My Crimson Hexagon

For about another half an hour it is going to be the first day of the year, of 2004, so...
Well, today I had to say goodbye to Anna for awhile. She will be in D.C. for three months, completing her final stretch toward becoming journalist. I gave her about fifty kisses and said some clever stuff, but when someone you love leaves for awhile you have to say goodbye to them every day that they're not with you. I like to think that it's noble to understand that two people will be separated by great distance from time to time, but I know such stoicism won't make the blankets rise and fall with her breath, nor will it play strip poker with me.
We took some pictures of ourselves this morning with her new camera. In one of them she is strikingly serene and beautiful. Maybe it is the gentle smile just behind a quieted expression she wears, as if just then coming to terms with a profound understanding of the clockwork of the universe. It’s a look I've never caught on her before. I wonder that the expressions on our faces are a way to differentiate between consecutive moments- that they are directed nigh imperceptibly to reflect an undulating soup that is our character by our hearts so multi-faceted such moments can be as different from one another as the people on a subway car, and sometimes only the shrewd, quick eye of the camera can capture a state of being that may wash over us like waves from a rare wind.
But anyway, by the time I see her again, which I think will be at the end of March, hopefully I will have huge muscles and a beard like a christmas wreath, and she will have gained two hundred pounds and gotten some religious tattoos. Man, that would be nuts.