sometimes we send messages to those we didn't mean

to receive such words, emotions, threads of meaning in our little, carefully plotted knots.

like living in a house where most of the mail comes addressed to people you assume lived there before yourself.

like living with roommates and trying to guess from the dried crusty colors on bowls and knives which one ate what.

(eventually all of our furniture becomes extensions of our selves.)

the messages we compose to the ones living in graves are perhaps the most easy to deliver, and the most difficult to compose. of course there's the knowledge of the decomposition of the meaning between thought and send, and then there's the obvious --- i am only talking to myself if the person i love is no longer physically able to hear these thoughts?

but if they were alive, would they really hear? would they take the time laid into the pauses between vowels and punctuation to get the sense our little language is tooled to deliver? that's why dead words -- songs, poems, emails never sent --- are perhaps the best words. they can be called up at any time, quoted, referenced, by the individual attempting to re-compose, to re-connect. but these words too, like the people to whom they are referents, also live in a time and place of introductory experience that has already passed. ... what i write here is never meant to be sent to anyone. that is why it lives in a world of strangers with back buttons and search capabilities. a wide world of access means that those meant to hear are rendered silent by the cacophony of software traveling pairs of eyes to a one-way conversation with a mirror image that can't see the black beyond the glass.

too many and too few. that is all i could ever give to you.