What I Am Telling You, Before You

I Read A Lot. I Always Have, But In Those Two Years I Gorged Myself On Books With A Voluptuous, Almost Erotic Gluttony. I Would Go To The Local Library And Take Out As Many As I Could, And Then Lock Myself In The Bedsit And Read Solidly For A Week. I Went For Old Books, The Older The Better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean Tragedies, A Dusty Translation Of Laclos - So That When I Finally Resurfaced, Blinking And Dazzled, It Took Me Days To Stop Thinking In Their Cool, Polished, Crystalline Rhythms.

Over Time, The Ghosts Of Things That Happened Start To Turn Distant; Once They've Cut You A Couple Of Million Times, Their Edges Blunt On Your Scar Tissue, They Wear Thin. The Ones That Slice Like Razors Forever Are The Ghosts Of Things That Never Got The Chance To Happen.

People You Knew When You Were Teenagers, The Ones Who Saw Your Stupidest Haircut And The Most Embarrassing Things You've Done In Your Life, And They Still Cared About You After All That: They're Not Replaceable, You Know?

Now That's A Concept That's Always Fascinated Me: The Real World. Only A Very Specific Subset Of People Use The Term, Have You Noticed? To Me, It Seems Self-evident That Everyone Lives In The Real World - We All Breathe Real Oxygen, Eat Real Food, The Earth Under Our Feet Feels Equally Solid To All Of Us. But Clearly These People Have A Far More Tightly Circumscribed Definition Of Reality, One That I Find Deeply Mysterious, And An Almost Pathologically Intense Need To Bring Others Into Line With That Definition.

I Am Not Good At Noticing When I'm Happy, Except In Retrospect. My Gift, Or Fatal Flaw, Is For Nostalgia. I Have Sometimes Been Accused Of Demanding Perfection, Of Rejecting Heart's Desires As Soon As I Get Close Enough That The Mysterious Impressionistic Gloss Disperses Into Plain Solid Dots, But The Truth Is Less Simplistic Than That. I Know Very Well That Perfection Is Made Up Of Frayed, Off-struck Mundanities. I Suppose You Could Say My Real Weakness Is A Kind Of Long-sightedness: Usually It Is Only At A Distance, And Much Too Late, That I Can See The Pattern.