Why do I say these things? What possible reason could there be for me to rip my chest open day after day for a few thousand complete strangers? I've let leak things that have festered in the back cupboards for decades, but when I sat down to write them in blue on black, they carried, for me, less weight than a feather. I've been exploring my tendency to write, to fictionalize, as a distancing technique; by encapsulating these oozing emotional horrors into pat, short, beginning-and-end narratives, it's like I've boxed up all of the unresolved gunk and filed it away in a cabinet with a six-digit designation. 082499 - that's Jenny. Glad I dealt with all of that. When in reality, nothing is ever resolved; stories don't end when I close the table. They go on and on and on, and no matter how many pat closers I come up with, they're still there. Remeber Jacob? I've mentioned him in a few stories, here and there. Email from him awhile back - "Was I really that bad of a person?"

How do you answer that? How do you deal with the people that you've flattened, reduced, turned into puppets and facades to act out your little plays? What do you say to them? Sometimes you say I'm sorry. Sometimes you can't say anything. I'm home in New York after a week in Seattle. I didn't say much.

More tomorrow.