reflections, fading to silence for a season

Somebody once asked me what I felt of the notion of being a salesman, as they said I have a natural ease with people.

Well, in the first case, I do not see myself as having a "natural ease" with people. I like people and I like to make them happy, sometimes to my own detriment, materially, but I am still a bit shy about asking people for things.

In the second case, I don't like the rate of return on sales efforts. You can blunder into a major sale, you can work your ass off for twenty years and never get anywhere. And, to be honest, that's how it should be in sales as selling is about adding nothing to the value of the service or product procured, just the illusion of value.

So it is with relationships. Some come to you for nothing you give. Some you must give all, tearing handfuls of your own flesh to make real. And you never are one hundred percent sure the deal is sealed until...well, I don;t know when, as it has never happened to me that I have had a relationship of that durability and joy.

I did a housecleaning earlier this week, discarding file upon file of correspondences that had built up over the years. Email and physical letters to and from Brigit, Selke, and even my second wife (the name that must not be spoken). People who have chosen to drop out of my life, for their own reasons.

I don't want to sell people on my value, and when I am not what fits with their life, that's not a place I want to cling to. But it is with sorrow and sweet remorse that I let go.

Months ago I mailed a CD containing the last images from my seocnd wife's modelling portfolio. She was and I imagine still is a lovely girl and should she had pushed harder I have no doubt but that she would have gone farther in the industry. I wish her naught but well. I have finally let go the last mementoes she left to me when last we parted.

Selke. Sigh. Anything I could say here would be a strange elaboration on a strange relationship.

Brigit. She does this, you know...drops from sight for a year or two then reappears to jostle my heart. It is good for me, actually, as I have grown so apart I sometimes forget the taste of passion in my mouth, the scent of it on the wind, the thought of it in my sphere. I hope she makes her orbital pass again, and soon. If not, such are the fates. I am better for her passage through my life.

There are others I miss in my sphere, others whose absence pains me, but there is naught for me to do. I have chosen this tower, this seat, this vista, and alone I sit, pondering the beauty I have held, the promise I have met, the souls I have enriched and the ruins I have slipped from as the last stones fell.

I am who I should be, and I miss those whom I have loved. Such is the irony of my life.