And the band played on...

In the grand tradition of all short timers...I was leaving in a week, well damnit I'm going today.

Instead of Friday, yesterday was Sporty's last day at our job. She's moving away (I might not have mentioned that) to get her new business started, and I'm left here to pick up the pieces of my soul and figure where to go from here.

We spent a last few minutes in the office as she set up my new blackberry to make sure we can IM each other, and that I had all her information.

In typical fashion, a day late and dollar short, I sent her this missive last night:

My time grows short.

Not my lifetime, for with the genes fate has granted me and with miracles of modern technology barring my own reckless stupidity I'm going to see the other side of ancient. That time is long in coming and promises long periods of the mundane punctuated by frequent bouts of adventure by accident and excitement in short intense binges.

No, something more important grows close to it's end. The end of a dream.

I don't think I have ever clicked better with any woman I have ever met. She's smart, she's funny, she's passionate and she gets me on so many levels. I have seen myself spending years with her. She is the first woman I have ever seriously considered asking to marry me. We became a term I used in describing things. She shared herself with me. She counted on me and expected things from me. And despite my previous hedonistic nature, that feeling of being needed felt nice.

And now that is coming to an end.

She says I didn't do anything wrong, but I believe I was born a few years too early, or wasn't expressive enough or a shade less aggressive than the next man, and as such this great experience that I used to thank god for in the dark of the night is now fast approaching a conclusion I thought might not come for forty or more years. I want to say I wish I had done this or said that, but that might have changed that delicious flavor of what we were. Sometimes the two ships passing in the night actually do pass.

But I still love her. And I always will.

I never learned how to stop caring for someone. I've seen it as a neat trick in others, how they are able to care for people one day and then have a argument or disagreement and suddenly somehow discard those feelings as though they no longer fit or have become toxic. I have never been able to do that. I don't know if I would be better or worse if I could, but for this last of the romantics love is forever. Come what may. I eventually mentally come to a working understanding of how things are when the feelings I want to share are unrequited, but it will only be that I've figured out how to suppressed my emotion. They'll still be there, shifting and breathing underneath a calm carefully constructed countenance.

And the world will go on.

I mean, I have notes and scribbles of half though ideas I haven't looked at in years that I can't bring myself to get rid of, so a living breathing person whom I adore and care for, sometimes more than I cared for myself, and who shows concern for me, well her moving on to the next part of their life wasn't going to devolve me into a "who's next" or a "just let it go situation." She is not replaceable. I am her friend because I was her friend, because it was the only way to really love someone is to like them first. And thus we existed as more than friends but less than lovers.

I'll still feel the same even if... even if her future plays out without me, to put in a way I can write with getting emotional.

Soon I will awake from this wondrous dream I called my life for the past few years. I could no more ask her to not go than I could stop being concerned for her. As long as she is happy I will figure something out. A selfless concern that borders on the silly I realize, but that is me. As for what awaits me in the world I know not, but it will be returning to the shadows from the sunshine. The solo hedonism that I return to has lost it's appeal. She changed me.

It's something I probably should have sent or should have said years ago. But the old lack of communication skills in this field do not serve me well.

Her reply is that she's speechless, but that we're friends to the end.

Exactly. She had no idea.

And the band....played on.