From my actual journal:

It is 3:22 in the morning and she has just gone to bed. I often wonder if she has taken the liberty of reading these journal entries of mine. She could very easily do this, as she has the backup hard drive and consequently has full access to all of my documents. She knows that I journal and that within the confines of this document (do pixilated margins count as confines?), I discharge even my most personal, most sublime and polluted thoughts. I wonder how she feels, sitting with that knowledge while I am safely at work slaving away on someone’s sprawling index, while she is alone, idly completing online puzzles on my computer because her internet does not work and I out of pity gave her unrestricted access. This trust is so vast and inexorable; it is the intoxicated trust that comes with meaningful relationships… a contented gleam in its eye and the faintest aroma of love on its breath. It is a trust that abides, subsists on subtle reassurances but is not without certain suspicions. I often wonder, but I do not move myself to worry.

The Fourth of July fireworks show downtown was not at all what I imagined it would be. I had decided that it was going to be a series fantastic and chaotic explosions raining over a deep purple sky, the upturned innocent faces of our liberal citizens awed and moving underneath. Instead, we couldn’t find the location precisely and ended up watching them from the other side of a highway, about three miles away from the bridge upon which they were being set off. Cars zoomed casually by and drowned out the distant spectacle, and the atmosphere, the buzz of celebration was utterly absent, though a crowd of people had formed near where we were standing, no doubt experiencing similar disappointment. An Asian man on the other side of her held his three year old son up in the air so that he could be amazed, even from afar, at the shimmering lights and the muted cracks that wracked the sky. He put the boy on his shoulders and bounced him. Everything was new for the boy. He could not, I suspect, remember having seen a similar show the year before, nor would he remember this one next year. Perhaps, it occurred to me, that is why kids retain their sunny dispositions with such ease – they have not yet lost the ability to let go of occurrences, to forget so completely those things, pleasant or not, that befell them yesterday, last month, or last year. Few events are solidified; they are only left with general impressions and schemas.

The Fourth of July fireworks show in sum was nothing more than an event. It filled our schedules as we attempted to escape the apartment full of beetles. One will do anything to avoid coming home to an infested apartment, and if it means watching fireworks on the wrong side of a highway, three miles away from the hub of the party, then so be it. She was there, however, and I was still marginally content. I felt a swelling affection for her during the finale and wished desperately that I could lean in to kiss her cheek (at least that, for god’s sake), but there was the watchful public shuffling around us. Neither of us has any desire to make ourselves more of a spectacle than the fireworks in the distant sky, and like walking stick insects, we crave the detached inconspicuousness of disguise. In open spaces populated by strangers, we are close friends, enjoying each other’s company, and nothing more. We dare to sneak kisses in the elevator, or squeeze each other’s hand on the bus sometimes, but “making a scene” as it were is an entirely different matter.

As it is now 3:50 in the morning you can imagine that I’ve been stopping frequently while writing to contemplate things. It is impossible to tell what things, precisely; they drift by so swiftly, without name or definite shape. Emotions are more readily pinned down. I am anticipating something and cannot tell what. Sometimes I feel there is no one who walks among the majestic trees and stones of this planet that houses so many anxious visitors in her mind as I. They pile in, these foreigners, one by one, directionless, having come from horrible places, without announcement or any intent of going on their way.