I must confess, I was at a crossroads of sorts last week, and you never even knew it -- although I imagine that after two weeks you were all beginning to wonder if I were ever going to record another self-indulgent, autobiographical word again. Look at the situation as something of a big coin toss; depending on how events had transpired, I would certainly have begun to return to my introspective ramblings, or, as possibly, I might not have wanted to write anything else for a long, long time.

You see, about two and a half weeks ago, I got myself into a fight with Clorinda. Well, let's work on the syntax of that a little -- I didn't get myself into a fight, I had a fight thrown at me, and what am I but a good little reactionary, such that with only a little bit of poking, I fought nastily right back. Now, I don't really know if I should mention any of the details. There are circumstances involved that I am kept to secrecy about, and I wouldn't want to talk about them anyways, because they involve my friend and they are decidedly unpleasant for me to think about -- after all, conflict or no, I do care about my friend. Those details aside, the particulars of the fight are also sensitive to me (to use a very tired and beaten metaphor, the stitches haven't come out yet, and even a little tugging would probably having me bleeding all over the damn place), as well as Clorinda, and I'm not sure how much you should be allowed to know.
Still, on the day I was to collect my OSAP (sweet, free money that it is), I got a very short, very accusatory and -- yes, I'll say it -- manipulative and deliberately hurtful e-mail from my friend Clorinda, which did exactly what it was intended to; it hurt my feelings.

The letter I sent back was confused, whiny, full of "oh, my hurt feelings" sorts of self-absorbed sentiments, as well as (I think) fair comment about the fact that I wasn't really the bad person Clorinda was accusing me of being. When I came home, I found a letter where Clorinda had basically called me on being a bullshit artist, of playing the saint and painting myself to be the wounded martyr -- basically of being totally insincere and full of empty promises. My next letter was considerably less unhappy, and instead was chock full of a whole lot more anger, and while I'll give that I probably said some nasty things, I was a lot more fair about it than I feel Clorinda was. Her words seemed deliberately vicious and as much as she accused me of not listening to her, I don't think she did at all a better job of it herself. Anyway, stuff happened, things were said, and we didn't speak for about a week and a half. I spent a lot of time being absolutely furious, and yet faced with the unpleasant situation of either being so angry that my pride allowed me to forsake two years of close friendship by refusing to pursue the matter, or swallowing my hard feelings and fighting the silence on her end with any kind of attempt I could make to get ahold of her.

In fairness to Clorinda, she has a lot of other things going on in her life that I didn't know about at the time (and I still don't know any of the details regarding these issues) and these were equally involved in leaving her lacking any real desire to talk. Eventually I did get ahold of her, and we talked for a good long while. Well, I talked. I have this way of babbling in an attempt to fill that horrible, expectant silence of another person's breathing. I don't know what my expectations of that conversation were; I have to honestly say that I doubt I had any expectations at all. When I called, I had fully expected to get her answering machine again, and all I was going to say might have been the same pleading, droning message I'd left several times before, to the effect of, "well, are we friends or aren't we?" (except much, much more whiny, and less on the Party of Five melodramatic tension). When she picked up, I was surprised, unprepared, and thus started into babbling mode. Mostly I was amazed that she was even willing to talk to me. I'd found out, at least, that we were still friends (in whatever sense of the word it could be taken), which was more than I'd been assured of since our conflict began. Again, Clorinda has other problems outside of me, and it was selfish and conceited for me to assume that I was the sole cause of her uncommunicative stint. I worked with the information I had, though, which was nothing (with a little of "She is really pissed off at me" possibly mixed in), and I do have the unfortunate habit of jumping to conclusions.
Nor did we resolve anything. I wasn't really ready to talk about our situation, but I think, had it come to blows, I would have -- however, Clorinda didn't want to debate, and I was glad to at least have a few calm words together. "Calm words" in the sense that she didn't say much, and I reacted defensively to whatever she did say.

The fact that we talked at all is why I'm writing this. As I'd hinted at, in a different situation, there would be no further Snivels from your humble narrator. All I could have said would be: "Clorinda and I aren't friends anymore... and we aren't speaking anymore," and even admitting that would be difficult. She remains one of my closest friends, in spite of everything, and losing her would leave me capable of only mourning. I know it sounds selfish to say that her loss would take me away from my writing, but it would. So many of our problems have been fueled by my dratted musings, and when I originally made my vow to someday quit this journal, it was with just that kind of scenario in mind -- the day that Clorinda and I stopped being friends. I don't know that it's still true to say that "I love her," in the way that I meant it a year ago, but I know I still care. I know I still want to hold her, and distract her from her problems, and, well, a lot of things that, outside the realm of statistical probability, are frankly impossible. I know that, for all of my mistakes, my intentions are still what they always were -- which are, and have always been, to try to make her happy. It's what I want for all of my friends; and yes, sometimes I fail. Sometimes, in fact, I do a particularly lousy job -- and sometimes I think I do a wonderful job.

