Our Selves Between Us

When I came back to the apartment, the first thing I saw was her empty closet. It had been filled with her pretty clothes for two years. That empty closet was like a grave. A death. An end. I started crying bad. I took one look at it and ran to the bed and cried facedown in the pillow. I'm halfway through life and have no idea how to live.

There's this scene in Richard Yate's book Revolutionary Road which is the most painful thing I've ever read. This neglectful husband has lost his wife to suicide. He goes into her closet and smells her clothes and for a moment he has her back, he can smell her, she's there, not dead, and he feels all the love he had for her, the love which had been lost, and then this horrible intrusive neighbor is banging on the door, and the husband hides in the closet until the neighbor leaves, but the spell has been broken, he can't get his wife back, he tries, but he can't reconjure her and he's lost her for good now, and this second death is worse than the first.

So when I got off the bed, done crying, I waved my hand in that empty closet to see if it was real. To see if I had really lost something so precious, and my hand sliced through the air and I knew I had lost her and I went back to the bed and cried some more. Just recently I put some of my raggedy clothes in there and they look ugly. They look like me.

—Jonathan Ames

I really liked the pilot episode of HBO's "Bored to Death".

I reluctantly watched the season premiere of "HEROES", like a battered wife giving the abusive relationship one more chance... and I kinda liked (elements of) it. Which kills me.

Is it possible that I've never been so lost in my life?

September 25th. This is what it's come to...