LESLEY'S WEDDING
I feel like I have slowly committed a horrible crime.

Lesley Wood was, for a long time, my closest friend in the whole world. We lived together in a little house on Bathurst Street in Toronto for a few years, passed judgement on each other's job prospects, pet projects and romantic partners, and did all the lovely invasive things that really close friends, totally comfortable with each other, do.

She offered to play drums in my old band when we needed someone. I helped her organize an anarchist gathering a couple of years ago. She turned me on to drum & bass, and kept me thinking about political and social causes and globalism long after I would have been happy to regress into being a normal apathetic grownup whose prime intellectual activity would be the latest Grisham novel or Everybody Loves Raymond.

She saw me at my best and my worst, and still came back for more, often against her better judgement. I credit her for large parts of my personality, outlook and ethics, and I love her without reserve.

A lifetime academic, she moved to New York the year before me, to attend Columbia University. When I came down, we were all excited that we were going to spend more time together. It hasn't worked out that way. Between her schoolwork and her activism, she's been all but unreachable, and I've immersed myself in the downtown songwriter scene to the point where I poke my head up out of the hole at all-too-rare intervals.

She's getting married next weekend. Mack's a truly sweet, caring and sensitive guy, I think the world of him, and of the two of them together. I've known about the wedding for months, and though it's not required, expected or necessary to the proceedings, I literally could not be happier for either one of them. The problem is my self-immersion. I have been so involved in my own crap these last few months that I haven't responded to her. I would love to sit down and talk with her, catch back up, and I will at some point. But I feel I have dissed her by not responding to her invite to the wedding.

But I have no time to go to Toronto, no money to pay for the trip, no gifts to bring to show how much Lesley has meant to me. I don't even have an answer for why I haven't replied to her calls and e-mails. She went through a phase where she didn't get back to me, and now it's my turn, and that would be fine, except my turn is coming at a spectacularly bad time.

This isn't the only manifestation of my blocking. I've been lax in booking better shows for the band, the book I was writing sits half-finished and untouched for months on my hard drive, I'm working a job I don't like because I can't be bothered to try harder to find a good one, I'm seeing someone and that involvement is suffering, and I'm just waiting until I get angry enough at myself that I'll pull myself out of this. Understanding, of course, that that's not how it's done.

Look. I am a poor man, I have nothing. I can only give my heart, and right now, that heart is all soup and no steak, and this is all a day late and a dollar short, and while I hope she has a wonderful wedding and a continuation of her already-glorious life, I feel like a total schmuck for blowing my opportunity to share in her day.

Especially with what she has meant to me throughout my adult life.

I hope she understands what's going on, but also how happy I am for her, how my love goes with her down that aisle, how even coming out of what sure feels like a nervous breakdown, I would give anything to bridge this gap and add my good vibes to the wedding party.

But I have lost the right to ask for more than her forgiveness, and I cannot expect her to be that gracious.

I'm going to light a candle for her this weekend. And pray to god she doesn't read this, at least until next week.