May gray is in full effect, and I’m dragging in the mornings, my eastward commute cloaked in sea-borne fog. Everything felt out of sync for some reason, and instead of listening to the morning shows, I ended up plugging in my iPod.

Out of the random collection of songs, it managed to pick one out that dragged me back over a decade, reminding me of an episode of my life that—quite pathetically—I still haven’t gotten over.

The wound that will not heal. How positively Arthurian.

Anyway, I tried to shrug it off. I rolled into work as always, grumbling, with a full-on case of the Mondays, and as the day dragged and finally waned, I wondered why I felt so out of sorts.

Some wounds run deep, I guess.

I have, though, been mining the past quite a bit lately. I haven’t really been reading any new books lately. I’ve been rifling through the disorder of my library, re-reading books I haven’t read in a while. I recently just finished Roverandom, a light-hearted children’s tale written by J.R.R. Tolkien. After that, I re-read A Fine and Private Place by Peter S Beagle (the author of The Last Unicorn, a book that I first read when I was in college, and which got me through a rather rough patch in my life. And yesterday, I started The Farthest Shore, part of Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, only just realizing that I don’t remember much of it at all.

I read a lot of books in college, mostly in that fallow time when I broke up with my girlfriend from high school and before I knew who my true friends were. I spent a lot of times wandering aimlessly, heartbrokenly, around the South Side of Berkeley, along the warrens and alleys darting this way and that from Telegraph Avenue. I spent a lot of time roaming the shelves of Cody’s and Moe’s just reading fantasy and science fiction, trying to escape the seeming morass of my own life.

But the darkness snapped eventually. (You would think I would’ve learned this lesson by now.) The books have always been my refuge, but I don’t remember them ever being as vital or as necessary as that dark time.

Still, that veiled time is not the time that haunts me most (although they run rather close to one another, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve confused the memories, letting deep sorrow flow from frozen moment to frozen moment until everything is under deep, cold water) and I suppose the great consolation of growing older is that, while I may never again feel such happiness and joy again, nor feel love and desire so keenly as that, at least I will never again feel such abyssal depths of sorrow and heartache. Everything I have seen and felt since that time is a mere echo, a reflection of a reflection. There is certainly something quite desolate about that idea, but I’ll take desolation and numbness over harrowing pain, I guess.