it was called saudade : extract from a future diary

After I finished the badman post over at dérives yesterday (even though it's not really a dérive), I literally found myself writing something else, about a situation I've been in for a while now and will be for a while longer. One of those life-changing predicaments that you don't know how to resolve, or rather, how they will be resolved, since full control isn't necessarily implied. It was a relief to write it all down more or less as it seems at the moment and I was feeling happy about it as I went out to see a movie - Girl With A Pearl Earring, which, despite some faults, is still like spending an hour and a half inside a Vermeer, which is not a bad place to be. Afterwards, though, I didn't feel so pleased about what I'd written that morning. Specifically, I felt I'd written it between two registers. It wasn't exactly a diary entry, but on the other hand, it wasn't exactly public speaking either. Not clear if I was addressing myself or the notional readers of this weblog, say. When I came home, I re-wrote it into two versions, which correspond to the two options in the previous sentence. That felt better - the diary-entry version is clearer on a several points I'd fudged or elided, whereas the weblog version, which I cast into a different tense, as if it pertained to an indeterminate period in the past, evolved into what I felt was quite a good piece of writing. And I did post it here. But then. A doubt. It may have been 'good' but it was no longer true. It suggested the dilemma had passed or been resolved, which it hasn't and isn't. There were other considerations - how much of what's personal to me do I want to disclose, what might the effect be on others who are involved in the (perhaps unlikely) event they were to read it - but it was the distortion of the real that bothered me more. I pulled it. Now I'm sort of half wondering how long it was up here for (can't remember), whether anyone did actually read it and if some after shadow persists in cyberspace? Not that it matters ... much ....