It seems like every time I take a leap of faith and go hello, here is my heart, be good with it, I should have just stayed still and kept it safe with myself.

Then again, perhaps taking leaps of faith might entail the understanding that you'll get hurt, but they'll make it okay, too.And it's a leap of faith, right?

But leaping, and falling in love felt like joy, and weightlessness, and oddly enough, like the opposite of falling. Nowadays, I feel like I'm falling, and my heart's laden and made of pavements, and about to crash and that no one will stop or ease that fall, and terrified that I'm going to make an error in judgement again even though I don't think I am, but I haven't trusted what I thought for a long time because it's too easy to convince myself of other people's good intentions, and not that they don't care about me, but that they're good for me. And if I could just trust what I thought, then I think that feeling would go away, and I think I'm getting there, but I think...because of that, I'd put far too much burden of proof for him to furnish without realizing it, which I do know now, and that after I realized, I don't think I have done that for a while. But when all is said and done, I think...perhaps it is very much just something that requires having the patience of a saint. Which I am not sure I have, or that being a saint is possible, or that not being a saint might sometimes be a better course of action. But none of those are things that I can decide, or know, or predict, or do anything rather than just roll with it.

But I think he is good, and good for me. I think. And I think that's enough.

I think, but I don't know, and I don't believe, either, when I used to all three, and that unsettles me, though. But being in this sort of haze-fuzz-unhappy is sometimes good, too. I've read a lot more, gone out and done a lot more, finally got started on the paintings again, came up with concepts for the temple drawings that I was planning on doing, gotten work to do, and pretty much kept myself busy. It's nice though. I enjoyed Reading Lolita in Tehran far more than I expected to be - perhaps because Nafisi's writing expressed her and who she was and what she felt so well, not because it was a revolutionary tale of some tragic women's literature group in the face of the Iranian Revolution, with impassioned speech and revelations, which is why I expected to like it, but because it was a candid, honest look into a person's life. Granted, sometimes the random literature references interspersed into there felt too forced...but at the same time, it's like speaking to Mona or Sarah back in high school, who loved literature and then would somehow slip a reference to Woolf or Flaubert into a conversation that would turn into a discussion about Bovary or Walcott, before slipping its way back to other topics, or to the teachers I had, who sounded just like Nafisi when they taught, because they all truly believed that literature both reflected and transcended reality, and in the power and the beauty of words constructed and sewn carefully into characters and a world that would spring to life with the first page of the book but live on in the imagination, long after the last word was read, and tried to make us understand their passion for the written word and pass on to us that knowledge of how to see that parallel world, which I think I'm finally capable of learning.

Yet for all those things, and for all the other thoughts that keep me busy during the day, thinking over high speed or freight rail or transportation or even GIS, and the others - being busy during the day is nice, and easy to do but harder is..busy at night, when there's too much waiting and idle time and scattered thoughts that coalesce into coherence too easily. That small, laughing, stupid, malicious voice that always tells you that something is wrong, that something will be wrong, that you're doomed to fuck up and cause misery, that you're not worth it, that you're just a substitution for someone else, that you deserve everything that's happened to you........oh, to be able to finally mute it, when it once had seemed gone for good. There's so much to be on both the side of it's getting there, and it is good, and  that with more patience, that feeling of terror and that stupid voice will be erased...but that feeling of terror is still very much there, and it would be nice not to feel like I'm trying to fight it alone, although paradoxically, once I don't feel like I am, it'll go away almost  immediately, too. And it's not only that, it's one of those point where life in general is confusing, wondering if I'm really walking down a path that I can be successful in, or if I'm doomed to fail just because I am who I am., wondering if and when things will start happening, knowing that I just have to wait, and wait.

And it's not like I wish I could flash time back and just live in the beginning of the year all over again, I just want to find some sort of stability and a base that I? he? we can settle into, rather than feeling like I'm coaxing tangential meetings and intersections of lives that seem to be growing both closer and farther apart - because what does that mean? Do you look at the closeness, taking heart in the small things that have slowly started re-appearing, and perhaps the glimmerings of things to come, or the furtherness, wondering about the seemingly small things that were once there and are now gone, and the feeling of unintentional neglect? and how and when do you learn what a stable, comfortable rhythm is? I feel like its kind of like an orchestra warming up - you hear that mass of strings groaning and tuning, your woodwinds blaring, and some damn trumpet bleating its own damn tune, and then suddenly it all quiets down and the violins, violas, cellos, all start tuning up and being in key, and then the conductor goes out, and you know the mess of sound is going to end, and then you know how it's going in be, even though while they're warming up you have no idea how long it's going to be or how badly your eardrums are going to be assaulted. And you go in at the beginning of the concert thinking you know exactly how this is going to turn out...and then while they're tuning you're just like oh god, oh god, why?! And even then, the music still ends up being a delight and a surprise (usually), even on things you've heard in recordings hundreds of thousands of times . And the more I think about it perhaps..relationships, in some ways, are very much like a concert.

But either way,  I want this summer to be over, because my entire prediction of it's going to be a long summer was right, and I just want something to change, because I feel like I'm sitting at a crossroads, and I hate waiting, knowing that I need knowledge and I'll get it eventually, but that I don't have it right now. I hate not knowing things, and being patient and waiting, knowing that it will come but not yet. Rrgh.