This is kind of romantic and sad too perhaps. Then again, it mirrors my 'ideals' not yours. We are here just for that fleeting moment, trying our best to make what sense we can of living, some of us dying before we even get the chance. But we all try, in our own way. So before you condemn mine, take a good long hard look on your own values. There are no winners in life, or perhaps, we all are.

"Don't disappear again." I couldn't hold it in.

The first time I saw her was at night, well in the evening to be precise, but it was autumn and darkness hits early then, getting into her mini-van. You know, looking like the big ones, just so much smaller. I don't really know what it was that took my breath away, a brown skinned girl with a nicely rounded body but not spectacular in any way. But I looked and she must have noticed it from her car because as I walked in she followed me in, me unknowing. There are several reasons to why I'm still not sure that it was me she followed, first of all, I'm no Adonis, and I'm not that young either. And girls and me? don't be preposterous.

But, as I saw her pass me I sort of clicked my tongue, I mean whistling, inside a store? Nah, but she deserved something, and a 'click' is okay. I sort of hoped to see her again in the paying queue as I went about getting my stuff, but as I stood there trying to choose between all those different brands of cat food, guessing what that coddled feline gourmet craved today. Yeah, I can swear to that damned cat costing more in daily consumption than myself.

Anyway, she turned around coming back, right up my alley of goods sort of. And as she passed me I looked at her and her at me. She had lovely warm golden brown eyes, dancing with laughter and curiosity as she looked at me, and I tried my damned best to present that allusion of a highly intelligent, sensitive type of guy, independently wealthy with lots and lots of good humour, and in reality so much taller than I might look.

I still don't know if she wanted to check me up, or if it was just me wishing that she was? Well, you're free to guess. But I'm shy when it comes to those encounters, especially when it comes to catch that fleeting moment, so I just let her pass. Carpe diem isn't really my sort of thing. And no, I don't know why I'm like that and all to often I hate it, like this time too, as I only could stand there mutely watching her pass me by, disappearing like that sweet ship in the night

Three weeks went past, me trying to spot her every time I went out, creating all sorts of possible scenarios in my mind, if I now ever would meet her again? In vain searching for that perfect pick up line, the one that would make her realize that I was the one for her. But I got stuck every time I came to presenting my future prospects for her, finding that a snowball in hell had a better chance than me. Me, soon hitting fifty and no money, just trying to bounce back from a lot of things gone really, really bonebreakingly, bad.

The only thing that held me up was my guitar, hell, it wasn't even mine. The guitar I had now was my brothers, lent to me as he knew that I loved to play, he wanted to give it too me as he had four more but I couldn't take it. I had left all things I had in this world in my former apartment as I walked away from it, including a beautiful steel stringed guitar with the sweetest blues sound you've ever heard, my daughters wooden cut of my sailing boat, my books and clothes, all the way down to my other love in life, my Suzuki RF 900, possibly still chained outside.

All memories of my life lying at some garbage dump by now, spread for the winds, with creditors looking for me, yeah, I didn't have money for those last months rental, and I didn't care either, I stopped caring a long time ago. But then again, I hadn't planed on living this long either. Thinking of it I realized that I wouldn't even be able to pay that cup of coffee for her, if I now would have dared to ask her out.

I had come out from a sixteen years relation to that empty apartment. Sixteen years with a woman that I still don't find the proper words to describe. In one way one of the few I ever learnt to respect and love, in other ways one of the most treacherous persons I've ever meet, but wasn't it Shakespeare that wrote 'when in love and war?' Walking away from it all, kids, my dog and cat, taking nothing with me, not wanting to disturb my former family's tranquillity, she had cunningly planned the break-up to when the kids were away. And then trying to build that new life, ah forget that, burying my self eight more years in a work I didn't care for is more like it. Always ready and happy for that overtime, working day and night, the first years crying, it coming without forewarning and with me not able to control it, yeah, I hated it.

I don't remember me crying before that time, I always felt it was giving people more information than they needed, so I had early on taught myself not to give in to such. But the crying I did after the separation must have gone a far way filling up that hole. Yeah, that separation made me a real danger on the road, and as I told you, crying and me found us a real tight relation those years.

I'd read all those macho stories on the net and at times I felt the allure of them too, loading that gun and blowing the bitch and her new man out of their shoes and life's. But hell, we had two kids together and she was still a better mom than me. I wasn't the mothering type, and the way I had grown up I didn't really felt like a role model for anyone. But it had still cost me my kid's, I couldn't be there as I had dreamt too, once, not in their normal daily life's. And that had been my strongest dream once.

And it was a promise made, right? After all, I had told her once that if she ever felt it, or us, wrong she just had to tell me and I would walk. And she was right, I didn't own her. Maybe that was the problem. That time I had tried to tell her how I felt, so long ago, she had reacted very strongly telling me that nobody could own anyone. I still don't know the answer to that one, but I knew that if I ever found anyone again I would want her to want to own me as strongly as I would want to own her. And if that feeling wasn't there? Well, once burned?

To make it right for once, raising a family, letting them grow up at the same place, making sure they still would have their friends around them as they grew up. Not the money, never the money. But as it was now? Well, when my son found himself caught between go sailing with me or celebrate his mother's birthday he chose the later. Not that I held it against him, not then and not now, after all she was his mom and I had been reduced to the man delivering money. A part time daddy, but it hurt more than I can tell you, just the same. I emptied a bottle of single malt that same evening trying to forget the phone call, all on my own, almost breaking my leg when I needed to get of the boat in the dark to take a piss later.

And that boat trip was somehow the end of me and my bloodbrothers friendship too. We both owned that boat, it had been my bloodbrothers grandpas, the last and biggest he ever built. I had jumped in with money as my friend thought he would need to sell it, saying that I wanted to buy it. Well, maybe I did, but I also wanted to share it with him, and him not to lose it, and share we did, and no, I never paid the full amount, don't know why as I could afford it. Maybe it was me making sure that he still would feel it was his, but we shared all costs for it as well as me arranging transportations etc. We had a lot of fun with it over the years, and my kids liked it too.

It was a very fast one, built for competing, with more layers to its hull than was really needed as his grandpa wanted it sturdy. It also had double rudders making it able to turn on a dime. And fast, lovingly endearingly fast, thirty feet of full-blooded exhilaration. But some time later he sold it, suddenly seeing it as his, and only his. Well, I had told him that it was, so I didn't complain, especially as he had met his lady love and needed the money. Never the less, looking back at it now, I find it a sign of things to come.

So I just stopped everything, ever so slowly letting my life petering out. And in the end I stopped working, living on what I had put away, enough for a year and some. I travelled too, being away for the winters so that nobody would disturb me with my idiotic birthday, I had the bad luck to be born at Christmas day. But it's true what they say, wherever you go you take yourself with you. I was like that time bomb, the fuse burning, readying to go off.

It all came to a head when I found myself getting stringed up by my oldest friend, my own bloodbrother, playing me against some other guy in some weird threesome for who was the 'best friend'. And no, not gay in any way, at last not me, and as he had a wife? It was one of the weirdest things I've ever experienced. My friend somehow still expecting me to 'fight it out' in some strange way, to prove some strange 'worthiness of friendship?'