I have kind of a thought experiment for you. I'm trying to imagine a set of circumstances where I'd throw a rock with the intention of hitting one of my friends with it. Dollar stores sell these great rocks; they're usually pink or blue and vaguely marble-like, and shaped like large eggs. They're really smooth, and really cool to the touch, and absolutely the perfect size to put into your hand and whip at something with the intention of destroying it with extreme prejudice. You know that if you threw one at a windshield, it would smash it. If you threw one at a person, it would sting like the mighty scythe of death. Imagine if I, living in Ottawa as I do, threw a rock and said, "Ok, this one's for... (say)... Caira!" Wham. It would fly about thirty or forty feet (I throw like a girl) and hit the pavement pretty ineffectually. Now, this is a problem for all you math freaks. Given the population and traffic density of a city the size of Ottawa (now a metropolis), there is at least a relative statistical probability that I would hit my poor friend Caira (who, as much as I would never try to hurt her, nevertheless isn't paying me nearly as much of the attention I was previously accustomed to) -- not to mention any number of cars, squirrels, storefronts, and innocent passersby. If I threw a rock and deliberately intended to hit Clorinda, who lives several thousand miles away, it would still hit the ground, and the chance of hitting her (I'd like to say definitively) probably falls to absolutely zero. She'd never even know I tried to throw a rock at her.

My point is: it's amazing, given the dangerous relationship of proximity and rock-throwing, how horribly more destructive distance can be to a friendship.

As an aside from this particular sob story, let me say that tonight, Broken's beloved pet Salamander, Sartre, passed away. We're not entirely sure why, we're not entirely sure how, but tonight we found her poor little body lying cold in her dish of water, and Broken is beside herself with tears. She really loved that sweet little amphibian, and lavished her with the very best of care. I really do wish that there was something I could do other than, equally, mourn her passing. She was special.

Actually, I'll also say this: Yes, I'm really mad at Clorinda, but there's a lot more to the situation than who said what to who, and who is right, and who is wrong. Neither of us are allowed to take the moral high ground, because both of us have been crappy friends to one another at times. Maybe I'd like to think that I've been a slightly less crappy friend than I've been accused of being, but at this point "crappy friend" is a semantically ambiguous term, and let's leave it at that. Clorinda hurt my feelings, she made me angry, and while I personally can admit my stupid mistakes (hurting her feelings, making her angry), regret them, and try to atone for them, I have some serious gripes as well, and I need her to acknowledge her own faults. Still, it must be said that, while I might come off harshly in my descriptions, everything I say is through the filter of me being really upset, and only somewhat prepared to talk at length about a really troublesome, hurtful, and stressful set of events tainting one of the best friendships I am priveleged to call my own.

I can't think of many people I care about more than that wacky girl from the States. I know that there are those, Clorinda in particular, who might doubt the sincerity of that statement, but it's as true to fact as Christianity isn't. Sure, there are times I don't write, and I could invest more thought into those times that I do, but if at any random moment you asked me, "Rob, if you could have any wish in the world granted right now, what wish would that be?" -- well, I would honestly have to say "I wish I could fly." However, if I could fly, the first place I flew to would be Spokane. There isn't a time, there isn't a moment, in my day when I wouldn't want to see her. It really bugs me, too, to think that at this point, there's no way I'm going to get to see her in any realistically soon span of time. The little travel voucher I got last year is about to expire soon, but I don't really care. I'd cough up real money to go see her again, or have her here. I really do miss her. Yes, I'm angry, that's a given, and some time is going to have to pass before I feel more at peace, more resolved -- but it doesn't change how much I care.

I mean, it was just a year ago today that she was badgering me to come down and see her, and now we're barely talking. I'm not even how clear on what our friendship means anymore. We're friends, "in a sense," according to her, but until she resolves her other problems, and sorts out her feelings in her head, we're going to be at a standstill. I know I shouldn't bug her until she's ready to talk, and I don't mind waiting for whenever that will be -- but I can't lie and say that it doesn't hurt to think about how much things have changed in our friendship over the past year. I'd like to think that it isn't all my fault, but I'm not about to poke fingers and pronounce who is to blame. I don't have the luxury of being able to work up any sense of sour grapes, or bitterness, about our friendship, or what I've put into it versus what I haven't. I'm her friend, and I wouldn't be her friend -- I wouldn't be worthy -- if I sat around and put myself in a position where I denounced her faults and ignored my own. The accusation could be made that now I'm simply pandering, because I know she read yesterday's entry, and may well read my thoughts today, but if I've managed to do anything lately (some might say I've done too much -- namely, me), I've at least accomplished a reputation for honesty. I'm saying what I think, what I was going to say anyway, and I am not making apologies beyond the ones I've already made.

