I'm 28 today.

Weird.

I posted in my livejournal this morning, saying that I had not yet been offered birthday sex. Two hours later, I've had three outright offers and a half-dozen or so coy looks. (The offers were from 2 men and one woman, the coy looks were all from women.) Though I'm not taking anyone up on it, it gives me a nice warm feeling to know that people volunteered.

mmm, ego boost.


There's really not all that much to report from the home front, except that I'm being selfish. Truly, deliciously, gloriously selfish. I am spending great gobs of time alone, not feeling particularly guilty for not wanting to spend time with the people I ought to be spending time with. I don't know if this is going to last--somewhere, my guilt is probably going to get the better of me--but I'm happy, for the moment, to be doing exactly as I please.

There are people, yet, I haven't managed to reconnect with. So many people I've lost touch with out there. So many more people I want to get to know better.

Eventually, I'll probably stop being so selfish with my time. But for the moment, I'm just enjoying myself, quite a bit.

Early one morning the sun was shining I was laying in bed
Wondering if she'd changed at all if her hair was still red

A few days ago, I got an email from M.

M was my second girlfriend, someone I went out on dates with for a while before I graduated from college and who I developed more of a relationship with after I moved to Seattle. We never got to the point of plighting our eternal troth; she ended up leaving me and dating someone who actually lived in her zip code.

M was...something else. She looked like a redheaded Jennifer Tilly, and drove a big pickup truck. I had an immediate crush on her when I met her, and that never really faded; I was less in love with her than awed by her, much of the time. She was fun to tease gently, and she blushed beautifully, and she smelled wonderful.

I would have walked through the fire for her, but I accepted that she and I weren't meant to be together, and after a while I settled down to just thinking about her every so often, wondering what she was doing, where she was, if she was married yet. Mutual friends occasionally had news of her, but after a while that news just dried out. I think I started assuming that she'd moved somewhere. I occasionally did Web searches on her name, just in case she'd shown up somewhere on the Net. Nothing.

But then....this email.

"I should have kept in touch. If you forgive me, let me know."

The past always comes back. Always. My life is a circle and things come back round on it, over and over again, bringing back people I thought were gone forever. Sometimes, they only touch my life for a very brief while; other times, they come back to stay.

There is a small, silent hope right under my heart that she'll be one of the latter.

Misha is such an enabler.

So tonight, I declare, "to hell with eating right, I'm going out for pizza" because a discussion on Hell about pizza had made me intensely hungry for some Delfino's stuffed crust pizza. And Misha asked me if I would let her take me out to dinner.

So when I finally got to Barnes and Noble to meet up with her...there she was with a big smile and a gift certificate, just for me!

A boxed set of his Dark Materials, Solitaire by Kelly Eskridge (a book that I read the first 20 pages of and couldn't put down a week before) and the new Peter Gabriel CD later, it was time for dinner. Then after dinner, I went back and picked up a copy of The Lovely Bones and the most beautiful handmade blank book I've ever seen.

The pizza was divine, too. (As was the company! Thank you!)

Now, I am full and I am replete with things to read. Between tonight and the booksale last weekend, I have so much to read that I've put off finding the library in my neighborhood.

I have started reading again, something that I hadn't done much for a little while. I am reading like a starving woman, in great chunks, greedy greedy greedy for the sweet words inside the covers that smell like dust and sunlight. I am not rationing myself, not reading slowly in order to make it last, I am letting my appetite run free and it feels like sweet relief.

I am shaking off whatever malaise has gripped me recently and diving back into my world. And it feels very, very good, as the days grow shorter and the air begins to hold the promise of autumn.

Soon, it'll be time to go underground again. But maybe, this time, the spring will hold a blossoming unlike any I've ever seen.

This is my fifth journal anniversary.

You can, if you like, see what I was doing a year ago, the year before that, three years ago, four years ago, and five years ago, way back in 1997.

I had no idea that I'd still be doing this five years later. What a strange trip this has been.

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