Almost four weeks have passed since I made the fateful decision to walk out on 11 years of marriage.  The peace I have felt, and the freedom, far outweigh regret to the point I am no longer looking back, even though I leave many good memories and the potential for several more behind.

I have always believed her to be a good and decent person, and I hope I will always feel that way.  It would seem a needless waste to ruin all the good memories by having negative feelings towards her.

I try to tell her I love her, but just not the way a husband should love a wife.  I know this to be true, yet she insists it be an "all or nothing" struggle -- either I love her or I don't.  Given such a narrow option, I looked at her dumbfounded and shrugged, "okay then, I don't love you.  Satisfied?"

"What do you mean you don't love me?  How could you be so cold??"

"I'm only saying what you've put into my mouth...."

Make no mistake -- love is a take-no-prisoners battle.  You think somehow you can come up with an amicable split with the person you've shared some of the best times of your life with... but everytime you throw up the white flag, she'll bloody your face.  After a while, you realize it's hardly a fair fight, and so you adopt the same horrible tactics until you both wind up hating each other.

Maybe that's the way it needs to be, to move on.  Maybe you need a sense of hatred to get past the hurt.  And if that's the case, sobeit.  Because once the first few cheap shots are thrown, and the wells are poisoned, the option of ever going back is taken from you, and your only option is to fight to the bloody end until you both lose.

The air is brisk, my heart stretches its tiny fingers across the insides of my mind, and my soul clasps the hands of someone far away....

My fingertips trace tiny circles upon skin -- a swirling of flesh, to blend with mine.  My hands spread thighs in sighs and moans.... I am all the places I want to be, within her flesh and the eternity of her heart.

I thrust through flesh in search of her core -- leaving her blurred, with utters and moans.  I am deep, and deeper still, as she trembles and loses control -- sweet shutters, ripples of souls torn free, as I become her, and she becomes me.

Every piece of shell devoured within -- passionate affection, so beautiful, in a deep deep swirling of sins.

To the east, the skies burned violet blue in twilight.  The west was filled with the shadowy remnants of the noonday sun in winter.

Today was a lot like yesterday.  Yesterday, a funny thing happened on the way to the mall.

Tomorrow, I'm going to eat a waffle.

We listened to the bird-song, delighted before we were aware, before joy and sorrow mingled in the silent glow of the passing of days.  Without time we become all things -- yet collectively we struggle, building staircases to the stars, aspiring to know all of what we are with tools that measure space and light but fail to measure a kind heart.  We imagine progress is progression towards knowing, that as we tax and torture, convert and recombine, we leave nothing of consequence behind.  

We drown the present, painting with the colors of our desires a dying world.  

How will the sadness of the bird's silenced note wreak the air?  Will it make the shadows tremble?  Deprived of wings, we create to imitate the feature of our desires, the swallow's shallow bending, pivoting on the wind.  

Lilacs in the field grow, and beside the stream the green fern.  Nature's unconscious measuring replaces the lilac in the wind, the fern in the shade.   

In the hush, a tree topples from a weather worn cliff.  The moving sound gathers to an expectant rush.  The Cliffside, unrooted, divided, integrates into the myriad cycles of the sea. 

Dancing firelight embraces the flowing robes of the moon's light on the leaves, in the soft halo of the night under a chorus of bright stars.

I stood against the flimsy railing and looked out over the wind-chopped swells marching their arc from the distant horizon to the nearby shore.

“The eternal ocean,” I thought, while the wind whipped against my face. "Eternal. Everlasting. Never ending." I wiped my hand across my brow. "Unlike me."

The sun glinted off the whitecaps, magnified as from a million mirrors. Though blinded, I gazed into the glare, hoping with all my might that as the reflections washed over me, the great ocean too was somehow looking upon me.

"Great Sea," I yelled out to the water. "Remember the part of me you see today, so I might be eternal too!"

I listened, yet the ocean gave no answer -- save the constant thrush of breakers rolling along the beach. Soon, a cloud extended its reach and blocked the sun, dissolving the glimmering reflections and breaking the spell they held over me.

I turned my back upon the waters. Eager to be away from this place, I leapt my way upward, clearing three, sometimes four steps at a time. I overtook a little girl, and she stared awestruck, watching me crest the stairwell and disappear.

She tried to mimic my action, but was too small to make it over more than one step.

Her mother took her hand. Following after, the girl dreamed about the man who could leap over stairs, imagining that someday, maybe, she would be able to do so as well.

This is not a boast, but rather, A TOAST!  TO PHARMACIES NATIONWIDE!

