This is someplace new. Like climbing out of a hole into some very muddled, cloudy air...only trying to follow the sweetness. I know it's out there, and I'll eventually find my way. It smells so close right now; I am full of hope.

I just wish it were easier and less uncertain. But that's the beauty of it, isn't it? The unpredictability, the possibility that the note might fall just a little bit off the expected. And maybe it will sound lovelier than you ever imagined.

I love my girl friends. You are all so very wonderful. Most recently, thank you, Bea and Michelle and Joanna and Debra. :) I can't go too wrong with you around to smack some sense into me every now and then, right? Or at the very least, I won't go crazy as long as I have you to listen to me get everything out of my system.

I just want everything to work out for once.

* * *
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
-E.E. Cummings