i remember having these deep, epic conversations with claire that convinced me of something i should have noticed even further back in high school-- that if i'm fortunate, life will be one long conversation. it is the same with any conversation, i find, and it is a comfort to be so self-aware as to know that i will always remain young and sarcastic at heart regardless of what turns my personality takes in the future. on tuesdays and thursdays laura and i have been lunching with emmie, resulting in a round table of laughs and, later, the inevitable lonely drive home.

i like talking to people, but it just struck me today what the implication of my life-as-conversation paradigm would be. death is the end of a conversation, the sad moment one, both, or all depart, and the empty feeling you are left with. i am not sure if this view makes death easier to stomach in its familiarity; regardless, its punch makes contact with a more acute spot of dread.

death is four in the morning in that conversation we thought would go on all night, when our eyes closed and we had run out of things to say long before. it's not a comfort at all, if that loneliness is so precisely lonely that we already have died, that i already have died, because monica left and those days with claire are gone and the band always packed up and left my garage for home on waning sunday evenings for a such a long stretch of time it seemed it had always been so.

. . . so.

so tell me more about yourself. we can't let the conversation stop. did you dream of something more? were you wrong to?