One of the things I most like about Peej (and there are many high up on the list) is the view of Mission Hill from his bedroom. I say the view is something I like about him, because it wasn't there before him. He conceived and created it.

One morning earlier on in our relationship, while the sun rose blood red over a church steeple at the end of his street, he pointed out a hawk perched on the cross on its spire. He said he had seen the bird snatch pigeons off the rooftops of surrounding row houses and tear them limb from limb.

There was something about that sight—inspiring, foreboding, poetic—and the thought of the one Peej described, that seemed significant at the time, somehow.

The things we see constitute in large part our perception of the world, of course. But we don't always see what's there. Or sometimes we see it but we don't connect it to anything in our experience. Or sometimes we weave it in in ways too intimate for what it is.

I got another one of those Israel Horovitz cups at Starbucks the other day, for example. The one that says "if you choose someone who doesn't love you, this is the sort of love you must want." Is he stalking me, or what?

We are, as a species, I think, made to pick out patterns in the world around us and our experience of it. Sometimes—mainly in science—this leads to a deeper knowledge of how the world works and how we can make it work for us. But seeing the patterns is only a first step in science, which requires testable hypotheses.

Nonetheless we carry this penchant for finding patterns into our personal lives as well. But the physics of the psyche are more mysterious and complicated than quantum mechanics. Partly because nothing we see or experience can be seen or experienced independent of what we have seen or experienced before seeing or experiencing it, and while we might see and experience the same things as others, we can never see or experience them from the same place in time or space.

The more sensitively and intimately we experience the world, the more particular our experience of it, and while the world itself responds to our sensitivities and obliges us with a deeper intimacy, the singularity of our experience makes it the more impossible (and it's always a little impossible) to relate it to others in the way we are accustomed to trading information with each other in society, where we can at least create the illusion that we're all on the same page.

Collective experiences provide connectivity, of course. But the experience itself is only the beginning. We want to preserve our impressions of it in amber—or better yet, on DVD—so that eventually some other can see that chain of impressions that accounts for our singular experience.

Through creative technologies we're struggling (always in vain) to enable the outing of our inner lives. The irony is that the more thoroughly our technologies allow us to collect and catalogue the minutiae of our individual existence, the more we feel our isolation. (Or maybe it's just me.)

I mean, face it, no one wants to watch thirty-eight years of your home movies (even with the cool soundtrack) or sift through your virtual shoebox of a hundred and seventy million snapshots. Or even read your blog (mine clocks in currently at about the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined).

Maybe someday we'll invent computers to sift through the evidence of our lives and certify that we actually exist.

All of which is to say, it's tricky to know what to do with the things you see sometimes.

I liked the hawk perched on the cross immediately, because it seemed like a novelistic device—whether a leitmotif or an instance of foreshadowing I couldn't tell at the time. The irony of the predator on the cross was nice, too, although you couldn't make too much of that. It was a little obvious.

Most of all it seemed a perfect symbol of fledgling romance, majestic and menacing at once. Building that steeple to the sky, only to have it serve in the end as a look-out for hawks in search of unsuspecting doves (or pigeons thinking they're doves) to tear limb from limb.