2004-09-01 - 1:24 a.m.

Before leaving for Qatar, Hallie was up on Saturday, and she spent her last night in America with two close friends who took a few minutes out of the evening to head to a party a few blocks down held in the honor of my close friend Danni�s arrival from India.

I don't have many close friends, either (and this all happened in Somerville, I might add).

It's the immutable law though, that whenever something important happens there are also a ton of important things happening at the same time, and after those coveted few hours, four weeks go by with not so much. Small scale on choices and aging.

(Just so you don�t hate me for leaving for the party, where the Roommate an I stayed for just an hour, Hallie got the use of our long distance phone, all the beer she wanted, and if she ran out of people to call (!), unlimited use of my 13.7 day music collection and plenty of CD-Rs.)

As for Hallie, I'm really going to miss her. She was there for me during a really bad time in my life, a couple of years ago, where I really lost track of myself. I never laid a finger on her, mind you--being around her, I didn�t feel like a total piece of shit, and that was a great place to start, great ground from which to build something. We had a really great friendship then, just doing things, taking turns driving the bus, and the lucky thing about it is that if I met her today the way I met her then (at work), we probably would not have become friends.

As for Danni, the friend that came back, it was really fucking great to see her. I don't know if she's even met Hallie (although she might have--I'm bad with details). Danni wasn't around when Hallie and I had our good period, a few years ago, when I was having a bad time with a ton of other things.

Believe me, the irony doesn't escape me like so many things do.

And it's not like losing a fortune on the stock market but bouncing back the next day.

It's like losing a really good and challenging job that I worked hard at and that was fulfilling and occasionally frustrating (as all jobs are), and getting a break from life and landing an equally really good and challenging job where I can work hard and possibly experience frustration in the future, and the rewards are the same, and always fulfilling.

I hope things work out for Hallie with everything she does. I really am sorry to see her go. We didn't get the relationship back on track when she came back to Boston last year, which was all my fault and also very much nobody's fault, but not hers at all.

I also hope things work out with Danni, my self-proclaimed close friend, but someone I made a few attempts to contact when she was in India, someone who I made a few attempts to contact when she was in California, and someone who I was close to when she lived in Boston when we were in college together, which stopped happening in 1999.

Kudos to her for calling me to invite me to her party (I do everything by email--save the small talk for when it happens so I don�t run out of good ideas in the meantime). Danni�s going to happen this time around. You only get so many opportunities to get to no matter what happens... status, and I'm sure the the Buffalo Bills don't need me to drive that point home.

And writing all that made me feel better but I still miss Hallie, though I still think we have a couple of postseasons left in ourselves before we retire.

At the same time (and this is revision, and I'm not doing any more html right now), but someone in a white coat should carry me away for writing that Oh, life's rich ironies thingie. The problem is I have nothing to go on to instead, nothing, and I just lost an ally. I'm really sad that my friend went away. I'm really sad I lost a friend I could talk to. I'm really sad about this.