The cold.

I have this annoying cough. It is a cross between a wayward goose and something else--but I can't quite describe it.

The one cool thing about this cough is that my voice is slightly lower, a little huskier--the kind of voice an actress from the 1940s would have. Once this cold has left my system for the third time this winter, I will miss that voice. I will not, however, miss this menacing cough.

I think that walking home this evening did nothing to help this cough. The wind reached into my chest and took the air out of my lungs. This cold was bitter, bitter, bitter.

I made it from the metro station to my apartment in Columbia Heights just barely. I felt like giving up at one point, but then I remembered about an appointment I had with a warm double bed and some pajamas.

It didn't matter to me that it was 6:30pm, it was time for me to retire for the night, do some writing and hope that someone else wasn't suffering with time difference tiredness to have a quick chat.

Things that go unsaid.

More than a few years ago, I was writing a paper which included a small section on Antony and Cleopatra. I had a great deal of trouble with the paper as I felt that I was in entirely over my head. I was trying to deal with questions about the nature of skepticism and acknowledgment both in the play and in my own life.

I can say this.

I was in the process of waiting for this man to say something, words that I had been waiting for years to hear. And they just weren't coming. I was crushed. It was pathetic really. But graduate students can be really socially inept creatures, and I was certainly one of them.

The entire situation was kind of interesting because as I read the play, I could empathize with both Antony's and Cleopatra's struggle with words and their desire to prove love through words--and some outrageous actions. And here I was just waiting for something, some semblance of that exact sentiment (pardon the alliteration) to be spoken or even written in an email.

It never came.

Well, last night, I had a conversation with this particular man. It was one that was long overdue. I owed him a phone call that I wasn't all that interested in making. In the last couple of years, the conversation has become as dry as the type of white wine that I don't like to drink.

And my goodness (!) was the conversation uncomfortable and boring. I found myself wondering why I had such a thing for this particular man--why I thought that the sun practically rose and set because of him. Crushes can be strange things, can't they?

I suppose what ended up happening in the end was that I had to find the acknowledgment that I was looking for in myself. I couldn't just sit around waiting for it to happen because frankly, it was never going to happen. Sure, it was nowhere near what I had wanted to occur, but in the end, I think that I did become a better person for it. All relationships, whether fantastic or terrible, teach us something about ourselves.

Or at least I'd like to think so.

The hilarious part of it all was that last night he said something that I would have loved to have heard several years ago.

Now? Not so much.