It's hard to say good-bye to those youthful delusions of poetry. Those moments, as a kid, when you sat in the comfortable crook of a tree root and waited to see an elf or cupped a firefly in your hands one hot August and felt its precious buzz, like the little mindless thing was speaking to you. When you laid back and looked deeply into the sky and thought about infinity and your little heart leapt with possibility. And that feeling came up again when you . . . when we . . . try to build relationships that may be based on youthful idealism and not mutual respect. Like trying to fit your heart into a story that it just wasn't built for. Those love objects that drive you crazy, those super-high-styled ambitions you would never be able to achieve. And if these desperate desires aren't acknowledged through therapy or self-work or yoga or Pookalan, then those outsized dreams bellow out of control and it becomes your atmosphere, you know?

Then, you move to the city, you hope for magic and not adult goals, right? You see the snow quieting a busy street, or the ghostly grind of trash trucks at five in the morning, or you stand on a rooftop at night, looking at the loving throb of lights below. And you feel as if there was somebody winking at you from somewhere? That soon, some avuncular Gepetto will grace you with animated life. That all the goofy swells of hope you've had since you were a kid will be unified with the real and glorious present moment, and you will feel happy, and find that perfect person to take you into his or her arms.

But then, that it doesn't happen, you have that horrible painful moment of realization that all your attempts (with boyfriends or Internet dates or whatever) were a wasted series of synapses in your brain. A complex net of electrical currents. Huge inefficient super-structure. And then with that realization all the signs and symbols begin to flake away like aged paintings.