Looking back at journals from two or three years back moves me to rapture. I can't believe I went through these things—and in this sequence! How did I survive? Often I look back on a time as idyllic, yet I wrote at the time like things were miserable. This means, for sure, that when things seem bad, they're more fun than they seem. You remember the good things, and the learning experiences; you forget about the stresses. Old Hemingway says, trying to be deep for once, "I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."

2005 was a big year for me. Some amazing things came into my life. And through calendar trickery, nothing left my life until early 2006. Then everything came apart and left hiss and steam.

In March 2005 I went to Santa Cruz to play Ultimate Frisbee with my college team, and all the old rivalries were gone and I played well and the weather was good and you could see the ocean from the fields and we had a great time playing. A few days later I put in a grad-school application to a long-shot school called Edinburgh on the other side of the world. Next I had a shallow relationship and got accepted to Edinburgh. At the end of May I recorded a vivid, prescient dream of a woman I loved in friendship, loved in a distant, delayed, and hopeful way, and later that year she delighted and sustained me and I had the chance to love her properly, to show her what she meant to me and how we could spend our lives together in blissful contentment. But I bollixed that, or she did or somebody did. That's why in February, 2006, something really good left my life and left an emptiness that has yet to be replaced.

I worried about so many things that were good things nonetheless. I'm so grateful to myself for keeping a record, for sending signals to the future me, so that I can later, somewhat, understand.