Significance

Oh the things we do.  I read the other day that a key to happiness is avoiding dwelling on your past failures; people who do so aren't very happy.  I wonder if writers must be counseled the same way.  But then they wouldn't have very good books, would they?  I was reading some old posts today, and it seemed that all my failures were glaring in front of me, either failures that I was giving words to, or failures given form by the hopelessly shallow pieces themselves.  Is there anything for this regret but to become habituated to it and try to forget?  As I look back, I turn pathetic in my own eyes, and I begin to wonder if everyone else has seen through me all along.  If I were someone else, the someone-else me would be having that aha! moment when he realizes that I am not really so hate-able, just pitiful and lovesick.
As I drifted off to sleep last night, my Iraqi roommate was on the phone with his wife, practicing his English with her.  The broken phrases floated through my sheet-for-a-door and into my half-conscious brain.  "I miss you, so, so, so, soooo, so. I miss you so so." Much, I miss you so much, is what he meant.  She must have been asking something like, kam, or eshqad: how much?  I could hear him grinning sheepishly, happily through the sheet.  I thought of the words in Arabic. They appear often, spontaneously, unsummoned, when I'm going out for a cigarette.  Ishtaq lik, Ishtaq lik.  There's no real word for so in Arabic, so Ishtaq lik comes and goes, and you know, we were never really taught how to speak fluently about very personal things.  First, hello, then cunt, then technical terms like philosophy and existentialism, but we never learned those intimate words.
It's nice to hear those raw things, perhaps just new codes to him, like a new apartment, but so raw and unaffected to me.  Ishtaq lik, it's now like an incantation, and in my mind has taken on a significance wholly other than that assigned by an Arab.