I was just rereading some old emails... I bet you don't know that I quasi fell in love with this person who I've never met, who was living in L.A. until recently. We started corresponding while I was in Thailand and by March we were having 6 hour phone conversations. Then he was offered a position at a theater in Italy and just like that, any chance I had to meet him was gone. Or at least postponed for a year or more. I can't think that far in the future. I don't really know what I thought was going to happen, we certainly didn't talk like we were "in love" or anything, but I felt we had a strong enough connection that it was worth at least meeting in person.

He left for Italy about two months ago for a trial period with this theater. My heroin use didn't start then, but it increased. Then he wrote to tell me he'd be staying in Italy indefinitely, about a month ago, just when I started doing it every day. I didn't notice these correlations until just now when I was rereading his emails. I didn't see any connection at the time.

But I wonder if my relapse was related to the strange sense of loss I felt, for this person I've never even seen, I've barely even seen a clear photo of him. Rereading our emails, I realized that I miss him. I wonder how he's doing in Italy.

I was hoping that understanding that -- my unrecognized sense of loss when he left -- could help me move on a little, and be nicer to myself about relapsing. I don't have to repeatedly tell myself what an idiot I am, all day long. It's unnecessary to be so cruel to myself. I just made a mistake and now I'm trying to do better and maybe there were outside factors that I wasn't even aware of, that I need to recognize, and heal from.

I've been clean for five days.

So today I met Donna at Crema and we talked over coffee for a long time, like three hours. It improved my mood so much. At first I was still depressed but after a while I started to feel like myself again. If I can't live with her, I really need to see her more often, because it's so healing for me. Then we walked to Bonfire on Stark and had a few drinks, and talked for several more hours. Tomorrow we're going to pick up my last paycheck, go shoe shopping, and hang out with our friend Ryan.

Then I rode my bike to meet Ashley in NE for a little while and we talked on her porch, and made semi-plans for the weekend, and then I went and got a strawberry milkshake and sat on the curb on MLK drinking it and watching cars go by. Very summery.

I was just rereading a lot of my old blog entries from around 2003 when I was in Minnesota and dying to be in Portland, and I was thinking, I should be more thankful that I'm here. It's a beautiful city and it's summer, and it's where I've always wanted to be.. even if I'm too depressed a lot of the time to really feel it like I used to, I should at least try. And realize there aren't many places on earth I'd rather be.