the words “title” and “titular” are very close relatives, duh

Did I mention here that the flight’s have been booked for me to go down to visit with Shannon?

‘Cause they have.

I’m departing at 2:05 PM on February 11th to go down to her neck of the woods in North Carolina, and my return flight is February 15th at 12:25 PM.  It’s only 4ish days, but we’ve known each other for over twenty-four years, we just haven’t seen each other in-person since our frowned-upon-by-her-actual-date dance at our senior prom (and maybe after that, too, I forget when our prom was in relation to the end of the school year), and we’ve been talking so much on the phone that I feel like I’ve had her in the apartment with me for the past month-and-four-days.

I remember dancing closely with her at our prom because her red hair smelled amazing like girl-hair does, and she was the one pressing our bodies together.  We’d always be chatty at our lunch/study halls and I know she had the hots for me and wanted me to ask her to prom, but I was so very broken back then and had a gnarly brain tumor gumming up my mojo, and she was always dating a guy friend of mine and I was too chicken-shit to shake our friend group’s world up in any way.

As my brother liked to put it, “Jake had no balls.”

Well a lot of life has gone on since then.  I survived all of my brain shtuff, and had enough of a marriage to give me an arsenal of inerpersonal skills and make an incredible almost-teenager, and now it’s time to see what other kinds of awesomeness I can whip up with my time here on this big, wet rock.  I think I’ve grown the balls.

That’s such a gross thing to say, I’m sorry.

I guess I just mean I’m not scared of anything anymore, and this is all just about being patient and enjoying the fact that there’s somebody else around that wants to share space with me.  I am still not jumping to any conclusions about what’s going on, even if it seems like I am by writing about it all so much, but this is just how I process situations and feelings like this.

Pardon me if I’ve already written about any of this, I’m just letting my fingers do the wading through my stream of consciousness.

Yo Wally Hey Hey!