abandonment, a theme i do not want to beat to death as much as certain others, but also a feeling that thrusts in an acute stabbing motion in my general direction in these waning days. driving home last night, for example, in the dusky fading sun of the days of late summer; driving past some people that i know (or maybe i should start saying knew, the past tense as an acknowledgment of the future being now), aware of their lives and motions completely independent of my own. a gentle solipsism devoid of ego, i swear: how real are those experiences of theirs if i am not there to witness them, though their lives are shaped by the grinding erosion of living daily, their lives on the occasions of intersect with my life influenced by everything they did before they knew me and all the people that they know that i do not. and vice versa. what about me is real to them and would they care or think or consider or become consumed by interest as i do?

--like i don't really live here anymore.

how i was driving last night in patty's car, afforded a degree of anonymity that i assume i would not have otherwise, the green of my own car being so apparently memorable. how i could drive almost anywhere in that darkish shroud and take it all in.

and worlds colliding: there doesn't seem to be much world left here in dracut. with each passing day, it seems to me that more and more of what once existed here for me is slipping away, patches in the sky; it seems also that i have little desire to fight to hold on if such a rebelliously and misguidedly nostalgic act were even possible. patches in the sky, i care not to explain the reference, but i mean that the dracut experience is not slipping away so much as it is undergoing a process of conversion to one specific facet of itself, that is, the part where i'm here, perhaps driving that familiar scenic long route to buy a book, driving past the houses of old friends-- the houses either vacated or the friends emotionally unavailable please check back in a few years if ever-- and a current of existence carries on without me. people come and go and love and lose and laugh and laugh harder and stir the cauldrons of local legend, they get drunk and fornicate in darkened rooms by night, contemplating brilliant sunrises by morning and not talking about it later; they have risen at an early hour with a sense of purpose for their day, and i'm the guy who rarely went anywhere and never made much of an impression.

then, of course, there's the other world. the world we're making for ourselves in a place that has brought me to such extremes, the world which i will cherish every day knowing that there is so little to return to here. a world which i entered not fully aware of my the two-worlds theory of living so close yet so far from home, a world in which i eventually became comfortable, a world which i made my own by some semblance of choice and maturity-- not simply being born there and forced to grow up and live with the manifest mistakenness of childhood and its later tragedies. at one point there was no alternative, but now that it's here, i choose the alternative.