To love someone means that you are fulfilled the most by putting their deepest desires ahead of your own.

It started with “Those who have come here to hate should leave now, for in their hatred they only betray themselves.”

It ended with “She gazed into his eyes for the longest moment. And then he kissed his wife, the woman he loved, the woman who meant everything to him. The woman who loved him.”

And I wept.

Great wracking sobs... heaving shoulders... gasping breaths. Tears streamed down my cheeks and soaked the hair of my chest until I thought I might meet the fate of the Man Who Couldn’t Cry. I became concerned that the word antediluvian was going to take on new meaning for me.

I cannot express how thankful I am that I didn’t read it this summer.

I’ve no idea how I would have dealt with that. Hell, even survived that. It’s more than just words to me. For several years, these books, and the ideas in them, were part of my life. More deeply ingrained than you probably know. They crystallized concepts I have held dear nearly all of my life in a way that finally allowed me to express them to others.

I think, this summer, that these lines could have changed my mind, my world.

I don’t know if that would have been for the best or the worst.

I’ve no way to know.

I don’t know if I want that crystal ball.

I’ve known the truth of the subject line in my heart for years. I lived that truth in the only way I could see. Wishes would not have changed the future. The pain waiting there should have been greater than the pain I caused.

As I read those words, though, all of my certainty fled.

I put those desires above mine; it seemed like the right thing to do.

Is there a single person I know who is happier today than they were on April Fool’s day, 2007? Sky and Thumper, probably. ZBS, if you can believe his blog and catch it on a good day. Podicious pan paniscus LXIX? Have to ask on that, could go either way.

Me? Well, I finally laugh more than I cry. I talk too loud, again; embrace all that is strange and tantalizing. Enjoy the idiosyncrasies of a life lived. It took me long enough. Tonight, however, I am melancholy and wish I had someone here to hold; to hold me. To talk and show me the empathy I am notoriously incapable of reciprocating.

I spend most of my free time with my friends, old and new. We continuous adventurers seeking new delights around every corner with the abandon of college students, the unselfconsciousness of preschoolers, and very little wisdom of our years. Finding them far more often than is even vaguely healthy.

I look forward to our next escapade and the ones to follow that.

Until I am in my empty house once again.