I'm not sure why seeing that it is November now hit me so hard this morning. My sense of time has become completely relative to what phase my life is in. Because I think so fondly back to last Spring, it seems like I've been programmed to think everything is happening in April. I think it is April now. But it gets dark at 4 in the afternoon and it's freezing outside. I wish I didn't feels so detached from the season, though I'm relieved I've even noticed I've been living like this because it's a sign that I'm getting back to normal. I've been living for some other time and this is where it's gotten me. Sometimes your vision's fucked up, sometimes it's not I guess.

The Gossip proved to be one of the best nights I've had in a long time. I forgot that I knew that band well back in the day. With the first few chords of the first song they played I saw in my head a distinct moment about three or four years ago when I was driving on the 215 freeway from my apartment in Colton into Riverside listening to some song of theirs. I was going to work, or to see mom, or to hang out somewhere. The picture is of me driving past the contractor's licensing school or the trailer store or the biker bar along the freeway on LaCadena. Remembering this made me partially relieved that I hadn't abandoned all recollection of that hugely influential part of my life. I was living with Nickolas- the love of my life. I made my first home with him and I still miss it. We came home to eachother- me lying on his bed while he translated songs and learned Spanish. The mangey cat I started to feed on the porch against his wishes. The livingroom we never sat in. My piles of stuff on the dining room table that bugged him. The guy who thought we moved out so he took my plant without asking. (We couldn't understand anything he said, so maybe not asking made it easier). How Nickolas let me park in the covered parking and he parked on the street. He had the truck then, and he got the car then too. We did The Fish when we needed to. I never did it willingly, he always made me and I felt better after. I was in love with someone then that didn't love me, and I was broken down a lot, but he balanced it out so I could get better. I can only hope to have been half as good to him as he was to me. Now he's in love with a beautiful man, and I have been off someplace else for quite sometime. It's no wonder my mind is in other places all of the time when I have things like that in places I am never in.

The other part of my mind went to the part where I was thick in unrequited love. I thought about how strange it was that that actually happened. Now, I can't think of reasons why I loved her. I don't think I knew what love was anyway, but I thought I felt it. I was 18 when it started and 20 when it was over. I stuck around for a couple of years hoping to figure it out, but I really just figured out that trying so hard was making me feel like shit about everything and feel small and silent. My ideas of what should have been happening were completely impossible and my ideas of who I was and should have been were so far off from what I actually wanted. I thought I had no choice. It blows my mind how much I suffocated myself and let other people in my life to help me do it. People change a lot and I feel like I can't even recognize what I was at 18. Wherever gratitude should go, I'm thankful to it for having moved away from all of that. And Nickolas is still my baby, and it makes me teary to think of him and think of how we're gauges for the passing of time in eachother's lives. He's seen all there's been to see in me since we were frustrated teenagers and all I have to do is talk to him if I wonder where I've been or where I'm going.