Killing processes.

On the movie screen, it only needs to run a few frames for you to get the point. Displaying it much longer would be boring.

Late at night and couched in darkness, a face is illuminated by the glow of a CRT monitor. Modem lights flashing on a desk hidden in the blackness that is everything but the screen, the face and the fingers flying like drones over a dim grey keyboard.

It's a bit misleading, that part. In the movie, there's always music in the background. In reality, this is an activity so all-encompassing that we don't tend to notice the silence, the clock tick, or the sound of our own exhalation. Furthermore, there's always something exciting happening on the screen to warrant the activity. It's never just a person hunkered down for the night staring aimlessly ahead, most of the time at nothing at all. But that is what it's really like. Being the silent computer-glow person isn't a fleeting moment on film, it's hours and hours of actual life, actual heartbeats wasted. It's what I miss the most about having a working computer.

I don't feel that I really wasted all the hours I've spent thinking, "what next?" or "maybe someone will log on soon..." and I don't want back all the messages I've sent into the darkness to people who sleep instead of responding. "Are you there?" "Hey, you..." "Awake?"

Being alone in the darkness and calling out for companionship is an eternal facet of the human reality.

Dream you back to me.

Tracking my heart's dearest around the country has proven complicated for the last few years by watching them move away, hearing that they're travelling.

I am a person with strict ideals about knowing where my effects are. Friends and loved ones are no exception to my rules and the idea that I can't control them, can't keep them close to me, can't keep them warm and happy and entertained forever, drives me crazy. I know that people move away for good reasons, but I wish I could offer a good enough reason to stay put.

I want friends in Chicago. I want a real group of real people that I can see and hug and stay up late with. I want people who plan things and invite *me* to them, not my boyfriend and me-if-he-wants-to-bring-me. Surely, I have some of these people, but it doesn't feel the same, somehow. It's not the same as it used to be when I had my own friends, when I had my own history.

The thing that hurts me most is realizing that those friends I had in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, the ones I had in Chicago before they left, the ones that still live here and never call anymore, have all got their own people. They have whole networks of friends where they settled, whole systems of things to do, fun to have, hugs to give. And I'm not part of it.

It is a testament to my biggest failures in life that my best friends never know that they're my best friends because I'm too ashamed to admit it; they may be the most important people for me, but I know that I'm ancillary for them.

I have always wanted a best friend (in the traditional, platonic sense) who could honestly say that he cared as much about me as I did about him (gender-neutral he/him, of course; I'm not picky).

I think I had one once, but distance is distance and I'll never know how to wrap my head around his motivations. Moving away doesn't help, but I can't pull him back because I have nothing to offer him (not gender-neutral, of course; and actually, I am quite picky).

Between realizing that I have no close friends who are present, realizing that the ones I had moved away a long time ago (incidentally, it has been longer than I expected when I counted the years just now), and realizing that if I found some, they, too, would move on to better things, better people, better places... well, between all those things is me, looking across horizons at past lives too busy to look back.