Days Pass And Turn Into Weeks, When We Don't Even Speak, We Just Lay Wide Awake And Pretend We're Asleep

--"Changing", The Airborne Toxic Event

Mojo,

Please refrain from any speeches of encouragement, or lack thereof. My intention wasn't anything so sinister. My venom has proven short-lived. This strange discomfort that passes for our friendship will pass soon and then these lonesome nights will be over forever. But until we are again made whole I am feeling the loss of what we had every tiny minute of the day and night. Perhaps you may not understand this, but sometimes when I miss you the most, it's the hardest to write to you. It's the hardest to even picture you when the heart wants what it wants that much.

But you knew that. Your perception on what I might profess to be feeling and what I hide away is keenly acute. It's a gift, alas, I do not share with you. You always know when I make myself talk to you, show interest in you, even though my soul might be slowly fading away from the inside out. You know my ache at that moment when it is hardest to tell you at all.

I fear if we were together in person, you'd feel how strong it is. You'd feel its sickly sweetness, its absent melancholy. You might even grow to love the sad tenderness of it all--that is, if you could gloss over the amount of hurt you've caused in your proximity. That's one of the reasons why I could never be sorry for the distance, though they have bothered me a time or two, because they afforded me the space to parse the events of my life in relation to you. The changes I make don't all seem like mistakes when nobody else seems to be watching, I can tell you that much.

Mojo, there's nothing in the world that has the potential to please me as much as you--but I acquiesce to your point. Potential is not actuality. The guarantees which accompany life are slim, and grow slimmer by the minute. I just feel that all the material things of this world are nothing. I would just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence because that would only cause you to love me less. And less. And I'd do anything to keep your respect for me, to keep that potential for your fondness, for my own. I don't want to merely live. I want to love first and live incidentally.

But try not to dwell on the things you cannot in good conscience give me at present. You've trusted me with more of yourself than I sometimes know what to do with. It's so much more than anyone else has deigned to give me. It's so much more than sometimes I feel I am worth. Gosh. Sometimes I feel it's infinitely easier to think of myself outside of life than to think of me in it. I often wonder if people have attempted to deliberately think of life without me. And then I think of people like you and all the rest of my friends who I know would feel the void my absence would leave behind.

That gives me the hope to soldier through the adversity of my current days. That gives me the courage to go on placing this brave smile on my face when all the while my spirit gently weeps for the boy who cannot ever possibly love me back.

All my heart,

Toby