Because, my friends, I am no longer a burned-out professional.  After a considerable hiatus from the "real" world, I reemerged today with a new job and a CONSIDERABLE raise over what I had been making, in a town I never had any intention of staying in.

Whatever predetermined fate allowed me to be a pharmacist, I will never know.  But thank the gods!

Few professions allow you the luxory of living virtually anywhere in the country, no matter how small the town or depressed the area, and command that kind of earning power.  It is freedom.  Amazing freedom.  No ladders to climb.  No asses to kiss.  No work to take home.... I'll take the burn-out of 12-hour days (all on your feet) for the rest of my life and LOVE it....

I am unable to sleep tonight for unknown reasons.

This is not one of those nights where my mind races.  My mind is stable.  Thoughts are mostly perverse, or pondering the fact that I feel fatigued.

No.  This is one of those nights where my emotions are raging hot.  My heart is a brick.  So much sudden change after such a long spell of sequential ceaselessness.

I am sad, lonely, excited, restless, fearful, anxious, heartbroken, wistful, longing, and deeply moved.... all at the same time.

I am in love with a dream.  The dream manifests itself but lies barely out of reach.  I keep reaching and from time to time my fingertips graze its edges.  One big push is all I need and I can grab hold and pull it deep inside....

Coming at last to a place where I am no longer running, no longer hiding, after leaving everything behind, everything I knew:  My comfort.  My security.  My possessions.  The woman I married.

Sometimes, you must sacrifice comfort in order to live again. 

Years of relying on someone else to think for me, to make my decisions, to care for me, to do most of my living for me.... It was an easy life.  But it wasn't living.

The fear of leaving is, you will be alone.  Yet, why do I feel the least bit alone I ever have?

The door has been thrown open, and the possibilities are limitless.  I'm alive.  I'M ALIIIIVE!!!!  (Think Dr. Frankenstein)

The Enchatress raised herself up from her crouching position, and stared back at the carving she made on the ground. The spell made a slight humming energy only she could feel. She turned back her attention to the approching footsteps, and searched mentally for who the being could be. It was so close, she could feel its heartbeat, its breathing, its unmistakable hum of life.

She drew its smell into her lungs, savoring it hungrily. For only so long can she stretch her powers so freely.

When the night ends, the moon will return back to its lunar cycle, leaving her powers yet again confined. Only when the night is bathed in its silvery light can the Enchantress roam unchallenged.

She smiled knowingly as she heard the being come closer, and turned around....

Clarity is essential during the cycle of seasons, the willingness to yield to the forces of change -- rain and river, pond and sea, the moon pull of the tide.

Each half truth glimpsed through the helmet's slotted visor, we charge in the ranks, knee against knee, spear against spear, knight against knight.

On the shore at the earth's edge, a new planet forms in miniature: each grain of sand, a speck of dust, light upon the palm -- yet the whole beach, in unison, weighing us up, weighting us down.

This world -- immanent, renascent, growing more solid through its thinning veil of mist.

The wild man sculls towards us, over the waves, over the sand, a fisher of what kind of men?

The pond's mask, reconfiguring in ever widening circles, laps at an unseen shore. Light bends like a reed; liquid are the letters dancing, distorted, on the white sand undulating under the waves.

The infinite sky -- great water-colored dome tailored to the edge of everything, palette of the oceans and the plains, filter of the heavens’ offerings, the very womb of all space, painting every planetary scene, illuminating by day, blanketing by night....

I don't wish to preach about another blindness of our age, another negligence or unspiritual paganry, but simply: this canvas of the dawns -- since the sun’s first dawn -- deserves a mention now and then, for once to be admired naked for its own sake, without peering and drooling over its prominent genitalia.

Our vertical attitude restrains us from enjoying more habitually the overarching skies. On the summer grass the child lies on his back and grows familiar with the endless landscape of the air:  cloud and insect, light and swift, his space is not dimensional -- and without any urgency or prejudice, he lets his eye and mind roam, imagination grazing on its succulence.

The older the invertebrate, the more his margins concentrate -- his world a tight and lonely raft moored to hope with fear.

The landscape painter -- half his canvas graced with all the lightest air we breathe -- the color and the cloud his artist-licensed taste… what is it in the vastness of the dome of every blue, that we so pressed for marvel shun -- to value more our trinkets than the ones we love?

Frightened as it were by the uncertainty of all the skies above…

You subject yourself to broken hearts, to regrets of all you wish you did or said, all in hopes of finding that perfect someone who will love you unconditionally.... who makes the pain go away... the person who with just a smile or a touch clears your mind of past sorrows and makes you realize you don’t have to be perfect to be loved.

