I think you caught me on the downside, downturn.
I was busy writing with a pen and
paper-thin dream.


How the hell could I fall in love with someone named Chester the Molester?
(how could someone named Chester the Molester love me like that?)

I was the only one he ever got a chance to love.
I am the only one who has ever loved him.
(and this is what I get?)

I like how the twentieth of this month passed without me noticing, as it did last month. I don't like that we've been apart longer than together and I'm not fixed yet.

My new surrogate daughter, or little sister or whatever, is a darling eleven-year-old who lives at the home called Odyssey and reminds me of me.
Not because she's more adorable than anything I've ever seen, or she hangs out with the upperclassmen like some kind of adorable pet. Those were not me when I was eleven, although I may have been adorable.
Because she's a world-changing creative genius in training.
In her, I see the little seeds of the dreams I had when I was eleven. I see the early mastery of words, I see the premature intelligence.
I see premature loss of innocence. Like me. And like me, she's taken those incidents and turned them into wisdom.

She told me the other day that it's okay to not be over Chester, because I probably never will be.
She said that people never get over love when they lose it, that they spend their whole lives covering up the bad things with good things, but then those good things go bad and they have to find more good to pile on top of that.
"It's just a big pot of rotten junk that you keep covering in sugar, and then your sugar goes bad and you have to add more. I mean, I never got over [the little(st?) Millsap] and even though I hate his guts somewhere I think I still love him like I did for the time we were dating."

She was the only one to tell me that. It was a relief, and it was not. If she is right, and I believe she is, then Chester is also suffering. I don't know if I want him to be or not.

There is an old friend whom I shall call Aubrey, who brings out the summer and the child inside me. If this Chester-shaped hole doesn't go away soon, all of the sunshine and the laughter and the singing and the dancing will fall into it and be lost forever.