not pure. i have made friends, lost them, made more new friends. i've had drunken nights, i've puked in discomfiting public places. i have cried quietly to sleep at times, not quite knowing why. i have resolved myself again and again, and lost my pluck. plunged back into school only to have it end in disaster. and i come up with reams and reams of plans, plans to counteract my failures, plans to make myself noticed, plans to set my life in motion.
some of them are working, some of them aren't. i think i have a clearer path ahead of me than i could have hoped for the clarity to see in some time. for the sake of my own disgusting habit of naming things, then watching them just as quickly disappear, i will not voice what i believe to be the phantoms of my future.
i think, for the most part, this sounds worse than it really is. i have learned to trust my failures because they are much more honest than my successes.
and, but still. i am here.