If you can't fix it you got a stand it

"Listen. I'm thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it'd be some sweet life. Like I said, I'm gettin out a rodeo. I ain't no broke-dick rider but I don't got the bucks a ride out this slump I'm in and I don't got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured, got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen's old man, you bet he'd give me a bunch if I'd get lost. Already more or less said it -- "

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain't goin a be that way. We can't. I'm stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can't get out of it.

Rifling through piles of books trying to find Laura's copy of Close Range, but it's nowhere to be seen. I found "Brokeback Mountain" online instead and just spent the last half hour reading it. Lo photocopied and mailed this story to me after we'd been together less than a year - postmarked near Yankee Stadium, trucked up via USPS to Cambridge 02138 - to woo me and make me cry alone in my university-issued bed with borrowed sheets and a flat, twisted sleeping bag for a comforter, to close the distance between Walton and Sacramento Streets and to remind me that 205.39 miles was too far to be away from someone who exhausted their love on you.

And this is the lesson to be learned from my sleepless hunt for old short stories: I promised you something on a sandy beach by a quiet bend in the Huntington River, because you are my point of reference, my north star, my sustenance, my home; you know this; you know this is why even the vaguest thought about John Wayne will lead me to even vaguer thoughts about cowboy masculinity and desultory searches for Annie Proulx stories that only remind me of you, my alpha and my omega. No prolonged end-of-the-year absences will change or deny this.

I don't write about you on my blog because most of the time it feels redundant - as if I need to tell you about what we live. But call it seasonal affectation disorder (triggering another alpha-omega chain of thought about El Scorcho rewritten as a paean to the copyeditor who introduced us to full-spectrum winter sun lamps) or circumstantial duress (cf. Boston, the boring pud, and New York, the lonely pud, and the Waynesboro, VA/Greyhound bus honeymoon that ended the thesis kampf and let us escape both boring/lonely puds at once) and the last few months give me reason for contrite redeclarations of love. My new year's resolution is to be a better person and here I am sleepless on the very first night of 2006 trying to re-break bones that have set and healed in the wrong position. I have nothing else to say except I love you and I'm sorry, to everyone, everywhere.