Inner earthquakes

Woke up to the sound of a firecracker being shot off in the alley, and a wicked dehydration headache.  The heatwave has been back, and I'd forgotten to open my window earlier in the day, so the room (and house) were sweltering.  Can't remember what I was dreaming about, but I thought of the "Great Gatsby" (because I finished it on Monday-one of the faster reads, he was a good writer, and it's short) and when I awoke I wondered why, on the day that everything happened, Gatsby says to Nick, about Daisy, that her voice is the sound of money?  There is disdain, but he still somehow wants her, or what she represents, even though by the time he says it, his dreams of a life with her are already slipping away to nothing.  (Though, I suppose it's the clinging of the desperate to an obsession his whole life had been built in service to.)

Was up writing in the middle of the night.  Couldn't sleep.  Seismic shifts in my head from a conversation, one line of it really.  And you can't change the outcome of something that happened almost three decades ago.  But I regret my own lack of self-love or self-worth that caused my own blindness at the time.  But there were still things none of us said to each other, things we didn't know about each other, and who knows at the time, what will matter in the end?  (And the sudden joy of remembering that someone made his life hard at the time, the joy now not because I wanted him to suffer, but more because she (because anyone) cared enough about me to defend me.  That someone thought I was worth defending.  And the core group of friends during those two years...I would choose them all again.)

I remember the last time I saw each of two friends from that era, right before I moved to finish college.  One instance I've thought about a lot over the years, the other, I'd somehow forgotten.  A close friend had come into where I was working (I was waiting tables) and asked me a favor, which I said I'd do, but I never saw him again, because we somehow lost touch.  I remember having the impression that he had shrunk, that all the air of his life had been sucked out.  I tried to hug him, but he pulled away.  The other set of eyes disapproving, which I get, a new phase of life and all...to you, I hope you got yourself back.

To me, I've lived my life way too cautiously, worrying about the wrong things.