14 January, 2002 - 2:19 a.m.

.. and as I stepped lightly out of my car with a small, hopeful smile playing on my face - a tiny, singular drop of rain fell onto my nose.

And I found myself feeling content.

*****

Sorry for that rather backwards beginning, but I had the words swimming around in my head and just had to put them down quick smart before they escaped into the fathomless pit that is my bedroom with its all too comfortable bed, and its all too comfortable teddybear asking to be cuddled, and well .. yeah.

So .. the events that unfurled this evening. Nothing worthy of oodles of excitement if you're not me, I guess. But if you are (which, let me state once again for the record that you're not) then, like, it was tres cool.

Perhaps I'm making it out to be too much of anything. And in all honesty, that's more of a certainty than most other things in my life are at the moment. However, just for the purpose of this entry, allow me to let you in on how I perceived things, and try and illustrate my jumble of feelings in as few words as possible so as not to bore you to death with unnecessary details.

Like now, for instance :P

My good friend from Seattle is due to leave later on today, and so I called up earlier this evening to see if I could scam an hour of his time tonight. He said that of course he wanted to see me, but that it was hard to see how it could work out well seeing as he-who-won't-speak-to-me was still kind of not speaking to me (hence the alias -logic, pfft.)

So I did the .. proper? polite? I don't know what to call it, but I asked to speak to him for a moment, and proceeded to verify with him that it was okay if I nabbed a moment with our friend from Seattle. He said yeah, and that was it. Like I said, not particularly nail biting stuff.

We hung up an hour later having organised for me to go around there at about 11pm, allowing us to spend about an hour and a half together before I would take second priority to a football match which was airing on foxtel. I think the 49'ers were playing, thus ruling my appeal out completely :P Now had it been a hockey match and the Stars were playing .. my existence probably wouldn't have been noted at all - fullstop, end of story, period, et al.

Honestly. Males. Pfft.

I arrive and say hi to he-who-won't-speak-to-me and his family members as I pass through the main family area, and then Seattle guy and I plonk ourselves down in the backyard and start talking about this and that .. the 90 minutes flies by, and before I know it, I'm standing up, dusting off my backside, and moving back toward the house to say a final goodbye and leave.

Now all the while that we'd been sitting out there in the semi dark garden with the fairylights twinkling around us and the reflections bouncing off the water from the pool, he-who-won't-speak-to-me passed my line of vision a couple of times .. and oh, how it ached. How much I longed to have him sitting there with us, laughing and joking as we used to do. But instead I had this .. spectre of a failed friendship hovering on my shoulder. Sneering at me. Making me feel even more helpless than before.

The whole "so near, and yet so far" never rang as true to me.

And then, out of nowhere - well, no, I lie .. - I mean, I've been wanting to sit down and have a word with he-who-won't-speak-to-me for ages now, but knowing him the way I do I knew that he wasn't quite prepared to listen to anything I had to say. But over three months have lapsed now, and I'm thinking that maybe there's a chance that he will want to speak to me. To catch up. General chitchat and suchlike.

So I'm standing in a room off to the side of the main tv area with my friend, and glance at him enquiringly. He looks at me, and without a single word passing between us gives me a gentle nod of encouragement. Go talk to him, his eyes say. you know you want to. I think the apprehension I felt inside must have showed on my face, because he started in on how he knew that he did want to speak to me, but that I would have to show that I was a big enough person to make that first move. With another encouraging look, he gave me a gentle nudge in the direction of the tv room.

With much shuffling of feet and wringing of hands, I approach the couch where he was sitting.

"Hi .."

.. yadda yadda yadda. I won't fill you in on all the boring details (too late, heh) but we went outside and talked for about an hour. I won't lie and say that there wasn't some strain, but hey, what can you really expect? I don't think I could have imagined it going any better, actually. And so when he motioned that he wanted to go back inside to the game (which he'd missed the beginning of while we were talking :**) I felt calm and .. well, glad that we'd talked.

The air hasn't been cleared indefinitely, and the ongoing saga between he and I is far from over, but for that short period of time while we were talking .. it's probably something that I won't forget anytime too soon. Not because anything completely mind-altering was said, but for the sheer fact that the code of silence between us had finally been broken.

Maybe it's the first step in a better direction. Maybe it hasn't changed a thing. I don't really know, and I daren't hazard a guess.

Yes. No. Maybe so.