07/02/2004 Entry: "Perhaps I Need To Read Some Thomas Wolfe."

[OK, my previous entry was pretty lame; it was artificial and forced. I posted it after literally falling asleep in my chair. But I couldn't stitch these two parts together. And I don't think I was done thinking about it, either.]

The strangest thing about the concert the other night was seeing so many familiar faces. I don't mean the nice people I know from the blog world. These were people I knew from ten years ago. Old tricks and ex-boyfriends. People I half-remembered from my club days. People I thought had died many years before. The Boyfriend said I was watching the crowd like I was expecting something to jump out at me. That may have been truer than I thought at the time. So many faces seemed to remind me of being in this same space so many years ago. Of the crowd I ran with and the places I frequented when I'd last seen Kiki and Herb. Of the place my head was at. And as real and close as it may seem, you can't go back. It might seem like you can for a minute. That's the cruelest part.

I half-avoided a former friend of mine who was walking out a person ahead of us after the show. We had drifted apart when he took a serious boyfriend, and circumstance made it easier to just drift away than to save anything. I'd like to say that it took me a minute to recognise him, but the years haven't seemed to change him much. At least, not on the outside. I debated calling out his name, but I wasn't certain if he'd even want to know that I was there, another ghost waving from a place that looked like the past. Or maybe still the present, just pressed under glass.

Which is less cruel, to force someone else to travel back somewhere they can't go, or to deny them the choice? I let fate decide: He turned right, we turned left.