I have a friend who falls in love a lot. It follows that she must also fall out of love a lot. When she’s in love, there is no one more in love with being in love than she.

It’s kind of beautiful.

It’s also kind of exhausting for all concerned.

But every time she falls in love, I really hope for her that “this is The One.”

I have an aunt with a rocky history of bad relationships. Really epically bad, bad, baaaaad relationships. The kind of relationships that make you want to stay out of relationships. She was in her late 50s and single. I’m not the only one who thought “Whulp. I guess that is that.” Then she met a guy she went to high school with, a widower. Bingo bango, string the banjo and… Happily Ever After.

Love trumped my cynicism. Her husband is a really great guy, too. Every time I think that someone’s relationship prospects are impossible, I think about my aunt and I remember that there is someone for everyone. It can happen.

But let’s face it, when you are between relationships, the last relationship is always biting at your ass. Sadness and bitterness and bitchiness. Then along comes another and all the past relationship sludge is flushed away. Forward!

/ Metaphor

I passed a milestone with my current WIP where I realized I was pretty much over Selfie. I still have a Full out, but it’s out with an agent with a bad reputation for non-responding Fulls. I’m pretty particular about which agents I query and the order I query them. Though this be madness, there is method in it. Yesterday I blasted out queries to the last 50 agents on my list. Bah. Done. Done with it. I have a bad habit of giving up on my previous novel queries in favor of my “new girlfriend,” my new WIP. I always put the bad relationship behind me and focus my energy on the potential of a productive relationship. I always quit querying early.

Not this time. I took it all the way. I queried all 142 agents.

And yaknow, it’s okay. The brutal kick in the crotch I got courtesy of agent Liza Fleissig was what I needed to numb up and move on down the road. I’ll give the agents I queried yesterday three months, and then I will self-publish Selfie.

Cue Gloria Gaynor. I will survive. I will survive.

I will write. I will survive.

THE GIFT
by John Ciardi

In 1945, when the keepers cried kaput
Josef Stein, poet, came out of Dachau
Like half a resurrection, his other half
eighty pounds still in their invisible grave.

Slowly then the mouth opened at first
a broth, and then a medication, and then
a diet, and all in time and the knitting mercies,
the showing bones were buried back in flesh,

and the miracle was finished. Josef Stein
man and poet, rose, walked, and could even
beget, and did, and later died of other causes
only partly traceable to his first death.

He noted – with some surprise at first –
that strangers could not tell he had died once.
He returned to his post in the library, drank his beer,
published three poems in a French magazine,

and was very kind to the son who at last was his.
In the spent of one night he wrote three propositions:
That Hell is the denial of the ordinary. That nothing lasts.
That clean white paper waiting under a pen

is the gift beyond history and hurt and heaven.