Do you remember when we talked about socks?

Well, it wasn’t socks, actually.  It was one sock in particular.  And, particularly, it was the hole in my sock.

I stopped and I asked you something to the effect of, “have you ever thought about what a hole actually is?”

Because, you know, it is kind of a funky question.  And I was balls-deep into metaphysics at that point and loving every minute of it.

But seriously, what is a hole?  You can’t say it’s an absence.  That’s just projecting some convenient language-sorter onto the world as some property.  It’s not nothing. There’s air where the hole is, right on top of the skin on my sexy foot, but the hole itself isn’t defined by the air that’s there.  I mean, there’s air everywhere!  

The sock defines the hole, of course.  It’s a privation of sockyness.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story.  There’s plenty to say but it’s still quite hard to get a full grasp of the qualities of a hole— but there it is.  The qualities of the sock are the qualities of the hole.  Yeah man.  

There’s more to say.  There’s less to say.  And I had it all in my head but it was all so Socratic.  I suggested something, and you followed.  I played devil’s advocate, and you called me on my nonsense.  You had God knows how many sketches due the next morning; shit, maybe you even had to make a dress.  I don’t remember.  You were always working, and I was always so glad to just be near you while you stressed about this or that.

Was I on the way out the door?  Were we going to bed?  Was I hopping out to go buy soda and chips before we watched some semi-above-mediocre show on Hulu before all the good shows started limiting their episodes (my God we would have never made it if Hulu+ existed back then)?

I don’t know man.  But there it all was.  My whole life.  The core of me.  Love and philosophy, in the most frivolous (as fuck) of ways.

I betrayed that part of me.  That all of me.

But I’m on the way back.  Holey socks and all.  Will you meet me there?