Last night I was reading and was suddenly reminded of a the suicide methods joke I wrote ten years ago (I’m not linking to it, I hate the damn thing, search if you must, it’s all over myspace). Something in the words reminded me of all the people I’ve lost track of over the years. All the people I met for 10 minutes while wandering the US. All the people I’ve worked with. All the people I’ve lusted after. All the people all the time all gone forever.

The one that flowed from the suicide methods memory was the Indian girl in a rural area that had searched for suicide methods and then sent me an email hoping for some answer, some salvation from the nightmare of being trapped in a rural Indian town, and their traditional ways.

I sent her back some meaningless pablum. Some trite words of encouragement and a Bukowski poem “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire”.

I never heard from her and she could be dead or she could have just continued living or she could have died inside. I’ll never know and for some reason last night that popped into my consciousness.

Some desperate person hoping for wisdom and…well…hope called out and I had nothing. Hell, I’m lost most of the time. I don’t know anything and I surely don’t know how to live. All I know is to keep plodding along and how to hope for something better to happen.

But you never much think about that kind of thing while you’re living it. You just plod along until something happens to change course.

Then suddenly someone hopes that you can help and you hope you can help too but you can’t so you do the only thing you can do which is spew treacle.

How powerless that moment was. How quickly I forgot it. How disrespectful that I don’t remember that moment every day.