End.

As I sit here with a kitten on my chest (presently we have four scampering and tumbling about the house), I'm looking at another way Broken has chosen to deal with her loss, which is by taking her empty terrarium, a constant reminder, and filling it with new guests who will hopefully happily make it their home. Yesterday she surprised me by bringing home three quite unhappy green treefrogs, fresh from the pet store (although, it must be said that before this stop they were probably freshly plucked from the wild, the poor buggers) and unceremoniously dumped into a wet bag by one of the employees. We cleaned out Sartre's old home and filled it with a special rock-shaped pond, a branch mounted onto a sheet of stone, some rocks, and a sprig of plastic aquarium leaves which hang from the top of the aquarium. Freshly filled anew with life, this miniature biosphere sits in my bedroom now (for references' sake, imagine it on the black coffee table beside my stereo), where the frogs have in the space of only a day acclimatized and made themselves quite comfortably at home. Between they seem to have devoured just under half of the bag of thirteen crickets I brought them last night, each has discovered a favourite hanging place (one likes to nestle in the leaves, another likes to sit behind the pond, and the third enjoys perching atop the branch), and they don't try to leap out of their confinement when you feed them (when Broken purchased them yesterday, one leaped out of their aquarium and slimily stuck right onto the horrified face of the young woman fetching them). Apparently they'll even chirrup when you get them in the mood; even the right music can set them off. As for myself, I'm enjoying them immensely. I have been adoring them for the past two months, since the pet store first acquired some, but lacked the resources and the resolve to actually buy myself some. I kept hemming and hawing, and now they are mine. I took Broken out to dinner last night as a way of repaying her, but in comparison to the delight and the wonder and the joy these little frogs (remember: I love frogs) have so quickly brought me (and Broken equally), I don't think I'll have fully managed to actually do it for some time yet. I mean, for our anniversary I bought her a sixty-year-old antique Smith-Corona typewrite (á la Naked Lunch), but heck -- these are frogs. Frogs win every time.

They really are beautiful little creatures. As well as the frogs, we have also chosen to adopt one of Pixiegirl's kittens, a black and grey little beauty that Broken has named Mercy. She is sweet and playful and affectionate, but to this point has only really taken any particular liking to Charlotte, in whose arms she will suffer a luxurious and prolonged nap, although she is very much into exploring my room with an audacity and boldness not presently shared by her siblings, who sneak and tiptoe with much more trepidation. In this sense, anyway, October is a time of both death and life, transition as well as renewal, and although I must now go out with Broken to buy a trowel and head for campus, I'll tell you about the transition later.

Earlier that day, Broken and I had set out to buy a little trowel from Home Hardware (home of the handyman), in the belief that this would be sufficient to turn over a little soil and establish a suitable grave for a creature about three inches in size. As it turned out, in the stocking wisdom of a store moving into its fall/winter season, Home Hardware had opted for plastic pumpkins and plastic cheer over keeping trowels in stock, so I bought a small spade. Well, "small" in a relative sense compared to other shovels. I looked quite conspicuous carrying in it around and decided, in a slow, creepy voice, that if anybody asked too many questions, that "I reckon I'll have to dig a deeper grave now," and made swooshy whack-whack motions with the shovel. We did discover, though, that even if it was a little freaky to creep around campus, in sight of the campus police office, with a big old shovel and guilty intentions, that in digging the grave it was certainly put to good use.
Broken selected a spot in sight of one of the benches in the little grove, off the path and at the edge of a growth of bushes, vines, and trees that lined the sharp drop down from the grove into the river. I was afraid that the accursed rock layer left behind when glaciers scraped the topsoil from Eastern Canada bare would hinder our attempts, but the soil was, although gravelly, compliant and deep, and as much as we feared the rasping of the shovel would attract the attention of either the studen-run Foot Patrol, or the contracted eyes of our university's security service, we remained obscurbed by darkness, the building complex of Carleton's greenhouses, and the white noise of the campus central heating core and the fans of the greenhouse and the traffic passing by.

