three more nights of earplugs

on the phone last night something amazing happened.

i asked her to read to me one of the poems that i had written to her. she did, and then over the course of the call, she read to me many of the blog entries i've made over the past week, plus some older ones.

that was new, nobody's ever read my writing aloud to me, at least not so much of it at once that i can remember it.

there's nothing in the world like hearing my words come out of her mouth, even if i'm standing at a salsa bar waiting for my mexican takeout to be ready.

she likes my writing, she says, and i haven't found her to be a fibber. she gets my writing, i know, from the way she enunciates it. she gets the rhythm, the parentheticals, the style, the humor, the me that goes into it, and when she reads it aloud, all that stuff comes right back at me. and the lamest off-the-cuff blog posting becomes a piece of music.

she says i should keep writing. i agree. i had reason enough before to write, but now... now my words are not destined to die, unloved, unnoticed, forgotten and buried in some obscure database. every tiny smidgen of effort that i put into what, for me, is art, is appreciated, brought to life to live as it was meant to, and shared with me.

she breathes life into the melodramatic personal emergency of my writing. she doesn't have to, she doesn't really have time to, but she does.

my goodness.

all roads lead to rome, and any time i think about things such as the above, my thoughts always end up in the same place. i've really got something here.