And so I thought these things, and a lot of other things that were sad and more specific that I couldn't admit to you today.

When I was a teenager, and lived in a small town under my parents roof I used to watch this terrible TV show. I would only admit exactly what it was to people I trust. I can only count those people on the digits between my two hands. One of them may be you, but I have no way of knowing or proving that to myself, so I'm going to keep it hidden. I only mention that I used to watch it religiously because there was this character on the show, this girl who made me feel like I wasn't the only thing like me in the world. She was blonde and beautiful, two things I've only come to be recently, and may soon leave behind - but that is not what fascinated me about her, or at least not the only thing. She was talented and tormented. She was an artist with a massive vinyl collection. So many people loved her, but she couldn't see that. Not at all. She was filled with passion and insight, but she carried a chip on her shoulder and a hole in her heart that was very awkwardly shaped. She could not count the space between things. She saw too much and too little. She pushed so much love away. I felt like her. I felt so much like her, but in this incredibly unromantic way. Like, when I looked at her I saw everything I was, and that made me feel better - but also worse. Worse because she had all this potential and passion, and that even though she couldn't see it, other people could see it. I could see it, and I was envious of that. I felt like that was the difference between us and I didn't know what to do with it. I followed the show for about five seasons, up until my freshmen year of college. I liked to watch her get hurt, and missed. I also liked to watch her find things, and people. I liked to watch her learn and grow. Her story line climaxed for me in the fourth season. She takes a risk. She does something much more honest than I have ever known how to do. She tells someone she loves him, and it's rocky and unclear for a while...but he loves her back. My teen heart has really never stopped beating in that way. I now own these DVDs and I watch the first four seasons on secret, continuos repeat. It still makes me feel better and worse, but part of me believes that if she can do it so can I. Because in a weird way I think her character may have been written about me, or what I'm supposed to be. It's dramatized for Hollywood, of course, and the events of our lives are very different, but neither of these things changes the fact that we are so much the same. Watching her fictional, badly crafted plot line makes me wonder about what things might be like if they were different. If someone figured out how to love me in the way he figured out how to love her. But then when it's over, and the now old disc is scratched and skipped I see the cracks in all my logic. For this is fiction. She has a different name, and a made up lover. She finds happiness, and there is an end to her one dimensional story line that is a bit too cheery for me to follow. I am, after all, a newly realized torment junky because it is familiar. Sometimes I think I've never known how to do anything else, and I blame myself. I was just sitting out on the porch reading a very good book, and it made me think of her - amongst other things. It also made me think of the gloves I was wearing on both hands. I lose gloves and socks much more effectively than I find things. The glove on my left hand was grey and fingerless. The glove on my right black, full-fledged, and decorated with skeleton hand in the shape of a grenade. One used to belong to someone else, the other was always mine. I thought about how my left hand, the one sheltered only partially by the fingerless glove was warmer than my right. That felt strange and a little sad. Like maybe the whole glove was trying to hard, and that it wasn't really whole at all. It was just better at pretending. Or maybe it's that the full glove used to belong to someone else. Someone that I really love, but is far from me now...like everyone I think I've ever really cared about in one way or another. Before it belonged to her, it belonged to someone else she really loved. And so the glove was aware of not one, but two other people it had really loved and belonged to, and how they had loved and belonged to each other. I was the third, and it was thinking all the time about those other two. I just reminded them of their absence, and so it couldn't keep me warm. The glove was forever lost, tied up, and bound to another. After this fact dawned on me I felt foolish for thinking it could ever have kept me, or even just one small part of me warm. The left glove, the one without the fingers didn't have a history before me. I think it succeeded, if only in part, because it didn't know any better. It didn't know how. Our maybe just because that hand held the book close to my body. Maybe that hand was warmer just because it was close to something living, something real. Even if that thing was just me. That thought made me happy and sad. Neither emotion out weighed the other, they just made me think of all the songs I'd ever heard, and how even the happy ones make me sad. Like maybe there are no real happy songs, only ones that pretend to be happy - like my glove pretended to be warm. It's as if even in those 'happy' songs all the artists are singing about heartbreak to the tune of happy birthday, but people just see the candles and the cake, and the smiles. However hollow or full, they believe in them - because that's what you do on birthdays. You believe in new beginnings an a better year, even though everyone who has ever had a birthday will tell you that 22 feels exactly the same as 23, but than again 23 feels different than 40, and 13 different than 55. How does that happen when one after the next, everything feels so even. I don't have an answer for that yet, probably because I am not 55, but I still feel like I am 13 and somehow 40...even though I haven't gotten there yet. I wondered if you are fucking her right now. I can answer my own question by saying 'yes you are' or 'yes, you just finished' or 'yes you are about to, and then maybe when you're done you'll screw again' and it'll feel good for you, and for her, and only really terrible for me.

the fire in your heart is out.