Referer (Sic) Logs (7)

Because a few weeks later, I finally got it into my head that it would never be again what it had been. Too much had happened, things thought about one another when the other was away that kept us, now, at distance — the things that one says about someone when they try to forget them. You know, though, I still have a little page in my scrapbook of the movie tickets of the night of our first real kiss, and the stubs of the last one we saw together, and a picture of us they took at the local TGI Friday’s. And I put in there a receipt for a brunch I had with her this second time, when I thought so very much that it was a second chance. You might think that I’d have put a match to those things after breaking up the first time, and again, the second — but you know what? I know for a fact that it was a good thing for a good while there, and this fool learned somewhere that you don’t let go of the good things. And you know what else? I still looked in my referer logs for her visits to my site, because I knew she still came by to see how I’d been. Silently to watch me live my life. Just like I silently watched her watching me.

So, I guess with everything said, now, this would be a good place to apologize. I began at the beginning, and not really in medias res. The middle has no conflict, so you never get to know the nature of the characters involved. (And the ex-girlfriend character was not nearly as well developed as she could have been.) The ending is just an ending, with nothing fancy, no great realization that has never been realized before. So, sorry. But I take a lesson in noting how the word “referer” is now a standard: it is in the nature of the world that we work with imperfect things, even if sometimes, it’s less obvious that we do — because that’s all we have, these imperfect implements with which to build a life. And maybe you knew this was coming, too: the meanings that we make of all that is around us, all that happens to us, and all we do: these, too, are imperfect. That doesn’t say, however, that we were never truly moved. Nor of these imperfect lives, because they experienced imperfectly, that we never truly lived. And me, who went from being in my room, looking at referer logs, to being in my room, looking at referer logs: don’t tell me I haven’t gone anywhere. Often the roughest paths are the ones that wind their way back home.

(part 1)
(part 2)
(part 3)
(part 4)
(part 5)
(part 6)

(fin)