Goodbyes

They are never easy things. As I sit here, 2330 hrs, in the death of the year, I am ready to say my goodbyes to the year, to the things it meant, and to the things that I leave forever behind with it. So, Goodbye, 2005. This nameless, rootless decade is halfway done, now, and it has brought me no farther than where I started, after all. Goodbye, Lafayette, I fear that I will never see you again, and I am awakening to what that is to mean to me, only now, in cold december, 700 miles away. Goodbye, Barbara; goodbye Carey; Goodbye Jason, and all the other names that might so easily fall from me. Let me leave them here, at last, in this ethereal realm of ones and zeroes, so fitting a repose for such a dreamlike year. Let it contain you, for I can no more; and let this be my time capsule to no one, never to be unearthed, as it will never know the soil. I tried to say goodbye. I fought the good fight. It is, after all, the only thing that I do well. So to all of it, and all of you; So long.