It isn't that my life is suddenly full of puppies and sunshine or anything. I mean mostly, my life is still rather solitary and empty -- exactly as I've strived to make it. I mean, I interact with people all the time but...

Honestly, I feel as if a huge weight has been removed from me, and I think I've a good idea of what it was. In part, it was undoubtedly just the looming unpleasantness of somehow finally disentangling myself from GBF with a minimum of drama. But having accomplished that, I think I can feel where the overwhelming imperative to resolve this stuff came from.

Basically, I like that I'm pretty much self-contained now. Sure, you can meet me and talk with me and even get into very heated, personal, and revealing conversations with me. If you're a girl and you've any charm to you whatsoever, I may even share in physical affection with you.

But let us not get confused: Because I show you all of my heart and mind in this moment does not mean that you know my heart and mind. And I believe this is the weight finally taken away from me. The weight and responsibility of an infinite variety of Close Friends all of whom are more certain of who I am than I could ever argue is healthy, all with their particular expectations of what that person I'm supposed to be is supposed to do, and how I'm meant to interact with them.

You see, I am aware that my having said or done something at a particular time in a particular place doesn't necessarily mean you really understood me even then. So the longer your list how I've been in the past gets, the more you'll try to use it to predict what I do in the future. But I never made any promises you were getting an accurate picture or even, for that matter, that I was presenting one. So how should I accept being held to standards that are ultimately arbitrary?

So it's weird, because I'm saying that I rather like that I feel like I'm really and truly alone right now. I can meet people and, if I wish tell them of my triumphs and losses in the past, my hopes for the future, and of anything at all else I might feel relevent to the moment. But I have not a friend, girlfriend, wife or lover ... not a college friend, childhood friend, family friend, or best friend to lend commentary to my tale. I could explain to you that I've had these things in the past, I could even offer my best understanding of why I no longer have each one now ... but what I can't offer are the relationships that are meant, societally, to validate my history.

Nope, sorry. It's funny, in all actuality today the people who could claim to know me best are also people who don't know my name or what I look like. And really, I think that's most fitting. The more we know of each other, the more we think we really know, and the more we're probably wrong.

Of course, the truly fun thing about all of this is that, feeling free and untangled from the mess of human relationships that's pretty much all of our birthright, I really fondly anticipate getting sucked right back in to it. Which is probably a good thing, as it's probably inevitable. In any event, I've been quite reminded of that weird mix of isolation and anticipation I've felt in the past when I moved to a completely new city, when everything was new and only surface-deep to me and I was just the same to everything else. I dunno, I guess I almost feel like we pay more attention, give more respect to those things that we don't assume to know, as opposed to those we take for granted.

Rule of Thumb: When you really feel pretty sure you know exactly what's going on with a person, you probably have absolutely no idea what it's like to be them.