If I look away I’ll miss what little of him there is left, because he disappears so quickly these days.  Something leaches from his thoughts, something heavy and dark that I can’t put my finger on --or something, perhaps, that I’m afraid to put my finger on, afraid that it will grab onto me and take me with it-- and I watch as the heaviness sweeps across him, dragging him down, his face collapsing as if some soul beneath the fear were made of nothing but dry sand.  The thought of the day ahead washes over him and then he is gone, and I am left here to face another day alone.

I miss my friend and his dreams.  I miss the arguments, the curiosity of his thought, and his inner focus that so many mistake for laziness.  I miss Imaginary Keith and find myself hoping sometimes that he will escape whatever it is that has this hold on him, but know that hope is not much of a rope to throw down to a man who’s fallen into a hole.  Can you pull a man up with nothing but hope?

Take hold of this, I call into the nothing, but again, there is no answer.

I’ve visited my own site so few times in the last couple of months that I almost don’t recognize it when I do stop by, and considering the visual connection I’ve always made with the site in the past, I’m wondering what this means.

Where is all the silence coming from?  The too-much-work and double mortgage payments I’ve been having to make?  Is it being bent over that barrel that’s taken away almost all my creative thought.  It’s one of the things - one of the big ones - I’m sure.  Life whipping you so long and so hard that eventually you go numb and just wait for the end.

Will I break?  Will I ever see the other side of this numbness?  And I’m afraid that my mind is running out of compartments.  Where will it all go when it overflows?  Who will clean up the mess?

From the Pot Roast With Steve dinner series.

“True.  You know, if your wife was going, she could be Sacagawea,” I said, not knowing at the time that she would, in fact, be joining us.

“I suppose,” Steve said, ‘but wouldn’t that make me Toussaint Charbonneau, the French fur trader?  Wasn’t he married to Sacagawea?”

“I can’t remember.”

“We better pack some history books.”

“Good idea.”