…never heard the melody, til I needed the song…

I’ve been home sick for five days straight.

This has given me plenty of time for mulling over my recent life decisions and resolutions, new plans and old promises.

I don’t know that I’ve gotten anywhere. If I am to believe my uplifting daily quotes, there is nowhere to go.

And I’d really like to believe that.

I’m making a mix tape of my favorite Tom Waits love songs. Tom, I believe, is a man unlike the typical man, with a thorough respect and understanding of that incomprehensible mental state called love. If only he were available for marriage, I dream.

These love songs, though! They used to be laced with wrenching memories of lost love. Now they echo within almost emptily, having lost a certain poignancy.

Maybe as a reaction to heartbreak, which I wrote about here, in the early years of this blog, I began a search for hilarity in the mundane. And I found it. You always find what you’re looking for, of course. And if you keep looking, you’ll find it again. I’ve found it again. And again and again.

I wonder, though, if I’d forgotten to keep an eye out, and a healthy respect for the heartbreak that is also so beautifully ubiquitous.

Or, rather, as a corollary, perhaps I’ve neglected the naively hopeful hope that is a necessary condition for true heartbreak.

Oooh, I’ve been heartbroken. In the two years of this blog, I was definitely heartbroken to learn that the domain name tupperwaresisters.com was against the rules. I was heartbroken to take my current job and not travel the world selling the EuroSteam. I was heartbroken late last year, but I won’t speak of that here.

When my sister got married this year, I couldn’t believe that she had shaken–or rejected–the healthy cynicism that is so becoming to a woman nowadays.

I wonder, sitting here today, gray as the skies are, if her skies might be blue.

It’s been a good year so far. It keeps getting better. It’s a year of finishing projects, and not beginning new ones. It’s a year for art museums and rekindling curiosities.

And, by god, it’s a year for falling in love.