I wonder, when it's all totaled up, how many long thoughtful walks I will have had down Bushwick Avenue in my life. We're already well into the dozens, could be over a hundred, walks home with phone calls when it was too cold out, so you had to keep switching hands, one in the pocket, the other holding it up to your face, the knuckles turning red. Dawn walks with sub bass still bouncing between your molars, the sweet ankle ache of dancing all night. Walks in rain, in fog, in the height of summer when all the trees lining the old Victorian houses between my apartment and the weight lifting gym I used to go to would lean this way and that in the hot breeze, the rattle of dry leaves and me wearing a fanny pack. Walks with everything on your mind and walks with nothing on your mind. Imagining one day realizing I'm reaching the end of my life and heroically taking one last walk down Bushwick Avenue, counting the bodegas as I shuffle past.

I'm having a lot of thoughts, too many, a lot of words are all crammed up in my throat, they're jammed against each other, like too many people in a phone booth, and nothing's coming out all the way, just phrases and limbs sticking out. Waking up in the middle of the night lit up with either desire or anxiety, I can't tell which, mixed up dreams, because suddenly the joie de vivre has returned, that electric bolt feeling that I held on to with both hands so tightly last year and rode on down the coast. Lost sight of it for a moment, there, but it's back, I'm walking more and more quickly down the sidewalk. Night and day, all at once I want it all again, ravenous, throwing my arms open to the world and scarfing it all down (I imagine taking two enormous slices of bread to all of the east village and folding it up, mashing it all horribly with my teeth, feeling the windows of the buildings and the bones of the people scratch my throat as a I swallow). No longer going through the motions, the previous months of this year blinked by, I'm coming loose (like my friend's truck wheel that fell off this weekend). Using more commas and making more sense to myself and less sense to everyone else. In one week's time I will be running and playing guitar in cities I have never been to and it is this simplefact that I really want for my stupid little life.

Last week I ran into someone from my past, train platform, I tried to act like I didn't recognize them but then when they were so nice and friendly to me I realized something - people from your past don't necessarily know that they're from your past, they could very much still feel like they are a part of your world, like they are a part of your regular considerations. You could very much be a part of their life and yet you no longer consider them an integral part of yours. There is no ceremony to demarcate when somebody has made this transition in their standing with you. Somebody once told me that in Germany people used to have little rituals to celebrate the point in their friendship when formal pronouns could be swapped for informal pronouns, I think it involved a candle and a handshake. But there's no ceremony when friendships and acquaintances drift irrevocably apart. It happens very gradually, but it happens nonetheless - at a certain moment people go from a current concern, someone "in your life" becomes someone "from your past." I felt a very strong urge to tell this person that they were now of my past - I wanted to say, you know, I'm sorry but you represent a dark swath of time I'd rather not think about or re-litigate, I've moved on, you were an intrinsic part of that darkness no matter your current vibe, talking to you is kind of like staring at the sun, you were witness to me at my most helpless and it's almost unbearable for me to remember that, I value you as a person and am grateful we were close once but now if we talk too long I'm concerned that sensitive information may be learned or leaked, can we please just shake hands and get on our way? But of course this can't be done, I was polite, I made small talk as we all do and rode out the ripples from that run-in as they came.

(Wondering if anyone reading this feels that I am of their past, that seems very sad to me, a part of me will always want to be close with anyone I've ever been close with forever but the world doesn't work this way)