The First Part of the Morning and Pieces of Us

Recently you made a guest appearance in my brain.  It doesn't happen all that often anymore, and it was less you than an image of you...  an image of you without a shirt, twisted among my sheets with that half-way-through-a-laugh look on your face.

When I do think of you, it's never for very long, and as I explain this, I understand why.  For just a moment, the thought of you brings a smile to my face and puts a twinkle in my eye.  Allowed to ferment, however, and the thought multiplies into thoughts and then into chains of thoughts and then into our story line, of which, to be honest, I am not the biggest fan.

It's not that things went badly.  Or sour.  They did not take some weird turn.  In fact, they went exactly as we expected them to go.  Not exactly as we wanted them to go, but sometimes, as they say, life gets in the way.

I'm not disappointed (it's hard to be disappointed when you have rock bottom expectations), but on occasion, I think of the "what if"s... but then I think of you, and I think that you probably hate thinking of me thinking of the "what if"s.

Sometimes I feel totally and utterly ridiculous holding onto any piece of us.  When I stare a bit too long at that picture of us at lunch that first day, or muse over the emails we exchanged (I actually haven't done that in quite some time, but I'm sure they'd make send my cheeks into an embarrassing hue), I realize how odd the concept of what we had when we had it must seem to anyone else.

I have a tendency to think two or three months ahead, and that brings me to about the time I might see you again.  I still don't know how I'll react, and maybe I won't know until we're in the same room again. Until then, thinking of you's useless to me. (But if that song leaks into my head, I know I won't have a choice.)