Do you ever just stop short, breathless, in the face of your own stupidity?

There are things I need to say, but I stutter to remember. I shudder to think. And I think the reason I don't blog much anymore us that I fear that I might appear insincere by being overly sincere. Too often I find myself perched on my own shoulder, narrating the events I am experiencing as they happen. Too little am I immersed in the happening.

And yet, I wonder if that's just what being a writer is all about. This endless need to reinterpret events even as they are happening. To draw analogy and metaphor from life itself. Or am I merely justifying my own insanity by calling it art in some form.

I told him "I lost my zen." He said "Don't worry. You always do that."

But I found it, and took a walk, listening to music. Trying not to trip myself from kicking myself. "I'm so freaking MAD AT MYSELF!" Was what I was screaming inside my head.

It must have been just about exactly a year ago that I last saw her. I'm finding all sorts of reasons to justify having not seen her since. Self-pitying me says that I deserved to choose my last memory of her, and wouldn't she prefer it this way? Is it egotistical or insecure to think that I did/did not matter enough in a person's life to have my presence be desired?

But it was such a wonderful last way to remember her. So the mystical me tries to convince me that it was meant to be the last time. It was meant to be goodbye. And then the self-flagellating (and perhaps justifiably so) me smacks me upside the head with the memory of her specifically saying how much she wanted company. How abandoned and isolated she had felt.

He tells me "You can't help it, babe. You are busy. You have a busy life." He tells me "It's not your fault."

But it is my fault. Because there is a choice in whether or not to be a presence in someone's life. There is a decision in that. Even if it's to not. And I have made that decision about many people in my life. And this time I was wrong. And this one I regret.

There is so much temptation in these moments to draw conclusions about my own life. I think to myself...how cliched to frame the death of another person with one's own neurotic observations about oneself, as if it had anything to do with her.

"Sick of the solemn solipsism of the first person...(I) think it would be a good idea to stop narrating," she texted.

He responded, "haha. Probably."