It's probably been about three years since I've found this place. It's embarrassing to find that I return every once and again -- when it's cold or boring outside, when I don't know why I'm in my parents' house, when I wish I were three years younger -- but I suppose that's for the even more embarrassing reason that several important events in my life have transpired through this convoluted, high-profile, and yet completely negligible medium.

I will not be relating them here, even though that is where they belong, on display for one to three friends, one to four casual acquaintances, and as many as two complete strangers to evaluate within the lameness of the context I provide. Communication is so much more linear and thematic when we think we're being documented for posterity.

Whatever it was that happened here -- it still makes my stomach drop a little. A lot. People about whom I know nothing have legendary, haunting memories; it would not shock me to hear that they matter more to me now than they matter to the people who were directly affected by them at the time. Larger-than-stupid-teenage-life strangers whose faces in my imagination are nothing at all like the faces I later learned to place with those names. Tragedies that seem more real when they happen to writers of fiction. Little sister syndrome. A disinterest in the intensity of one's own reality. A devotion to other people's. A devotion to other people.

I hope, one day, many years from now, to return, grateful, humbler, wiser, and exceedingly embarrassed at how juvenile and naive this post was.

Until then.