Little burning villages.

I was still in love with him on October 1, 2005, when he took me into the middle of nowhere. Whatever relationship we'd had for all those months was deteriorating more and more with each passing day. We both knew it, but for once, stopped talking about it. He drove, and I sat in the passenger seat, miserable and silent, wondering how long I would have to stay before he'd be ready to take me home.

I was tired. Tired from waking up at 7 a.m. for practice. Tired of the ups and downs in the relationship. Tired of putting so much energy into something with someone who would never ever feel the same way about me as I felt about him. Tired of feeling. At all. And now what was I doing? Driving to a remote location to spend an evening at a bonfire with a bunch of people who I hardly knew and who didn't like me anyway. So many people. So. Many. People.

Even now, when I try to remember what I was feeling that night, it's just a melange of fleeting thoughts, unsettling feelings, and strange sensations. But I do remember one thing. I had lost him in more ways than one. He was off talking to someone else -- wherever he was didn't matter to me; I had lost track. I had lost track of time as well. It may have been midnight or 4 a.m. I was cold and sitting next to the fire, holding the hand of a near-stranger. I had been talking for hours and hours, and wasn't stopping any time in the foreseeable future. I gazed into the orange flames. Deep within the fire a log was slowly burning. As pieces of the wood burned, I saw within the wood what looked like several tiny villages of houses, flames licking their roofs and walls, smoke pouring from the tiny windows of the tiny houses that made up the tiny villages.

I pointed out the village to the near-stranger who sat next to me. He said something back to me, but I have no recollection of what it was. What I do recall was an urge to wrap my arms around him and tell him that everything would be all right and that he would be happy again some day. My intuition was telling me that the person beside me was as deeply unhappy and lost feeling as I was. Instead, I simply told him that I had no soul and no spirit. He didn't respond and I went back to watching the fire.

I feel that way again, though. Not unhappy, but like my spirit is gone. I've stopped caring and simply can't be bothered with such tawdry things as love. I work and I come home and I socialize with friends. But there's a strange empty feeling once more. No one ever realizes it, no one intuits it. I've become ambivalent towards people in general and don't think about the odd, disquieting emptiness. But on those rare occasions that I do, I simply close my eyes and see smoke swirling about the little burning villages.