"People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch - until there is no skin left. "

Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

No one has been holding me back from speaking my mind, but it was out of courtesy and the lack of necessity to pass judgement that I've been doing so. I'm genuinely happy about the news that I learnt of today, you have no idea, however strange it may seem. But I guess I was wrong when I said we're on the same page.

We had a good run, for the past handful of weekends, and hell I had an absolute blast. I don't remember a whole lot from all these alcohol-fuelled nights, but I was so conscious that morning to not let our lips touch, to not make any gesture that suggested any more than a drunken fling, and to fend off questions knowing that the most honest answers I could have given were just something that I should keep to myself.

But I quietly enjoyed you breathing down my neck and running my fingertips down your spine.

Bathroom hook ups and goodbye kisses were awesome, repeatedly awesome. Every now and then, I thought about moments that we shared. We had fun, but from day one, that was all that I'm up for. All along, the rational part of me has been wide awake, so awake that the slightest interaction of you with my sober self rung alarm bells.

One can do a lot, or very little, in two years, it all depends. "Age" as I said it, is half the truth. It's not about numbers. It's just...wrong on so many levels.

Not everything that needs to be said has to be heard.

Rejection, psychologically, is like physical pain: the same part of the brain is activated. And we have evolved to avoid that. What we do instead is to pretend we give less of a sht than we do or we rationalise it and blame it on external factors.

Some people fear rejection more than others, but even the most secured people put on a facade. That's the rule of the game, they know it, and that's why they (seemingly) ace it.

She's so open about her fondness of me, even though we barely know each other (She's not crazy and I hardly deserve it save for the fact that I'm somewhat of a novelty to her, I think), that it's just sweet, refreshing and turns me into a putty. I suspect it's because she knows that it'll never be more than making memories, riding on the waves of what we shared in that brief 72 hours or so. At least that's how I feel.

A couple of messages that I received over the past few days came close to turning my life upside down. What I thought, believed and took for granted as the one stable thing in my life that was my safety net appeared to be disintegrating, like a spider web in gusty wind and rain. I'm far from knowing the truth, and I'm not sure that I do want to find out, at least not right now. It all seems like a bad dream: irrational, out of control and unstoppable. I hope that it goes away, or that turns into a kind of deja vu supported by context, reasons and rationality.

So there it is. Making good memories seems to be the way to go, cos as much as good times' gonna come, the bad ones will stick or come around again.

"I seem to be really good at this accounting stuff," I said. "But I don't like it."
"It's easy to find a job as an accountant but it's hard to be brilliant and stand out from the crowd," he replied. "And if you don't like it, don't do it."

Yes, brilliance is the aim, and let's hope it's worth the pain.