focusing/not focusing. school and such is dragging (god, i can't spell anything these days) on me. making me tired and making me hate it. i spent this evening in the bar, trying to explain the difficulty of relationships to someone who is but five months into theirs, while i myself am inching my way towards three years of marriage. somehow i become incredibly articulate explaining the need to find commonalities in a sea of lost passions. explaining how it will always be hard and that perhaps you can only hope that the firsts of childbirth and rearing will provide you with the emotional excitement you once seeked in one-night-stands and the freshness of new relationships. how you must find the spaces where you work with your significant other, however cramped and slender they might seem. how you must remember and rediscover the reasons you decided to be where you are. why is it that i decided so many years ago to be with jon? what was it that stuck me like glue to him, so long ago (and yet we are "supposed" to be in our "honeymoon stage" even still)? what was it that made me know so thoroughly, so inside and out that he was the one for me, that he was the person for me to share my life with? and how could i ever imagine letting that go? i told erik tonight that it was about how we work, how our relationship has extended beyond sex and passion into the familial, that we have found, somewhere outside of ourselves, a way of reconciling the mundane with our passions and our goals. that we are still, to this very second, finding that. i explained to erik that jon and i are searching in nooks and in crannies for that something that holds us together - that we don't always understand what it is or how it affects us. that we learn daily how to love one another and how to go on with one another and how to replace the emotional thrills of the former newness of our relationship with something that is somehow more important, though we haven't the language to explain it, though we are born without the ability to articulate it. we understand somehow that what we have is different from what every other long-term realtionship has. we understand that the sequence of experience differentiates us from everyone else on the planet, but that there is a commanality there - the commanality of searching deep within ourselves for our faith - what can be described as nothing besides faith - in one another and in ourselves and in our relationship and our interraction with one another. we have somehow found faith, even within the constraints of our deep-seated atheism, we have found faith, finally, in our relationship. so we know that beyond everything, beyond ourselves even, we have a commitment that outweighs our psychological desire for that which is new and stark and striking and beautiful. we have found a new realm of understanding - a new way to understand and reconcile ourselves, as both individuals and as a couple, to that which is emotionally stirring and resonant. we create and find new ways of seeing each other and ourselves within the constraints of a partnership, within the hope for a future.

all this, regardless of my having drunk four to five beers and my tiny weight of ninety-eight pounds.