I've been doing quite a bit of socializing lately, mostly in groups. And I think that, although I do enjoy the activities that I do, I just plain like hanging out with people one at a time better. People act differently when they are with one other person then they do when they are with several. Go figure.

In all the years that I've held full time jobs, I've never gotten a review until now. I got my first review earlier this week. Interestingly enough, the things that my boss thinks that I'm best at are things that would do me well in most jobs, and have nothing much to do with systems administration.

The psych class that I was taking is over. Now I have my Sundays back again, and more free time. I think I'll take another class next semester.

Rock Soup has a high ceiling; it used to be a bank. Most of it's bankness is gone now, replaced by burnt orange walls and laquered tables. The music is an African Carribean band of four, but only one of them is black. The guitar picking, cabasa griding, and melody block out the dinner conversation din. My hot chocolate arrives and the thought of it makes me warmer, but it doesn't chase away the chill.

Bright music and the boisterous people only contrast my mood. I want someone to sit with me and not speak. An earlier conversation today about existentialism makes me abandon the idea of someone sitting next to me being connected. Aloneness in the end cannot be escaped.

Spring 1993

Easels line the drawing room upstairs in the art center, circling Toni and I. Toni runs through the end of her one woman show. In four years here, I've never been in the drawing room; the smell of charcoal is unfamiliar. The end of the script is unfamiliar. Toni has been avoiding it.

Toni reaches the scene at the end where she screams, where her voice enters her. The air stops. Toni stands in the center of the room, unevenly lit by the track lighting; she inhales, and then lets it out. The sound shatters me. It's not a scream, it's the air blasting apart and rearranging itself, it's all the blackness in the night sky concentrated into a sliver of glass and stuck into my vein, it's the feeling of inhaling ice, it's the possibility of everything and of nothing colliding. It is every scrap of rage, frustration, fear, and anger Toni has ever felt. It is her sister being raped. It is her father leaving. It is the bullet entering Galen's chest.

Corrina walks into the room.

Toni is crouched on the floor, arms wrapped around her skinny black frame, doubled over. I'm standing, rooted, staring at Toni, holding in me everything she has emptied out of her with the sound. Corrina looks at Toni, then looks at me, and looks back at Toni. The lights flicker in and out. The soundless vibrations slip out of the drawing room, down the hall to the theater, and pool in the spaces left empty by Galen's death.