how many times have i vowed to stop googling your name?
how come i always have such terrible timing when i give in to the urge to see whether it turns up something new on what you do?
how many times have i managed to find out about your latest readings just days after they happened?

this time, i'm 10 days late for one of your literary gigs in northtown. - you were reading as one of three special guests of northtown's latest avantgarde literature club. the recognised one, the one that country-wide feuilletons talk about.

i shouldn't kid myself.
i wouldn't have gone up north anyway, even if i had known about your little gig beforehand: i was in montreal.
even if i hadn't been, i wouldn't have tripped up north to see you read. - it would have been too absurd to travel several hundred kilometres to silently sit in the audience hearing and seeing you read, applauding you. i would have tried to look casual, when it would have been anything but.

but still.
fact is: i wonder how you are.

in the picture they put up on their website, next to your little biography, you look severe, a little tragic, like the upcoming but currently starving and suffering multi-talented artist that you are.
in your eyes i can see some of the disconnection i expect you to feel to it all. i imagine your face moving into a grin, soon after that picture was taken, but maybe that is just me imagining things.
you look like yourself, despite that beard.
looking at your image, it doesn't take much work to imagine what this new face of yours would look like when talking to me. i can actually hear your voice and know how you'd laugh at me, if you knew i was writing this.

the little bio calls you an "all-rounder", an "exceptional artist with childish sujets and aggressive realism". it talks about your animations, about your "wonderful songs", which "are somewhere between brutal singer-songwriting and gentle, playful minimal electronica" and about some of your stories, like the one about paul and marinade, who rub wollen dolls so that they don't have to have sex with each other.

i soak up the little info on the website and your image, just like i've soaked up all the little info on you i've stumbled across, sometimes even when i wasn't looking for you, in the three years since we last met.

in some weird way, i still miss you in my life.
in some weird way, i want you to know that i care about how you are and what you do and that i am happy for you because of your work and success. - even though i still suspect you would shrug that off, because it would just show that we never were, and will never be, equals.
in some weird way, somehow, after all these years, despite it all, i still love you.

which no one really understands.