I want to write today, dearly. But my heart is not having it. My heart, so often, seems to fall flat, to weaken and dull when I need it to be vibrant and engaged and full of splendor. And there's no excuse for my malaise today, my ennui. I want to write something meaningful, something ferocious and full of grace, and yet all my body wants to do is lie down, to feel nothing, to mope and moan. Last night, by all accounts, should have left me feeling full, and instead I feel eviscerated. Susanna, Rachel, and I spent most of the day together. I had work until 10:30, and then I walked into Sylvan, and from there, the three of us spent the whole day wandering, talking, admiring beauty. We went to Rachel's house and I talked to her father for a while on the front porch, the two of us baked in heat. We all ate lunch together. We went to Susanna's and we made a pie for the barbecue that her parents were throwing, an apple chedder pie, and we listened to music, and we danced, and we sat on the floor together and we read poetry together. We went for a long walk, went barefoot down to a small, wending creek that cuts through the backyards and forests of Sylvan. We walked shin deep in the water' and we picked up pieces of pottery, and sometimes I would stop in the middle of the creek, water purling around my ankles, and I'd look ahead of me and there would be Rachel, resplendent in a diaphanous blue sundress, and the water stippled with sunshine and rocks, water moving in and out of shadow, and Rachel looks over her shoulder at me and smiles, and then behind me is Susanna, her face vibrant and sweaty, moving lithely in a pair of gorgeous red shorts, her tank top rolled up to her chest, her hair pulled up and loose strands of it falling around her forehead, her cheeks. Beauty in all directions, women and water and trees, occasionally the wind labors through, occasionally the smell of a barbecue, the distant sounds of children shrieking past on their bikes. We went back to Susanna's and the party was underway. We drank sangria and beer and wine, we ate heaps of food, we played guitar and sang rounds, I talked to Susanna's father for a long while, I talked to their friends for a while, we ate our pie and it was good. And then we disappeared into the night with a bottle of gin. We went to a large field, it was twilight, and in all directions there were fireworks going off over the rooftops and treetops. Fireflies were blinking like Christmas lights in the dark silhouettes of the trees. We sat in the middle of the field, drinking gin, and then Susanna ran naked around the field, and Rachel and I watched and laughed and drank, and then Rachel climbed up a football goal post, her skirt hiked up around her hips, Susanna and I watching and laughing now. We lay there in the warm night, the three of us side by side, the fireworks still going, the stars above. Life, I thought, life is mysterious and often full of grace. By then it was eleven, I had not slept since five, I was running on four hours of sleep and I had a low grade fever and I was very drunk and I couldn't possibly decide who I loved more, Susanna, my voluptuous, vivacious lover, or her beautiful, radiant best friend. I went home and I slept fitfully for twelve hours. Since then, I've sat at my computer and tried, in vain, to write. We sacrifice so much in life. So much of our lives we do not want. I don't want a house or a car or a good job. What I want is to write, is to feel my heart aflame and to write feverishly, passionately, beautifully. What I want is to wander until I am lost, so lost I don't know the way home. What I want is to spend a thousand thousand evenings and afternoons lolling in bed with Susanna, and Rachel, and Hanna, and Marie, to talk about poetry, and literature, and art and meaning, to lavish every inch of their bodies, to not feel the omnipresent tug of responsibilities and the modern world drawing us away from one another, into the streets of homogenous cities full of advertisements and dour faced men and women tittering about, prattling endlessly about capital and politics and civil suits and promotions and their vacation homes. There are days I feel so confined. I fear the world I want, the world I desire, has been co-opted and corrupted by the culture that has raised me. I fear there is no where in this world that I can run, that I can hide from the noise and live the kind of life I want. But then, of course, there are nights like last night. And those nights matter so much, and maybe they matter more because I can juxapose them against the shit of so many other days. I don't know. Today, I wish I could write.