Yeah, I’m still here. Kicking. Just haven’t felt the need to write about junk (or about anything) lately, thus I have not.

Truth is I’m slowly coming out of a rather dark-ish period in my life, and you wouldn’t notice if you saw me. It’s not that I started painting my nails black, my face white and dusted off the old Sisters of Mercy LPs. Nope. It was more of an internal thing going. Well, yeah, provoked by an external thing… yeah, all you want, but still. The hurt was (is) inside. Like Intel.

Okay. I can see that won’t cut it. And that I’m gonna start getting emails saying things like “WTF are you talking about? Don’t jump!!!”. No, I’m not jumping. I’m landing. It’s all good. Mission accomplished. I’m staying the course. Not gonna cut and run.

If you absolutely need for it to be spelled out, well, let’s go ahead and do it. There’s no other way of saying it than… just saying it, I guess: Like John Cleese used to say, since last May it’s not that my marriage was dead but… well it was “not at all well”. Things happen. Shit happens, rather, and it’s shit that you just have to wade through if you value at all what’s on the other side of that nasty bog of shit you’re in. And I did value it. And I do value it. So I waded through shit for about five months, which was not nice. But hey, it builds character. And Malaria.

I’m not gonna go into the particulars. Those are domestics and they belong in the domus itself. Suffice it to say that, yeah, a few times through these last five months there was a real and distinct possibility for the marriage to end. Thanks to a lot of luck, spit and effort, that wasn’t the case. Things are patched up, and I think today is the first day that I can officially say to myself that, yeah, we’re on the road to recovery, redemption, reconciliation and whatever other ‘r’ you want (except rabies). Things are good. Certainly much better than they ever were in the last 5 months, and getting better. Slowly. Day by day. Trying to build the sand castle again after the wave washed it away.. because that’s what life ultimately is: It’s building a sand castle right by the ocean. Sometimes all you can really do is watch how the water swallows it up, and then you start again. Until you run out of sand. That’s all there is, really, and this is not something defeatist. Quite the contrary.

Defeatist would be to give up after the first wave, or worse, decide not to build at all and spend your whole life looking at the sea. Humans are trying creatures, and there’s nothing heroic or remarkable about this. It’s hardwired in us not to give up after the first failure. We just brush it off and try again. Maybe do things differently, maybe insist on the same, but we do try.

Why do we try? Why do we try in the face of our failures, past, present and to come? I don’t know. I guess the best answer I can give is that I try, because if I don’t… what’s left there to do for me? We try because we want to see something done, something built, something felt. We try because we do have an unwavering love to see something out of nothing. Building, building anything, is a creative process and, as such, nothing more essentially than an act of love. And, honestly, what good is an act of love… what’s the purpose of buliding something out of love if it’s not going to be shared with someone else? Someone just like you, as different as he or she might be.

I thought I had built something, and for the longest time it stood. Then the waters gobbled it up. I can’t but to try again, and build it again. So I can share it again with her… the only one I remotely care about sharing something as beautiful and fulfilling with.

I don’t build things like these for my own enjoyment. For that, I do other things. There’s nothing here for my pleasure other than the pleasure of seeing it given away, well-received, well-used and well-felt. Love is an expanding motion, never a contracting one. Love, like life, is heat, not cold. I didn’t build this for myself, I did it to give it to her. Maybe now it doesn’t stand anymore as it was. Maybe now it will be a little different. Maybe I can’t build it again in its perfection, a spotless, spitting image of what once was and now is no more. Then in that case, no matter. I will build it differently, and just as good if I have any say about it.

I’ll build it again, so she can have it again. And that’s all I ever really wanted; for her to have a little piece of me.