what is, was, and ever shall be. world without end. amen.

so it was just me & the crown prince & the shaman all holding hands in a circle. the crown prince was telling her «you can go on if you want. it's okay.» and i was thinking that was very cool & zen, which i tend to overcredit the cp with being cool & zen, but anyway i was thinking that was very cool & zen so i'd get on board the go-on-if-you-wanna train. but then you know the punchline - the freakin go-on train left the station with the shaman on board and there we were left holding nothing but a handful of heaven. oops. i mean, it is what it is, and i am fairly certain she was beyond listening at that point and also fairly certain she was going perform according to her modus operandi which is to do whatever she damb well pleases -- but i kinda wonder if i should have counterbalanced the go-on-if-you-wanna with a wee bit o' stay-with-me-awhile. you know?

yeah, you think you know, but you don't. on account of you weren't there. you think you know how you'd be or what you'd do or what you'd say, but you have had some time to ponder, now haven't you? you have ruminated over the scenario and drawn it to your specs and come up with how things should have gone down. and you might be thinking you would have done things different than ol' ace but here's the thing - you weren't there, were you? no. you were not. and if there's anything true about that thing - it's this: that's really not the kind of thing you can plan. you can certainly reverse-engineer it, deconstruct it, and think that the next time you're gonna handle it different, but guess what? there is no next time. there is only that one time and you're slammed-out tired cause you ain't slept and you're melting into some twilight zone world of antiseptic smells and damb quiet beeping so loud, so loud, and the crown prince is saying «it's okay. it's okay.» and you can't stand up even one minute longer, and all you can think is man, this is weird, and you know in the end that it is what it is.

so we were there the next day and the day after that and the day after that and the next and the next - packing up a lifetime and hauling it away. and everyone was there but the jewess and tallulah. i didn't know why they left and couldn't muster the focus to be curious. me & the crown prince & elvis & sweet baby james - we gazed at an amazing plethora of paper, and they handed me some stuff and said it was mine. i looked and i saw it was my 2nd grade homework, and i didn't remember it really, and it was just crap really, and it was trash to me really, and i wasn't connected to it at all, really... and all i could think was that there was only person in the whole wide world who would have saved my 2nd grade homework. so i threw it in the trash because i don't need my 2nd grade homework reminding me every day that there's no one left who cares about the 2nd grade me.

because there are people here who care about the now me and i care about the now them and that is nearly too much for me most days - the power of it all. what with one of them being a certain someone in a cowboy hat, with a braid off to the side, with a ghost of a grin on her face - the one whose 2nd grade self i care about.