That's the last time I read a novel containing a powerful love story while my partner is away. Last night I wanted to turn to Matt and show him the things in the story that I feel we also have, and talk about how we have it so much better than the star-crossed lovers in my book. As it was I had to keep these things to myself and ended up dwelling on the other theme of the book, which was the debate over whether something has to endure to be worthy, and if so, then is anything worth it, because our lives are all so temporary anyway... I had a night of very strange dreams, the internal motivations of which I can't begin to figure out, but it was kind of part of an old running theme so I'm not going to try to dissect it too hard.

I'm a little ashamed of myself for calling him at 5am PST to announce that I couldn't sleep and I missed him, while he sat in class, I was also highly incoherant as my mouth wasn't nearly so awake as my overactive imagination. It's the only such incident in over nine months, so it's not a bad average, and maybe it'll teach him to talk to me the next time he's sleepless with homework anxiety, instead of letting me sleep and driving himself quietly crazy.

Ho-hum, he'll be back in a week, refilling the Matt-shaped hole he left behind in my life and hopefully helping me paint my table. The design for which I suppose I should try to figure out this weekend, I'll take my notebook and William Morris samples up to LA with me when I visit Granny. Along with my poor neglected guitar, I want to have some beginnings of calluses on my fingertips to show off by next week.

On the grander theme of permanence, my take on it is that continuity isn't the be-all and end-all of what is wonderful in this life, because we are constantly in transit. A love doesn't have to last a lifetime to be considered a "true" love, and often things achieve more meaning by being transiently beautiful, as it makes you focus in every moment of it's presence. This attitude may be due to the fact that I've never had to live through a great loss, I've seen the grief it causes up close and personal, in my family and friends, but not in myself. There has been one great loss of my own, but I didn't recognise it as such at the time, and by the time I realised I was in need of mourning I was already aware of how much I had gained as a side-effect of that loss. So much so that the departure of what had been taken from me seemed rather insignificant in the end. I still light a candle in my mind for my younger self every spring, but it is the echoes of loss in others that makes me wonder what it will be like when it is my turn to carry a flame of memory for a loved one lost.