In a matter of minutes, I had dug a hole deep enough for Sartre, somewhere about a foot or so deep into the earth. Broken had decided to use the decorated box holding Sartre's body while it chilled in our refrigerator as a coffin, so removing the lid and disposing it Norse style, she laid the dark green, glossy, imprinted cardboard box into the grave and we expressed our last farewells to the tiny, departed, creature which had brought so much delight to Broken's first months at our house. I tipped some earth into the box before Broken scattered five tiger lily bulbs into the grave, so that they would have a base between the box and the surface to sprout roots. We were bolder about the noise we could make at that point, so I finished filling the grave with much scraping of metal against rock, and used our boots to smooth over the gravesite before packing the earth firmly down into the grave. Although it was extremely dark by the time we ended the funeral (probably about eleven o'clock at night), the grave looked secure, solid, and hopefully, as the dark, upturned soul dried out and blended with the dirt on the path, all inspections from the few people who would actually ever venture to this spot would reveal nothing out of the ordinary. To further conceal and consecrate the ground, Broken diverted the tendrils of nearby vines over the grave, covering the site with long growths of leaves which hopefully will further obscure it from undue investigation.
We stepped back, paused respectfully to again say "goodbye" to this small, but important, salamander, and headed further along the path, wider and more substantial from increased use than the earlier lengths of our journey, down along the river towards the Unicentre. Bereaved and tired, we were also thirsty, and Mike's place, the graduate-student operated pub on the second floor, had Jolt a-plenty for the quaffing.

We made it home sometime near to one o'clock in the morning, nibbling on awful junk food and pausing downstairs to play with our kittens before heading up to our respective rooms. I'm deciding to devote the rest of my weekend to some time at The Gym (honest, that's its actual name) and my linguistics textbooks, in lieu of going out and having fun.

Well, also, I'm trying to call Lilith.

Lilith and I have been loosely writing one another over the past couple of weeks since she got established at her new school in Montreal, and although there have been gaps, she continues to persist and write me pleasant and -- for reasons outside of both content or intention -- wonderful e-mail messages. Whenever I hear from her, it warms me up, makes me feel special, and restores the hope I have that our friendship will continue and grow, instead of lingering and stagnating.

The other day, though, I received a strange message from her. It began with a few details of her busy life -- those particulars which perhaps all awkward letters begin with. Then she told me about how bad she felt that our friendship had become such an uncomfortable thing for us; and she said, "I have a hard time being wrong, but I am, and I'm sorry." She then asked me to call her, and mentioned that she's experiencing a particularly trying time in her life, and closed her letter. I haven't been able to get ahold of her yet, but I have to say, her letter did nothing but worry me. I don't even know precisely what she's trying to say to me -- or why she now sees our friendship from a different perspective. All I can think is, she's seen something in our past which she really regrets, which she accepts responsibility for, and far from making me happy, this makes me incredibly sad. I don't want the power over a person I deeply care about. In this case, that power that stems from her feeling somehow "wrong." It also makes me unhappy to think that there really has been a nothing more than misunderstanding in our past, and truly our strained present is a consequence of events which could have gone differently. However, that said, I don't really know enough about what Lilith is trying to say to me to definitively say this is the case at all. Maybe she was referring to a difference in philosophy over cheese sandwiches -- and maybe she really likes cheese sandwiches now (we don't really have any differences in philosophy over cheese sandwiches; I was being facetious). Her letter was short, and I'm afraid to claim I know what she means without talking to her on the phone... which is another of my missions this weekend.

And if Lilith is referring to the fights and misunderstandings of our past, what does this mean? How did she come to believe that she is now "wrong?" She made reference to her pseudonym, though, which leaves me believing that she must have been reading my web page. I find it dubious to think that my whiny words have somehow proven revealing, though... if events show any pattern, it's that my public insights tend to make things worse. I don't know that I've ever said anything differently on my page than in my letters to her, so I'm not really positive about the situation at hand. I'm just really concerned about my friend, I think, and that's a good enough way for me to feel at present. Lilith seems to be faring poorly, and for all of the time that has passed since she and I loved one another, and could honestly think of ourselves as good friends, she remains a person I can say I used to love completely -- a beautiful friend and a desperately needed part of a life I used to have. A life I don't have now, but nevertheless one I remember and cherish -- and perhaps that is why, even if she is professing some kind of wrongdoing, I don't think it's necessary. It's not about being right, or wrong, or about forgiveness, or about regret. She and I both have our shares in all these realms. She was, and continues to be, someone I care about very deeply, and if she's telling me that our friendship is really so important to her that she can admit -- with strength and dignity -- being somehow wrong, then I have all I really want... much more than any apology or any vindication could ever provide. Lilith isn't "wrong," in my eyes, and never was, even if there are decisions she made I disagreed with... even if she saw me in a way I felt wasn't truly accurate to the feelings in my heart.
When she talks to me, and asks me to call her, and looks to me in a time of great difficulty, and perhaps need, I know that I in fact simply have a friend named Lilith.

What more could I want?

Brought to you by Jolt Cola, with
the buzzing and mild irritation of
caffeine induced paranoia.

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