Bloggers on the Verge; Dashboard at Night

There was a crash here yesterday that no one heard. There was me, hitting the wall. I might have been that sheet of paper that one fists up to toss. I might have been wrinkle and toss.

In the aftermath I sat alone thinking about bloggers. About those I have come to know over the past two years, since I began this blogging journey. I was thinking about the tremble of words that get proffered out here, the colorations of life, the shake points, the anchors. About how we come to know and love these souls whose faces are not known to us—how we follow their stories, how we are pulled up short when those stories disappear.

For many of the bloggers for whom I've come to feel a kinship are on the verge of such disappearance, or are already gone—their real lives taking them down another path; their ears tuned to new songs; their confessions, admissions, atrocities, humor, opinions put aside, at least for now, or yielded to others.

This, then, is to say to them: I will miss you. And: I understand.

I should say, for some of my Facebook friends have inquired, if, by way of this post, I am announcing an end to my blog. I am not. I am feeling melancholy, as I just said in a Facebook comment, about how much of our lives go on unknown to one another, about how we grow attached to people we will likely never meet, and about how others' lives snap off, in the mid-sentence of our reading. I will still blog. It is the journal that I keep, the conversation that I cherish. But things shift, and I do, too.