Today was the first day that I managed to go through its entirety without speaking to my girlfriend. It's 2 in the morning. I've been up since 6:30 or so. I went to class, work, came home, napped, and then went and studied calculus for three hours in a tutoring session.

And throughout this span of ...12....6...2... 20 hours, I didn't once speak to my girlfriend. No audible signals or sounds reached my ears from her lips.

Suddenly it's a very sobering thought. And by sobering I mean painful beyond measurable degrees. We, as a society of humanity, have not counted such an expanse. Instead we label it with a sideways 8, call it infinity, and move along. There's nothing more to see here. And no more to see her.

Sobering. By which I mean volumetrically intense. A kind of harshness that would shatter diamond on Moh's scale. Like the expanse between east and west. Or perhaps behind God's back. Someplace where I can't reach it. Some incomprehensible chasm of darkness and depth that is horrifying in its massive span.

I'm faced, of course, with this realization only through comparison, by which I mean previous days. All 957 of them, if we average a month to be 30 days. If you're looking for the conversion, it comes to 2 years, 7 months, and 28 days. Like a label written on the side of a milk carton - will expire after this date. The only way I can come to terms with the inherent volume, the inherent scope of such separation, is by taking today and holding it against the previous 957 soldiers. And somehow this one day outweighs them all and shines the brightest with a darkened, hazy glow. As if it were branded with some triple-six digit and smiling with cruel distaste for everything, like some behemoth, gargantuan eater and ravager.

It hurts. It really does. And perhaps the distension only becomes more apparent the longer I think and dwell over the topic, adding to the subject's already incalculable girth. When you run something over in your head a million times a second, and that groove was worn itself bleeding inside your matter, and your soul responds with a salty twitch...and the best that you can do is nothing. You try to ignore it and it grins back, it grabs your arm and buries finger-edges inside your skin. And there's little you can do but suffer.

So I didn't talk to her today. A thought so bizarre and completely esoteric in nature, that I have a hard time comprehending it even now.

...

How stange. Or perhaps ironic? Because when I choose to italicize "now" up there, the resultant tag for Blogger is "em." I think any reader, here, would be smart enough to make the connection as to why I think that's ironic. It obviously means something to me, and I'll rest tonight with little regret or care if you do or don't get it. It means enough since I chose to completely stop my train of thought and examine it. And so I segway back to my previous groove.

I cannot comprehend this, even now. Even when I remove myself from the real world and sit back and examine everything that has occurred in the days of late, in weeks recent. That it's so completely unreal and ethereal, like some demonic beast that exists in fairy tales. I can't even integrate this thought into my head without some synapse failing to initialize - I haven't spoken with her all day. All 24 hours. And I can feel myself melting on the inside when I think this.

And now I'm operating in modes and stances that are foriegn, even alien to me. Life can't return to what it was before. It's not something singular and remote and static and apart from everything else in my life. It's not a candy bar, it's not a stolen bike, it's not a speeding ticket. It's not something so isolated that it leaves it mark and then simply makes an exit.

What is going on now is not something that whisks itself away and allows you normality of previous engagements. Instead it steals away some mortality of yours, smiles, and vanishes in brevity. All in seconds. 957 days versus, maybe, 9 seconds. And those nine seconds, right now at least, hold a far greater dominion over me than ever did the millions - some 82 million, to give a round - that preceeded them. Those soldiers, now, lay dead at the hands of a precious and terrible few.

I guess the point, now, is that there lives and maintains some phantom of excellence and joy. But that's all it is - a ghostly foil and structure that, in the span of one day, has completely removed itself from my conciousness. It lies in some grave, in some plane, in some dimension I can't hope to find. At least not now, anyway. That apparition has departed and lies in some ocean, surrounded by deferred dreams that stink and wither. With dying embers that wrought their souls upon the floor.

And cease to rise, lift, ascend.