2006-01-31 - 8:37 a.m.

Making the unsettlingly smooth transition from alcholic to workaholic over the last year has (finally?) lured my mind into thinking that love would be a lovely thing right about now. With the desire to flirt and traipse through the heads and hearts of girl after girl slowly fading from my mind (or at the very least, opting to nap for a while in the back of my noggin), I turn my thoughts now to more long term adventures/risks.

Maybe it's the "nesting" syndrome of finally having a place to call my own, or maybe it's just the overabundance of challenges I've laid out ahead of me (see also: self-abuse), but it seems that lately (and who would have ever seen this day coming?) I'm wanting that fleeting, 50% end in divorce, God I hate your Mother-In-Law kind of relationship. I'd love a good "nothing fight" right now over something as trivial as American Idol.

I'd like to come home from work and collapse like a zombie onto a girl occupying my couch in my sweatshirt, hair in a ponytail, busy circling sales in a paper. I'd like to bury her underneath a brown blazer and refuse to move, just to feel her squirm underneath and frantically hunt for ticklish spots to try and push me off. I'd like to hear a giggle erupt from underneath me as I hold her ankles and scratch the souls of her feet.

I want someone to burn the shit out of my dinner so we can drive to pick-up take out together.

But most of all, I want a reason to cry again. One single tear. I want to care enough about someone that I'm willing to squeeze out the most minute fraction of moisture, even it's quickly wiped away and never even witnessed by anyone else.

My hands are getting older. The knuckles and joints crack with almost every keystroke, every gesture... the creaking and groaning reminding me that at almost 25, I would typically have lived a quarter of my life... but at the pace I've lived, I imagine it's somewhere closer to half.

It's not like Chicago is that far away. I would make the sacrafice, would you?

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