Thank you darling, for your warm candlelight in the window just now (5:10 pm). This morning, too, I happened to go online at the precise moment (6:53) that you looked in on my blog - the numbers bloomed & transformed before my eyes, and I knew it was you, wonderful evidence that we were thinking of each other at the same time. My mind is forever seeking to find meaning and pattern in things that perhaps are better understood as random. Honestly, a year ago just this time, I think my mind really got a bit unhinged, seeing patterns and connections and weird coincidences everywhere. I think of that these days. Though my spirits flag now & then (unsurprising, I think, due to strange, impossible circumstances, not to mention icy torpid weather) I am very much on an even keel now. It's strange looking back to last winter. In my entire life, before or since, I've never, ever had mental health issues to the point where my sense of reality seemed to be becoming unhinged - and hopefully, never will again. Someday I'll tell you. I should write it down, really, try to construct a narrative. When I mentioned it in passing to an old friend recently, the hard time I had last winter, she asked me to tell her about, and I couldn't give her an answer, didn't know where to start. It was just all these connections everywhere, what appeared to be obliquely pointed messages directed at me - not linear occurrences.

Ah anyway, so I'm of sound mind now, certainly a good thing. But in the spirit of Kitty-Levin, I try to make sense of this series of page hits, two days in a row:

Proust's Double
Morning Write
Evening Post
(a.m.) Outside the windows grizzled land and pall [ed. note: yeah, this afternoon too]
New Age
Yuletide Mash

There are two others - because the last two days it's 8 page hits at a time - but I don't know what they are because the stat log has room for only so many, and someone else - several times a day, has been hitting on the "starved gnat" post from last September.

So little to report, today, dearests, and I'm not feeling very inspired or poetic, though I did read several short essays of the poet Ted Hughes, in his volume Winter Pollen. Which I really enjoyed reading, and felt very comforted by, as a poetic love letter writer who feels anxiety sometimes over writers block, and he offers such sage, gentle guidance from his own experience. How writing a poem (for him) is like hunting small animals, which he used to do as a child, or like going fishing, trying to glimpse let alone catch the shapes that flicker past underneath the water. In this context too, in startling parallel, I think of his poor son Nicholas, who as a grown man was a research biologist in Alaska, studying the movements of grayling fish (they're salmonlike, I believe). He took his own life a couple of years ago, unfortunately. I was very struck and moved by what I learned of him, the fact of him, his studies, his love of nature, of going out onto rivers and closely observing the movements of fish - like his father, who was able to take it a step further, metaphorically. I'm tired now, and it doesn't feel like my story of theirs to tell, don't wish to appropriate it, and yet in the back of my mind I've always wanted to write something about it. A couple of years ago, as an exercise in a writing class, I took a large journal page and jotted down, in a lot of balloons, connected with lines, thoughts, leaping associations, quotes, the "Pike" poem of Ted Hughes, a description of Nicholas' research. I went quite far afield on that sheet, with many other tangential thoughts as they came up. And here that page sits - looking quite official, almost like an organic organizational chart - but I've never felt that I could do anything with it somehow, as though the sheet itself sufficed. Which it doesn't, but there is a part of me that resists being the one to put it together in some formal fashion. I don't know why it feels so opportunistic to me - just not wishing to tread on others' lives, I suppose. There is a lot of palpable pain there. They're both dead and gone (Ted Hughes, who died of cancer, predeceased his son) and yet - they seem very immediate to me.

Sorry, darling, I'm just babbling here a bit, which I don't really like to do in my blog (yeah, I'm sure that shows).

What I'd really like is to be able to shut off my mind for a while, just lie in your arms in peace, hear about you for a change - learn about you. Maybe one day, or not, who knows.

It's getting late where you are. I imagine that you're in bed, or getting ready for bed. Or - who knows - perhaps you work late into the night, or overnight even. I have no idea. But whatever time it is that you go to bed, even though I'm not there, I'm kissing you goodnight, and making sure you have enough covers and that the shades are drawn and the room is nice and dark. Good night, darling. Sleep well.