-I has been exactly 50 days since I saw you, since I held you and kissed you, and asked you through watering eyes not to forget, and to hold up this flame, this love against all others to see which one burns brightest, which one lights the way.  Who can say why one loves another.  I could list of some of your attributes which would make any man think they love you.  But it’s the indescribable parts, the intangibles that really make the love.  The way I could look at your face and see the inner beauty radiating through it.  The depth of your soul simmering beneath your eyes.  The static shock from your skin when it touches mine.  And the loving feeling of being inside you when we make love.  These are things one can be at a loss to articulate, but yet are as real as your beauty, your brains, your silly sense of humor, your angry tantrums, and your kindness.  Anyone could fall in love with you on paper, but true love, my love, is for what’s between the lines.

-On this day, New Years Eve 2015, as my heart stretches out across the continent to meld with yours, it’s mate, I want you to know something… I’m aware that I sometimes ask you a lot of fucking profound and complicated questions.  Very weighty shit.  Yes, these questions run through my mind, and yes I would like to find answers, but perhaps if I’m patient, understanding, and just a bit lucky, over time we can answers each other’s.  I just want you to know that at the bottom of all the craziness (or “mishigoss” in Yiddish), and at the heart of all of my sometimes overly-complicated questions is but the simplest of answers… I love you.  And that can make a person crazy.

Today this pic warrants a repost.

-Who wouldn’t understand you being circumspect about getting back together.  So what will it take to help with the fear?  What must I do?  You had asked me to go to therapy and get a ring.  I’m doing the therapy so that our relationship would be more understanding and with less of my baggage.  I bought a ring to show you my level of commitment to you and to us.  What’s next on the list, baby.  You need to tell me, and if you don’t know then please put some thought into what else there is I can do.  And if there’s nothing else I can do then where will that leave us?  I have fears as well, honey, but I’m not going to let any of them stop my trying for what it is I know my heart really wants.  So if therapy, a ring, poems, and spilling my guts into cyberspace virtually every day doesn’t do the trick, then what will?

Can you believe two more days until New Years?  Unfuckingbelievable.  So much to reflect on.  I have spent most of the year reflecting on you and I; the things we’ve said and done, the opportunities to get back together that we squandered, the feelings that won’t go away…  The one thing I know I would have done differently would have been to push this hard back in March/April, when I was buying a house in Nola and asked you to come down and move-in.  I even though you said “no” (via text no less), I should have pushed harder, like I am now.  Imagine where we’d be now; in a lovely house uptown, living together, probably engaged, finally making that life together.  That would have been so great and so different from where we are now.  Thank God our situations aren’t irrevocable yet.  Still, I should have pushed harder.  I shouldn’t have been dejected by your “no” and flown-up to see you then.  Even though I mostly said then what I’m saying now, I should have pushed harder.  Push through your brain and stubbornness and towards your heart.  I pushed via text about my love and longing for you.  I was ceaseless when you went on vacation in eastern Europe.  And I was sincere.  And now that I’m reflecting on all the pushing, I’m fucking exhausted.  What a work-out this year has been pushing this enormous boulder up a hill all year (most of it anyway).  Admittedly I had to pay penance and truly show you that my intentions were/are more than just words, which I think I have.  Thankfully my labors are almost over as this boulder cresting the top now, and when it’s there poised it’s going to need a little push from you, just a touch or a word for it fall to one side or the other, and then there is where it’ll stay forever.

-Baby, baby, baby.  I went down to San Diego on Saturday to hang out with Larissa and her hubby.  She’s a good friend, so while I have the time I’m trying to get around to see people.  We caught up on life, and of course I told her about where we are (purgatory).  She was on the edge of her seat, breathless.  She said it was one of the most romantic stories she had ever heard.  She also said it was one of the stupidest for all the back and forth we have done.  In answer to your text, I started a blog last night when I got home but couldn’t finish it.  I also did a little work to it this morning, but it’s going to take a bit of thought, so you might not see it for a little while.  It’ll be worth it.  The end of the year is rapidly approaching.  I can’t believe it.  Another year.  2016.  Time is picking up speed.  This could be the last new years we spend apart, or it’s just another one apart for the rest of our lives, with every successive year remembering less and less of the other.  How sad that would be.  Don’t you know that I already think of you as my (estranged) wife, and your parents and my in-laws?  That just kinda is the situation and sentiment that we’re in, no?   In new news, I couldn’t stand just living in that downstairs room, so even though the upstairs isn’t done yet, I brought the couch up (with Ted’s help), a TV and some other furniture so I can actually hang-out in my own living room for a change.  It really changed the whole dynamic of the house.  I don’t feel like a tenant renting a room downstairs from the homeowners.  I was actually hanging out, watching movies in my living room last night, and though it’s still a bit rough, it was great nonetheless. It’s starting to look and feel like a home.  I can see you flitting around here, making drinks, or cozying up on the sofa with me, walking the dogs around the neighborhood and up to the lake… Up on the hill with the fresh air, away from the scene, and yet close enough to dip down and do whatever we wanted; dinner, movie (aka you napping), theater, drinks, etc… It would be so nice.  I wonder what odds Vegas would give me on that?  And speaking of Vegas, it looks like I won’t be going there for new years eve.  I’ll be sticking around Los Angeles, which is generally pretty damn lame on NYE.  Guy knows of a party somewhere.  Whatever.  I’ve resigned myself to a mediocre LA new years.  woohoo….  I’m still hoping to see you in a couple weeks.  Have you figured out how to pull it off?  Let me know please, because I would have to make plans and it’s going to get very busy for me here in January.  Love you, honey.  I’ll finish the other blog post and get it out as soon as I can.  XO

