"Our despair is domesticated and gives us peace. Only hope remains. Wild hopes, their screams shatter the night and rip up the day." - Yehuda Amichai

Shattered nights. I've been building piles of crumbling emotion around the shattered nights I've been wading through. Shattered by hope, it's an interesting idea. How often the compilation of big dreams becomes the weight we break our backs to carry.

I have been thinking. A lot of thinking...about...things. Can I explain it? Can you hope to understand, and...if you did...would it really matter? Would any of it really matter to you, and make a difference?

They flutter behind you, your possible pasts...some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost...She stood in the doorway, the ghost of a smile haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign. Her cold eyes imploring the men in their macks for the gold in their bags, or the knives in their backs.

I've always loved that line, the imagery and way it's worded: "The ghost of a smile haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign." Can't you see it? It's a perfect image. A sad...image. It's a good simile. Normally I don't like similes. Don't ask me why.

Somedays my life is a pile of disjointed quotes whose interplay and relationships only make sense to, well, me.

Oh, it's been tempting. So tempting this past week. But I will let it waver and settle in the amber of uncertainty until it becomes tepid and hard, and I can chip it out and throw it away. Or against something, watch it, too, shatter. Explosions into a thousand shards of each thing I tuck away with a doubt and a whimper. Some days I am amber-full, like an old tree, hoarding the pieces of things caught in my slow-to-change way. Maybe some day I'll find them again, and hold them up to the light, seeing them in a different way that the one they've settled in so comfortably now.

"Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone." - Gertrude Stein

I struggle in the quagmire of wishing it all knew what I meant. What I know. Of knowing what I wish it all means. Of meaning what I wished it all knew. It only winds tighter the further up and further in you go.

What do I mean? It breaks so easily along the weakest lines of things. When you move enough times in, over, across, beyond, through some things, you only weaken them. And they will fall apart. It's not that you intended its breaking. It's that you loved it so much it could only ever be broken.

"A reassuring platitude: "I love you" became the constantly-handled coinage of a relationship daily devaluing itself."

I wrote that once, in a poem. I don't know why it keeps coming to the front of my mind. Swimming somewhere in all the doubt and the ether.

My room is finished. The walls are painted, the furniture is back. It's gold as gold as gold as gold. With a red dash here and there. The new bamboo blinds are hung, and hanging. The light breaks through them into a plethora of filigrees and falls across the bed that finally has a frame and isn't on the floor anymore.

In my rush to get to work this morning to log out of msn messenger, which I realized I hadn't logged out of on Monday, I left my cell phone sitting by my bed. It hasn't been used much lately, and I suppose it was just...something made suddenly forgettable.

I brought my music, but the batteries are dead.

I had a five-hour conversation Monday night with someone I don't know. It was fun, I had forgotten how enjoyable it can be, discovering a person, some new perspective that breathes and sees and owns a life. Something that at least for now is not at all a part of yourself, of the world that you've built around you.

I take comfort in little new things, when the old ones have found their place and there's room for something else in the compartments of my attention.

My gamer pride was stabbed, gutted, and devoured in the flash of blinding light this past week...

I am not as good as I think I am when I'm alone.

Which, I suppose, has far more implication in every other aspect of my life than I give it credit for.

Perhaps that's a meaning I don't know yet. But it's wedged itself in rather uncomfortably. And I will stare at it, annoyed, until I can learn to understand it, and accept the fact that it's there.

Perhaps that has been my problem all along.

Don't ask me why I write these things. It's something I have to get out, put down. Sometimes it makes the sorting of answers easier, and sometimes it only gives me new questions.

"While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words, dying to believe in what you heard, I was staring straight into the shining sun."

At least the Floyd will never leave me.

Odd, the-off weeks when the lightning of change forks its way through your soul and leaves you singed and electric. That's how I feel.

I feel like I keep clawing my way through distractions, because it's easier than staring at truth in all its bared-teeth and snarling glory. How bright and hollow the grimaces of our dreams can be when you meet them unexpected around a dark corner.