instead i head to the computer and it's like i turn into a little girl who's just seen her first rainbow. i get all giddy and nervous and hopeful and despairing and i tell myself not to look obsessively at my buddy list, but it might as well be projected onto the insides of my eyelids. at 8:05 his name pops up, and i start to count. i only get to twelve before his IM pops up.

It doesn't have to be on Valentine's Day. It doesn't have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn't have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn't have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third date. It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirit. It just has to be.

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.

Even if neither of us got what we wanted, we found freedom in the third choices.

We love and we feel and we try and we hope.

I am stronger than words and I am bigger than the box I'm in, and then I see her in the crowd and I fall apart.

placid, adj. Sometimes I love it when we just lie on our backs, gaze off, stay still.