Here are some things I miss in this newly shorn state…

The smell of her at night. Anytime really, but it was at night, in an embrace, standing anywhere at all, that it was most intoxicating. Related, a head butt. Kind of like what cats do to each other and people they like, touching foreheads together and holding it a moment. If only minds could touch, none of this animosity would have happened.

Eating with someone who was as passionate about food as I am. Food babies piss me off. Give me a girl who can eat and who loves garlic. Why don’t more people love garlic so much that using enough to cause physical pain is a welcomed?

Taking a long drive with her. We didn’t do that nearly enough. Once I got depressed and desolate and my life seemed to crumble around me I killed all suggestions of it and I don’t really know why. Maybe it is just the desire to destroy something beautiful.

[Aside: Destroying beauty is all you want to do sometimes, can do sometimes. Destruction is so damn easy. Flip a switch and it all goes away. Building, growing, creating are so damn hard, harder still when there's someone involved who has to help, harder even still when you're all twisted up inside, harder even still when the situation is "complicated" and boy was it complicated (I should talk about that soon). It's so much easier to take a sledgehammer to the Grecian statue and smash it until all that's left is driveway gravel than it is so chisel beauty out of raw stone.]

[Further aside: Am I maudlin? Yes, I am maudlin.]

I miss the fact that she got the jokes. So few people get the jokes. Or the references. Or anything at all. It is a rare wonder when you don’t have to explain obscure references to people. Or even the not particularly obscure references like Nietzsche or Dali or Chuck Palahniuk. Hell, she turned me onto Chuck and Chuck rules! Chuck is a kind of personal writing hero.

Laying in bed with her spent and happy and my mind on fire. A creative explosion zooming, coursing through my head.

I am going to miss The Captain. That big orange cat used to run to the door to greet me and then I’d carry him around like he was a tommy gun. “HMMMM?!” he’d say in his stilted meowing way. He’d purr so loud I could feel it in my head. Oh well, she gets the kids. The Captain is a stand up guy though and he’ll lay by her and lick her hand when dark days come. That’s The Captain’s job in this tale of miscommunication and redemption.

How sad to miss such simple things. Even sadder that I could never say it when it mattered. And even sadder still is that I knew all this and often thought “I should say…” and then didn’t.