professor eliot emailed, asking 

how my summer was going, if i was writing.

i begain to write a long response,

writing, yes, but lost, i've lost my voice,

and so on.

~

but he doesn't want to hear

all that, so i said, yes, i'm writing quite a bit,

not with the direction and passion

i had during seminar, but, yes, still writing.

i asked after him and mrs eliot,

and wished them a good happy 4th and a good summer.

~

it's playing out as i expected. i've lost track

of marcy, colin, and antoinette.

terri is gone after our trip to big sur, we had a fight.

there were tears, i don't even know what it was about,

only that it was due, and inevitable.

the dolphins hadn't been seen in a long time.

i was remembering julie, just now,

from high school, the first time

i was in her pink bedroom, pink with white wicker furniture.

tender is the night

was on her bedtable. she was reading it for class.

we spent a lot of that spring and summer,

and all that next school year, and the next summer,

and all the next year, and the next summer, in that bedroom. 

her mother was dead drunk and passed out most of the time.

her father had fled, leaving three kids

with julie in charge.

i needed julie, and julie needed me. my home life was a mess.

i think we raised each other.

no one told us anything, how to do this, how to be, how to function.

how to make love.

we figured it out.

three years together. the intimacy was profound,

we knew that college 

would be the end of it, we never fought it, or doubted it.

it was a fact we accepted.

when i met terri, i told julie, 

and when julie met her first, other, girlfriend,

she told me, and we were happy for each other, but it hurt, it hurt because —

because i don't know why, 

somehow it wasn't the same with terri, despite everything.

~

the writing, obviously, is without direction, without form.

i wouldn't want professor eliot 

to suffer through my meandering thought process.

yes, i'm still writing. still writing. still writing.

~

terri wrote to me

and said we should remember how special it was.

she wrote this on paper,

a real letter.

i did not answer.

i wrote to julie, a meandering letter such as this.

julie has a.d.d.

whatever i say or write to her

lasts as long as a fireflies's blink, but i still write to her,

because i know she won't retain it.

i write to confess.

terri wasn't perfect, and i made out that she was.

i don't mind that it's over. 

she wasn't making me happy, 

and i know i wasn't making her happy.

i am obssessing over the sex, missing it. missing it terribly.

i'm dating robin.

it's awful. she tastes like make-up.

i'm beginning to doubt love.

if not julie, if not terri, then who? or it is whom?

i found a photo, online, of my north country girl.

it wasn't so hard, an hour with google

and there she was, is. 

i've been looking at it, the photo, a lot,

but not as much 

as i would have expected. i'm not sure why not. 

i know why.

if julie and terri and others

let me go, and they did, i must be damaged goods,

and though our two days together were bliss,

my north country girl would let me go too. she would. i would.

it's going to take someone really needy

to stay with me, to put up with the moods and introspection, i.e. selfishness.

someone so needy as to be blind to all that.

i'm wondering if terri

will do that thing we did with whomever she's with. i kind of hope not.

and i'm laughing at the thought of professor eliot reading this

if i were to accidentally hit send.

julie had a girl's body, terri has a swimmer's body.

i never saw my north country girl's body.

these thoughts are very random. maybe i need a diary. dear diary,

today i ran and wrote and worked and heard from professor eliot

and became intropsective while replying to him. now it's time to go to bed. 

and in my head i'm hearing:

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

But at night it's a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come-on come-on and dance all night
Despite the heat it'll be alright 

~

easier said than done.

~

"Summer In The City"

~ John Sebastian, Steve Boone, Mark Sebastian.