August 4, 2013

Dark, silent. TE posted a new Facebook photo. I spent a long time looking at it. The face I loved with such then-unparalleled desire, with such constancy and hope, the love I took to the dark hills of Syracuse praying that it might be returned to me in some measure, praying that effort and determination might make him love me as mere association seemed not to be doing,  the love that made me kid and giving and selfishly vengeful by turns, that face, which I would not have recognized had the name not been attached to it. He looks like his dad. He is an old wrinkly man, with slanted. happy eyes. I prayed that his life might come to nothing without me– that’s how bad it was– but have no idea where his life went at all. Nieces write under the picture how handsome their uncle is, and how they miss him. What does that tell me? That he went where I did, only me without the handsomeness and the missing? Don’t know, am afraid to ask lest the answer be silence. I would have been a better man had he said yes to me, the tree of bitterness forced to take a different root, or none at all. Perhaps I should tell him that.

New glasses, hard to look at anything too long, a day of writing wasted, though the studio garden got weeded and I finished a painting. Could focus on You Tube videos, and so watched them for most of the day.