'this sort of thing cannot make anybody happy, but it is a way of saying: "i wish you were happy."'

-- thomas merton, the seven storey mountain

at some point in the past, i think it was sometime between the night i braved the cold to walk catherine back to her apartment from work (this was back when she lived down by the water in a tall, narrow apartment building with the steep stairways of a citadel) so we could catch up, admire the way she and her roommate had arranged their books in ceiling-hugging shelves, and watch lost in translation and the day i walked there to meet her and we watched the dueling birds with alternately red and black beaks, i made a bargain with myself, trading away my happiness and depression in exchange for a deadened, but stable, holding pattern of emotion that has since kept me mostly amiable and occasionally prone to flights of excitement, but within which i haven't been as happy as i feel i could be. but i haven't killed myself either.

i used to say she did it to me, that that meteoric relationship we had and the torturous friendship that followed and dissipated burned me out, that i exposed every emotional nerve i had and was cauterised-- my days as an emotional live wire, the only way i could describe what went on. as emo as it sounds, the thought that i haven't been able to feel properly has occupied me since. what followed was that awkward night and the weeks after with the one i still won't name, a couple of forays with younger women in my role as the worst first boyfriend ever, the first ending with an annoyed girl who was just looking for a good summer fling-- i laughed when she broke up with me, knowing that i'd driven her to it but unable to feel what was happening as deeply as i should have. that wasn't love and never pretended it, so one could argue my reaction (the laughter followed by a couple of days of mope and everything but the girl's baby the stars shine bright) was about right, but i am not the sort of person who responds in such a measured, calm way unless something else is wrong. the second, well, we all know i still feel guilty about that. at least i managed to apologise, for whatever it was worth. so do i date my emotional mostly-death to the beginning of the four-year period that is now coming to an end?

maybe this is true, that it actually results to that period rather than the later one i was talking about above, but what isn't true is that it was somehow catherine's fault. what i did, whenever i did it, was make that subconscious deal, the one that she herself refused to keep making with herself when she flushed her generic prozac and became another person, only i did it without medication. i did it to myself. like in the radiohead song. that's why it really hurts.

kaleigh had that lyric in her instant messenger outgoing message almost constantly for a time; it must have meant something to her, but i could never figure out what. that is the consequence of online profiles, that we live under the illusion of knowing everyone better than we really do. when that shatters against reality, we feel the loss as acute, forgetting that we were only reminded that we were looking for returns on an investment we didn't make. there was no material loss, only the hollow feeling that we should have gotten in sooner. then a hollower feeling that we are commodifying our friendships; that, if we didn't think about things so much, none of this would ever have been a problem.

that's the sort of sadness i trade in now-- theoretical. mourning for what might have been, but only when 'might' implies the loosest probability. 'maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories,' william t. vollmann wrote in the rifles. what do you remember? the way in which your hopes were fulfilled, partially or fully? or are your memories made up of the hopes themselves, long past their expiration dates?

so it comes back to this: i once had a dream. i was terrified of distances. what woke me in the middle of the night after my parents bedded me down in my sky blue room with stories of romulans and a glass of pepsi and my bright yellow lamp was the image of my consciousness standing on one part of a vast plane and some sort of necessary objective some sort of distance away in some sort of direction. the sky was a giant clock and i did not know where to begin. to this image i awoke night after night, cold sweat after scream, with this moral: anything that takes a long time to do is terrifying.

as my final semester begins, i'll be drawing up lists of things to worry about, checking things off, and trying to calm myself. everything always gets done has always been my late-semester mantra, and it has always come true. as it'll all be ending, i imagine i'll have that phrase on my lips for months instead of just those last few weeks.

what happens afterwards is that frightening Future thing, which i've seen work out for some people but not others. i'm not as pessimistic about it as i should be, this being a one-step-at-a-time sort of situation, but i know i'm not heading anywhere particularly glamourous. assuming i can get by, there's the taste for simple pleasures. yesterday i realised that the way my schedule breaks down i'll have almost all day friday open, week after week. when spring comes i want to spend that time down by the water at forest river park. i want to find a pleasant spot and listen alternately to the water and 'a burial at sea.' i want to re-read fathers and crows and beautiful losers and convince myself that, internally, everything will be okay.

q: what do you call a palestinian mass grave?

a: israel.

-- dennis perrin