lol...and you are? tell me if we've met someplace, sometime and in what fashion or mode. (my questions to jeff asking him to dig deep.)

I am happy today. Honey, the brown one who hates peeing in the rain, decided it was a good day to attack the snow. She's young and never known the cold. I smiled broadly, laughing, looking through muddy pawed windows while H was in the kitchen making coffee, making breakfast. I heard Rox talking to him in a little girl voice. She's cute, I like her. I like Bri too. The other one I have yet to meet. Lots to do, busy work and painting. Songs for Jarrod. I'm feeling poetic today, good day to listen to Mazy Starr and Cowboy Junkies, sway from side to side and sing in hushed tones. Fold the laundry while the sky is gray and the snow still falls.

Ry, thank you for your words, they struck me in kindred spirit. Others have tried but I find their "voice" trite in harsh falsetto. I've marked your page and mark my words, I'll come back to it. People like us are hard to find. Don't talk so much about school, honey, it's unimportant in the scheme of things. Let your emotions bleed through. Your note to me, it's those words that speak:

"I connect with the second half of this more and therefor I like it more. I have always found myself crushing and without focus.. lost somewhere in dreamy dazing of another's skin. Its so sensual. You remind me of the Hemingway i wrote today in some ways. Goin from monotonous and hurtful grays to vibrance and luster. Wonderful emotions..."

Beautifully they touched me.

When did this all become so autobiographical? I can't say. Maybe I finally started to bleed through, own up to my emotions, you know, those that manifest in my writing, the ones I don't see until it's too late. I'm learning to feel them and articulate.

My heart. I put it up in a jar on my desk at work. A jar labeled Mt. Olive, Dill Pickles. I made a little slit in the top with a knife where I deposit notes from time to time. Notes and loose change. It'll keep there for a while, my heart. I put it up safe, those specific hopes with it. You know, J, all those ones shot to hell over too much thinking. I'll come back to it, to them at a later time. For now, I am content with nothing from no one. I am content being me and letting time spill around me.

I sit on that warm beach on Vieques, the sand cold and wet on sun kissed skin. I lean back on stretched arms and look to the sky, the tide ebbs and flows around me. It is the beach I gave you in your dying days. Your soft step draws me from the sun and I turn. Walking towards me in silence, arm raised in greeting, you smile. No, you will not age, Robert, you will forever be that youth, smiling and carefree. That youth of my summer before the world turned. Not even thirty-five, you'll be that nineteen to my sixteen. In our separate paths we made it to a similar destination. We did not judge each other, we did not know each other well enough and yet that bond existed. You were you and I was me and we finally loved ourselves feely enough to love each other. I miss you, two years is coming up fast.

Time moves that desperate ache toward fond memories and bitter-sweet smiles, and fades anger from black to gray. Time moves within my womb, within my heart, slowing, stilling. I have to get through before I can get past and though the pasture is wide, I see the gate that opens to the next field.