today I told a friend that sometimes you have to be secure enough in a relationship to disengage -- if for some reason disengagement is required by circumstance. it sounded practical, all with the realism and grit. then tonight, for reasons I can't quite locate, I remembered something: how much of love is about focus, how much love is sustained by focus, is made new by it and made substantial by it and real by it. maybe these things don't need to be mutually exclusive, but I remember now a different respect for attention. not as the narcisistic obsession of adolescent love, but as the way we combat the numb that too often gets mistaken for comfort.

oh yes. and I've been watching scary movies all night and I'm alone in the mountains and the dogs are barking. all I need now is a storm.