La Vie Et Le Vide

Oh, she was right, she was right.

I have a friend, a relatively new one but a very good one nonetheless. In a short span of time, we hung out a lot, we got close. We started to throw over much of our usual weekly activity in favor of seeing each other, several times a week. It got to be a bit too much for her, and she declared she was taking a break, to rest, relax, and sort out feelings. I saw her today, in a crowd with a bunch of other people at a Cold Stone, and she was doing palm readings. Just for fun. She'd learned it at a young age, and was very happy to be doing it again. And one of the things she picked up about me from my palm - something that would not have been evident, even to her - hit home.

I do not put much stock in palmistry, or astrology, or fortunetelling of any sort. But one of the little lines in the palm of my hand told her that I do not fully engage myself, feel, and allow myself to be in the moment as much or as often as I should. It was a fairly brief note, and she went on to other things at greater length and interest to myself - presumably - and to her. That one thing, though, stuck with me.

It's true. I've thought about it before. Long ago, when I was young and impressionable and filled with the pains of young love and trauma, I learned a defense mechanism. I wouldn't feel. I would be cool, detached, analytical. Reason and rationality would prevail. And it worked - I was strong, the untroubled rock, and problems would flow around me and fall like rain. And the price was a heart of stone.

I'd recognized the problem and took steps to improve. Improve I did. I could feel again, love again. It was not perfect, however. It's why I so treasure the few I truly love, time well spent with good friends, rituals, and fighting - always was the training and the fighting. These things let me be fully in the moment. Without them, things would gray and pall, and I would be blase again - unbothered, but with a price.

And I've just had it brought to the surface. This friend, this perhaps-more-than-friend, drove off the grey very nicely indeed, and while she was gone, I reached out and surrounded myself with other friends, had good coffee and good times, to fight off the grey. But I need to be able to be rid of the gaze of the void completely. To be in the moment, wherever it is.

That starts tonight. Tomorrow, with a little luck, I see my girlfriend....and if I still feel it then, well, I'm already lost.

August

Oh August, how I hate you.

Were it not for the hubris of mortal man, August would never have existed. King Numa Pompilius saw fit to create two new months after December, thus making the Latin Sextilis the eighth month. Julius Caesar saw fit to give it two more days, and Augustus saw fit to name it after himself.

And all that silly confusion could have been avoided if people just stuck to the perfectly sensible pagan calender that went by the seasons their lives revolved around.

Anyway. Whatever cosmic force deemed, through a series of unfortunate coincides, that August would exist, also deemed that it be the bane month of one Iago Flaherty, alias Black Wolf.

August is the month school resumes.

August is the month I lost a great tournament to a broken ankle and biased judges.

August is the month the then-love of my life left me for bigger and better things. No, not that.

And so on.

Perhaps August and I will come to terms, or perhaps we'll have a bloody battle till I die or the calender is re-written again. But this August sees me intensely questioning some of my own personal philosophies, with people I love dearly far away, with schisms and rifts with those I care about sprouting like wildfire.

Oh well. It's another fight. In a way, my prayers are answered: "Lord, let me be anything but bored."