October 17, 2002 | 3:34 PM

Yeah I�ve got a busy weekend ahead.

Tomorrow is the Bach�s Mass in B Minor with Tara, and perhaps a couple glasses of wine.

Saturday is the day trip to Providence with Jenn (ex roommate and best friend) and John (ex boyfriend and ex roommate) who now live together.

I�m excited for the trip, which was orchestrated by Jenn. But a little apprehensive as well. Providence holds so many memories, all associated with John and I being a couple and doing couple things, like kissing in the hotel pool and holding hands up and down Thayer Street and mooning at each other and being, you know, happy.

What the fuck did we know?

Those memories are really vivid. I still have pictures from the first time we went together, just 21 years old and cramped in a photo booth, kissing and smiling. And you know, it even still makes my heart hurt. That was so long ago, and it feels so long ago in one sense. But in another it�s just like yesterday because I haven�t stopped caring. I don�t even care less than I did. It�s just that the caring has been escorted out of the main building of my heart by big burly security guards and is sitting in a holding cell while I attempt to starve it to death.

The caring scrapes a tin cup across the bars of its small cage lamenting melodramatically,

What went wrong?

and

What if this? What if that?

Even though I already know the answers to those two questions.

The answers have been explicated and framed in various contexts. Given changes of scenery. But they are still the same fucking answers�stone and brick, defiant, non-malleable. Set in their ways. They won�t change.

I have heard the mermaid s singing each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By seagirls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown

--T.S. Eliot