This pursuit is the boldest of endeavors. But in the end, love cannot be found.  It is simply given when least expected.

The world is dark and all I can feel is the wind at my back, pushing me onward. 

Somewhere in front of me is a cliff;  I know this, but I cautiously step forward and wait to feel myself falling, free, weightless, into dark nothingness, until I plunge headlong into the bright warm world below....

In a pond was a line -- on either side of which, the world went in two directions: up and down -- the lower being wrinkled as if trembling in its own embarrassment at being perpetually head down, the upper seeming aloof and maintaining a countenance of grandeur in its superior or more correct upright state.

The line seemed not to care at all.

Among the others who did not care, were the trees, shrubs, the sky, the balled clouds, and winged creatures who made residence in both the upper and lower worlds, both interesting, both necessary to the order of things.  

And the line, the unbiased line to whom both looked correct?  It stayed silent in the middle -- necessary to the order of things, yet languishing in the fact that none of the life evident in the upper and lower worlds resided in it. 

This too is necessary to the order of things.

She said she loved me a million times over.  She has shown me love more times than I can count.

So why do I feel so unloved by her??

It is a question I have struggled with for endless days.

I am capable of feeling it, I am certain.  I accept it whenever it is offered me.  I wrap my arms around it and bask in its warmth.

Perhaps the love was never free.  Perhaps it had a price.  Perhaps it took more than it gave.  I don't know.

All I know, is what I feel.  You can drive yourself crazy trying to comprehend it all.  But I suspect that love, true love, does not create feelings of entrapment and distrust.

Or perhaps it's just ME.  (Though I seriously doubt it....)

I don't know whether to love or hate you... at times I border the two.  How can someone I love so much make me hurt so often?  But you do.  You never let yourself see that you’re not the only one in pain -- especially when you’re the cause of that pain.

But who is to blame?  You for doing this to me?  Or myself for allowing it to happen?

I tried to block my heart from you.... but failed.

You say you want me to be happy -- yet I can't be myself around you.  I have to be who you want me to be.  I've never really lived my life -- because you never let me.  You never gave me a choice --something you yourself were always given.  Because of this I often resent you for a simple reason... instead of regretting the things I did, I look sadly upon all I didn’t get to do or experience. 

Because of you.

You were able to live a life how you saw fit to live it.  I'm still waiting for mine to start.

Non-bloggers will never understand.  You can try to explain it with Joseph Conrad-esque vocabulary, and they likely still won't get the soulful brother and sisterhood of the blogging world.  They are unable to comprehend the comradery or the true nature of intimacy formed here among strangers who likely will never even meet in "the real world".... the notion of learning someone from the inside-out... the methodology of painting yourself onto an electronic canvus using symbols and metaphors that will be detected and cherished by a select few... to be digested and regurgitated and exposed to a greater life of understanding than the author probably ever even imagined possible.

I have reached a milestone in my blogging life.  I am one-year old today, after a cycle of shedding my skin every now and again to finally arriving at the contemplative station I now embody.  And I can say, without a doubt, that my understanding and empathy for the lives of those who offer themselves likewise on this vast electronic altar has grown exponentially.

I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who reads these words and cannot see the greater good this serves.  The opportunity for those who spend their days and nights in emotional subjugation to find themselves in the words of others, to form the kinds of emotional connections which become far deeper and meaningful than anything in "reality" ever could be.

I used to have cardboard boxes for stuff in my bedroom when I was a kid. My mom worked for Kroger and we'd use boxes from there to put the stuff in that wouldn't fit in my dresser. I think this was before Rubbermaid made anything that wouldn't fit in a refrigerator.

I learned early on that that it was wrong to write on the walls and other nice things. Somehow, I either applied that to cardboard boxes or I was actually reprimanded for marking on cardboard boxes once -- I'm not sure which.

Nevertheless, I was drawn toward the carboard boxes whenever I chanced to have a Magic Marker in my hand. I wanted to write graffiti on them. I wanted to be a vandal in my own room, but the consequences (or mistakenly-assumed consequences) terrified me.

What could I do? How could I mark yet not be in trouble?

I did the most logical thing I could think of: I marked the boxes the way a stockman might.

For years I had boxes sitting around my room that I had secretly marked with "3 of 6", "PO 3423" and "Broken Case." Mom and Dad never caught on that the "Hold" on that Del Monte Sliced Peaches in Heavy Syrup box was written by me behind closed doors with a tin-shelled Marks-A-Lot.

I was so slick, I was...