-I woke up with a thick head, a dry mouth, and a body ache that only a good hangover can provide.  I’d hate to think of the state I’d be in had I not had the foresight to take aspirin before I went to bed last night.  Then the assault of guilty memories of the ceaseless cocktails, the bars, and the late-night drunken pizza. Why???  Oh yeah, and I drunkenly blogged too.  I cringe at the fragmented and blurred memory of it.  I made an attempt to run up the stairs, which was more like a cautious limp, to see if Santa put the thing (or person in this case) I asked him for under my tree.  I crest the peak of the stairs and see my  nearly-naked, Charlie Brown-esque tree, still standing there alone and sad; no Erin, just two dead leaves a lump of coal.  I wasn’t so naughty this year, was I?   I did some work that I’m proud of.  I made some significant life changes.  I bought and am building my my own nest.  I had some profound life revelations about what and who I want.  I thus far fruitlessly made several impassioned pitches to a girl whom I still love.  I renewed old friendships.  I spent quality time with my mother and other family members.  I’ve been charitable and kind to lesser fortunate.  Perhaps I’m just biased, but I think I should have made the “nice” list and Santa should have brought me the only thing I asked him for.   What a dick!  I ask him for one fucking thing, one thing, and he ignores me.  What a thoughtless and mean old fucker!  I hope your sled got side-swiped by a drunk driver.  I hope your reindeer got the shits and assaulted you with flying poop shrapnel.  I hope Mrs. Claus is getting the high hard one from Mr. Frosty while you’re out all night. Then again, maybe he just didn’t have my new address.  Damn the US Postal Service!  Change of address form my ass!!!  Love you Santa, but next year if what I want isn’t under my tree, you and me are gonna have words.  XO

-Technically it’s Christmas day, but it’s still the eve for me.  I just dropped off Guy and his airbnb housemate, Michael, and am in the place between fucked-up and sleep.   The place where thoughts have no filter and ideas vomit out onto the keyboard.  I shouldn’t say vomit because there’s just an outside possibility that I could actually do that.  But I’ll keep it together for this.  This race that I feel that I’m in… I have always thought of it as a race between me and you getting closer with your guy.  But I had a thought tonight which may have changed my thinking of the nature of this feeling.  That feeling, that urgency, that race, could be a race to get you back in my life before I grow feelings for another girl.  I did meet someone, but it’s very nascent.  It’s so new that I owe her no explanation for anything, and it may never evolve to anything which would warrant a talk.  But it has put the thought in my head about the race and the vow I made to you.  And I meant what I said; that I would drop anyone the moment you said yes, and I will, up until my birthday.  I don’t think I could possibly grow feelings for anyone else as deep and true as they are for you in that amount of time.  But nonetheless, I feel the race has begun.  You are, of course, the odds-on favorite, and no one would bet against you, certainly not me.  But please be quick, my love.  Run Forest, run.

-You’re the only thing I want under the tree this year.  Merry Christmas.  I love you.  -Why the fuck do I think of you all the time???   I hate it and love it.

-Baby, I want you to know that I heard ever word you said about the weight of your situation, your reputation, and the potential aftermath of your next move.  There’s a lot to consider and the effect it will have on people.  I love you and hate when you’re being torn-up (unless it’s by my girthy schlong).  Given the gravity of the situation, may I suggest that if/when we next see each other next it should be for more than just a weekend, we need a chunk of time, and away from everyone and everything; like a cabin or a beach somewhere.  I think it would benefit us greatly to just focus on each other, talk a lot (a lot), and see if what’s there is as real as we think it might be, without any distractions.  That being said, if going to New Orleans is the only reasonably explainable way for you to have a solo vacation then we’ll make it work.  Either way, spending some quality time together will go a long way to know if we should keep torturing each other or end it (yeah, right…).

-Another day without you… without us.  We are wonderfully functionally dysfunctional, and I look forward to the adventure and mundane ahead.  I’m at the starting blocks, shoes digging into the dirt seeking traction, muscles tensed and coiled like springs, senses aware and laying wait for the sound of the starting gun.  BANG!  And we’re off………

-Good morning honey.  Did you know that I love you…?   I have a call about doing a budget for season 2 of “Hap & Leonard” (the series I did earlier this year).  IF it happens, they are thinking of shooting it in New Orleans next year.  It took me moving to LA to work in Nola.  Oh, the cruel irony.  And my therapist later today as well.  We had a nice talk last time, where I realized a bit of the differences of how people (mainly you and I) communicate and love differently, and to try to understand and not expect everyone (you) to communicate the same way as I do.  Of course I knew that you communicated differently, but on some level I kept expecting you to communicate in the way I do.  That’s not going to happen, so I need to understand your method and appreciate it, which I am digesting.  I would need to spend a bit more time with you though to really work on it though 😉

-I just saw it with Guy and Ted.  Didn’t suck, but I had to pee for the last hour of it, so I may have missed something.  I just love seeing your face.  Your face feels like home.  XO

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-Baby, it’s been two weeks without seeing your face.  I’ll be home most of the day working, so hit me for a few.  I want to see your beautiful face, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasssse.