"Never give up."

TiVo faithfully captured The Office Christmas Special for me tonight. I downloaded it ages ago, but I never managed to watch it. And now it's on back to back to back to back on BBC America. And I've finally seen it. And it just broke my heart. I guess I would have felt sad if everything hadn't worked out the way it did, but I'm plenty sad anyway. And a MySpace friend of mine (Jude) posted a Pablo Neruda poem that is aptly entitled Saddest Poem to the bulletin board tonight. Perfect.

It's not like I don't want other people to end up happy. Or that I don't believe in happy endings. Or that I don't know what it all feels like. I just miss the ghastly, glorious feeling of being in the spiny clutches of romance. And I've lately begun to wonder if I've ever had any idea about love. If I might have been confused about everything all along. Sometimes it seems that way. As if I might have just gotten it wrong. When I'm really honest about things, it's hard not to conclude that I was only pretending all the while. Getting used to something doesn't make it real. Or wonderful for that matter. I mean there are people out there whose love I thought I would never ever be without, and they don't even know my phone number anymore. Maybe perpetuation is a delusion. And I guess that's fine. I wouldn't want to receive calls from plenty of those people. I'm sure there are precious few things that are great enough to last forever and still be of any use to anyone. Even petrified forests must snuff it at some point.

And of course it's only a television show. And there's this whole business of actual life to contend with. My time is slipping away as quickly as theirs is. I'm widening my eyes at how many things are already a year behind me. Two years. Three. I'm incapable of handling that sometimes. I'm prone to feeling weepy and soft and blown to bits by it. I don't look in scrapbooks much either. Sometimes I prefer not to remember. Sometimes I don't like being able to see the trail I've left. My footprints always look too big to me.

My feet are cold, and I'm going to light a fire. Which means I will be up for a long time, because I don't like to waste, and I worry that the fire will be lonely.

It's been years. For them.