No Less \

I am curious why I am so eager to say out loud when I am alone those words I wish I hadn't said out loud in the first place. Curious in that morbid fashion of picking at wounds or looking at my yearbook pictures or dialing old phone numbers just to see the name pop up on the screen. Somewhere between nostalgia and regret is a 34-year old recreational runner who purposefully runs harder on his bad knee because he gave up religious atonement shortly after he gave up religion. A friend once referred to this as reminiscent melancholy. But I don't remember the bastard's name. God, I miss him.

It used to bother me, the amount left over in the tank, how I imagined it was stagnant and rusty. I would spend an inordinate amount of time draining the tender, and leaving the top hatch open in the full sun, because the water at the bottom was original, had some kind of institutional memory of all those fires we didn't put out, all those roads that ran us off the path, all those wrong turns while people's lives were illuminating the night sky. I talk like this, get out everything in the reserves of my memory, give to evaporation what little bits cling with surface tension.

I can only describe the last year as the one good line from a forgotten poem that once sent you over the edge of your limits, and instead of memorizing it, you never read it again, afraid that it might not quite have the same impact. On occasion, you think the only way to really adore it is to let it go and put it out of your mind. I am so often wrong about these ideas, and occasionally I, what's the word, revel in my mistakes.

The word is wallow.