Saudade in transit

Saudade in transit

I’m on the bus. It’s too early to be human and I haven’t had my coffee yet so I don’t really want to do much; maybe read or listen to music, things that help tune out the other people or the monotony of the commute. When I leave the suburbs, it's usually dark. I sometimes look out the windows, but more to see how far I’ve traveled than at anything interesting. By the time I arrive downtown, I can see the sun coming up over the harbour.

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This week's stories

This week's stories

I had to take a break from the personal blog last week because I was feeling a little worn down again. I think it’s a combination of a few things: overload from the news cycle, overwhelming feelings (some of which I decided to finally book an appointment with a therapist to figure out), and the time change making it dark by the time I head home (I’ve always been affected by this time of year).

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Letters (ghosts)

One:

I don't know if I've ever been in love, but this may be the closest thing to it I've ever experienced.

Two:

I worry that the ground shifted in our friendship; there is a distance between us that wasn't there.

Three:

I use the word attraction to describe whatever it was I began feeling about you, but I don't even know how accurate that word is for the mess I've found myself in.

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Them's the berries

I wrote this about two years ago. Relationships were on my mind at the time as a few of my friends had gone through breakups the previous fall; as much as I was trying to keep things vague in the post, I was also trying to work through some of my own feelings by writing about them, still blindsided and conflicted over the automatic neurochemical reactions I kept experiencing with a specific person a while back (part of the equation: for the first time in at least 10 years, it was a woman). As far as I know, nothing was going to come of it, but I still try to keep the number of real-world interactions to a minimum because I don't want any involuntary emotions leaking out. 

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Nighttime

It’s the middle of the night. I look through my idle Facebook conversations, trying to decide if it’s worth sending a message this late. I still haven’t fully embraced that feature, ever since it switched from an internal e-mail system to a real-time chat engine; unless I’m comfortable enough to drop random Simpsons references into conversation or just randomly send YouTube links, I tend to fret over my choice of words and hang nervously waiting for the response. It’s worse when it’s someone with whom I have an easier real-world rapport than normal.

I usually don’t bother, though. I assume you’re asleep anyway.

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