I find my life to be simple. All I really need to do is take care of myself, work, and be happy. None of that is really difficult. I like to clean and to cut my own hair, work isn't exactly fun, but it's nothing I absolutely can't handle, and being happy...that seems to be the easiest of all.

For the past week or so, I've fallen from his number one priority. I'd be tempted to be upset about that...tempted, who am I kidding. A couple of months ago, there's no question that I would have been very unhappy about it. But I had some sort of understanding within me that just made me smile to see him so excited about his music and his web log. I was definitely uncertain as to whether or not I'd want to be present for the event, but in the end I knew that it was something I wouldn't want to have missed.

I see myself differently, these days. I can smile sincerely as I am ignored over the new eight-channel mixer, and I don't really mind if no one eats the cookies I brought back for them from my favorite bakery. It's been at least a week since I slept in my own bed, and I don't know how long it's been since I slept there alone. I don't know what has happened to me, but I don't ever want it to go away.

I was disturbed a couple weeks ago, when I realized that of all the times I've thought I was in love, there was never anyone that I couldn't live without. Did that mean that I'd never really been in love? No, I decided, no. I think it means that I'm just really my own person, no matter that I've been single for a total of maybe three months in the last five or six years. Well, I'm sure you could live without me, and I could live without you, but that doesn't mean that we should. Life is better this way.

A brush with death this weekend.

No...not my own. For a couple of weeks, I had company. Her...no, it's, name was Inca. We said she was a girl, just for the sake of convenience, ask Kat put it.

Sunday morning before I went home, my nose started bleeding.

When I did get home later that morning, she lay in her tank, stretched across the bottom but coiled once about a third of the way down from her head towards her tail. Unblinking, as ever.

I can't quite blame myself, honestly. I don't think she needed feeding, and I kept her water well, it might have been a little bit too warm, but the experts don't seem terribly concerned on that point. The most I could do was cry for a whole night because she was my responsibility and I had let her down. I think she may have been sick, and of course, I wouldn't recognize that. I think really it was bad mojo. Saturday, I had broken to news to Kat about the new creature, and Peter had casually mentioned it to his entire family. I don't know why that would be a bad thing...maybe just too much excitement and thought about her, and her little essence just couldn't handle it. I couldn't stand to be in the apartment all day, and I couldn't go home that night.

I stopped at home before work on Monday, which was garbage day, because I certainly couldn't leave her there in the bottom of her tank for a whole week.

So, I have had absolutely no contact with anything internetty since July 5th. Yeah, how much does that bite. But really, there will be pictures, soon, I'm told. Neat pictures of me with reptiles. nudge nudge wink wink.

"I'm going to write about stars in telephone wires as notes on a staff," he said.

Just there to be read, I thought to myself. But no. The information might be there, but if you tried to play it, it wouldn't make any sense to us. It's a system with which we are not familiar.

The air smelled of horses and fog, loose strands of my own hair whipped into my eyes, and I didn't feel the tears until they slid over my lips. The road ended where the headlights ended, for all I knew, and we pushed into liquid dark. The trees and the night, the wind and the water, I held them to me like a lover or a child, terrified to let go.

I held my breath for hours.

My heart is in my throat. I cannot breathe. Kat. Rabi.

Pictures and more of my drivel soon to come. We can only hope.