"somewhere other than inside the out there." -- part twenty seven.

after a night of porch-sitting (a favorite activity down here) with two of my favorite boys (almost ever), i came back in and got my pajamas out of my closet. as i turned, i noticed that one of boy's letters to me had fallen from the shelf and onto my desk, right on top of my mail. my first (albeit premature) thought was, holy motherfucking shit. that lasted half a second before i realized that the carefully folded paper with "BEAN" scrawled across the top had merely fallen from its place, and this was not a new letter. only one of the few that i have memorized.

i sat down and read it.

i take the simple things that happen upon me.

i have never been a firm believer in "destiny" as you may define it, but i'm old enough to know that everything happens for a reason. that doesn't stop me from wanting to punch whoever thought up that reason right in the goddamn face. if a letter falls onto my mail pile, i'm going to read it even if i already know what it says. i'm just that way.

i do believe that everything happens for a reason. no, i don't believe that everything happens for the best. i'm not even sure that the best exists, or ever has.

i believe in certain fated occurences. milestones throughout the carnival. there's the ferris wheel, the fried dough stand, the tilt-a-whirl, the alley of rigged games. but, generally, it's how you get to those milestones that really matters. the journey should be more fun than the destination. when it comes down to it, you stand in line for an hour to ride a roller coaster for thirty seconds. best thirty goddamn seconds of your day, makes you forget that hour you stood in line. something inside makes me think we should be paying more attention to the time we spend waiting.

have you ever been to one of the bigger amusement parks, and while you're being corralled through the z-formations, tvs are desperately trying to entertain you?

that's my point. it was in there somewhere.

either way.

i'm stalling.

it's not that i don't have a lot to tell about new orleans or the year that we lived there.

it was peaceful and a quiet sort of brilliance. those things are hard to describe without being overly-sentimental (me? never.)

it was the first time i had worked so closely with kids on a regular basis in a long time, and so i kept getting sick. every cold and flu that came through that joint, i caught. those bugs had their way with me. boy never got sick. he never caught whatever thing i had, and it drove me insane. as soon as i got over a cold, i'd get the flu. that winter was spent on a lot of bed rest, but he took good care of me.

new year, and buddha and his girlfriend and rockstar and philosopher all came down to nawlins to have a time. we wandered around the quarter, and walked and walked through the cold. at midnight, the dawn of 2002, we were in the middle of st. charles, and no one else was around. just the six of us standing on the neutral ground, shrugging over what to do next. so we went back to the apartment and made some hot cocoa. boy played "even a punk needs a paycheck" and we all smiled good smiles.

they left a couple days later, and it was back to our ways. we led a quiet life there, structured but not too. we missed each other when the other was at work, and that's the best way to describe it.

we had been so tied into a web in boston that when we freed ourselves, we went into hiding. wednesdays, we went and got comics. fridays we spent on his dad's porch. sundays, his stepmom cooked dinner and then we'd go home to watch the two reruns of er back to back. we did our laundry. we got mail. we spent a lot of time walking up and down magazine street. and we talked about plans.

i was never that girl with the plan. i still don't know what i want to be when i grow up. i just always figured that these things have a way of working themselves out. we were both content to know that we didn't have to worry about finding the love of our lives anymore. we had the love of our life together.

things never go according to plan, and so i had never wanted to chisel it all out. but we lightly penciled this delicate stencil of how we wanted it to be, and we were always too scared to trace over it in any permanent sort of ink. certain places, the lines were thicker.

we always wanted to move someplace warmer. we didn't miss boston, but we missed our friends. we kept writing. it was never a question of "will we be together forever?" the question was always, "when does forever start?"

it was a time span that almost seems a nitrogen sort of frozen. tap it the wrong way and ...