The Flag, a Sky-Blue Field with a Centre Charge of a Silver Book Under Crossed Pens (12/15/08 Monday)

It's a relief to be over Julie. The precise point at which it happened was at the latest coffee shop encounter, when she said she hadn't read much of the blog but had read "enough" to find me obsessive. Yes, she was one of those readers. Right then, the scales that had clung so tenaciously to my eyes finally dropped off, the mystery of Julie was not so much solved as dissolved, as a cloud--just a wisp of my imagination--the subtlety, the depth now sharply outlined and easily plumbed: challenge over. No challenge = no fun = no attraction. But I'm being a bit too easily petty. I have not plumbed Julie's depths, and I don't pretend to even have scratched the surface, but I've scratched enough to know there's no value in digging further.

I reread a few weeks back and couldn't find this obsessive monster. It's one thing being over Julie, another to live with an unfair and derogatory label. I wake with a heart racing with anger. The chip on my shoulder grows heavier daily. I've lost a lot of weight I could ill afford to lose. I've been constantly hungry but not eager to eat. Finally, this week, I had a hamburger, twice, after several months without read meat. I'm still hungry, alway hungry.

It's time to move on, and I've set the ball rolling--and this time it's not a downhill snowball. Nor is it a Sisyphean rock. Shame I can't talk about it yet, given the gossip's disregard for propriety. Perhaps you can ask Tammy out to lunch, pump her as you did Julie last Wednesday.) Ask me, and I'll tell you--or you can just make something up; it will be a better story. Do the same with the three days I've taken off. Forget that I planned this a month ago. As a mental health break it's a week late but still welcome. Call it what you want. I know the truth.

I make a conspicuous point of still writing at work. It's important to show I'm not cowed. Even if I don't write in it I keep it before me, open, on the table before me at lunch in the breakroom. It is a symbol now.