september 15, 2001. I've been thinking about being single lately. No, not in the sense of throwing aside the Boy & joining the swinging Wolfville social scene. More like pondering the difference between me and the single friends with whom I cavorted a few weeks back. Being back in Toronto by myself almost made me feel single again: suddenly I was on vacation from a life consciously lived in tandem. I hung around single people with single-people-problems and single-people-homes, and I moved in single-people-patterns of dance & drink & telephone & smoke & food. I guess I felt a thinning of the membrane that separates me from the single life, and it made me wonder what I would do if I were suddenly like the majority of my friends, i.e. single. Q once said to the Boy that one of the biggest benefits to being married is that you can turn off the mate-gathering segments of the brain and redirect those neurons to other pursuits. Usually compatibility improves over time with deepened understanding, meaning that it's easier to be happy because happiness is less of a chance operation when someone really knows you. But you give up excitement - at least the rawest, most visceral form of excitement, the kind where you're both deadly afraid and irresistibly attracted to the chain of unfolding events. And sometimes, despite myself, I find that I wish for instability and change because I'm deathly afraid that the rest of my life leads downhill from the months when I was drunken with love for the Boy. "it was the grandest day of my...youth." - george, who's afraid of virginia woolf? this time 3 years ago: I swallowed my fatigue, put on some lipstick & shoved my keys in my pocket.