A fitful night. I've got the windows open and a desultory wind blows in ideas the candle flames protest.

For maybe the last few weeks a job change has felt inevitable. Although I've been planning to look for a new job but haven't gotten around to it, the momentum of change builds so that it seems all other forces are preparing for it but me. This is not a dreadful sense but a positive one: A job change will occur and support exists for more than one route. It doesn't mean the transition will be smooth or lucrative, but it is the right thing. All things point in that direction.

This feeling preceded the news last Wednesday of my company filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. After a few rounds of layoffs and a general decay in business practice, the news was not a shock but a curiosity. Similar meetings in the last few months have been more like exercises in decryption than truly informative. How long until the end? The official line is that the company is sound beyond this month, but is buying time to remunerate debts. However from my sunny desk in the corner, I can see no executive interest in production -- no vigor for the future at all.

As if to fit the role of a destitute entity, the thermostat was lowered and now we all freeze, hunched and coated before our monitors, mugs of warm liquid propped against our lips. This decision was made to reduce the temperature in the server room to something more livable for the two employees stationed there. Unfortunately, the thermostat for the whole office is located just above the wall where the servers are stacked. The rest of us suffer to support the struggle between the air conditioner and the heat generated by all those computers. I've made repeated requests to raise the temperature by a few degrees.

Today I passed most of the day before the computer reading newspapers, magazines and journals. One article I edited, the only one in my queue. Otherwise, time to myself for thoughts, clock watching and spying on people from my window. What a cage!

When I left there late afternoon it felt like fleeing and some song on the radio by Erasure reminded me of a young Dave with his bangs grown long and bleached, a boy who liked punk, new wave and electronica. While I walked I remembered his youth, years with me, and how he's living for himself in the desert now.

Before he left he said I was nuts for pursuing work in the private sector, for abandoning the only path I'd ever followed. Not that he was accurate to think I would sell myself to it, but he spoke from the experience of being used up by a corporate job. Having lived with me for so long, he knew me well enough to know I'd quickly hate it too.

And I remembered myself with him and what I saw was an amalgamation of moments where he, a stable figure poised over some puzzle, game, or book was ripe for a pouncing by a clamor of ideas or opinions I'd found in myself while reading some article or book or in reaction to current events. Such memories are many but really just one moment in different venues and clothing. They are warm memories of nice times.

For a moment I missed that companionship. Or thought I did.

Do I?

Recently I've longed for it some. Decisions around buying a car and upgrading the audio system in it have not been easy. At times, it's been too much for my mind alone and I've had to consult with others just for their hearing. I wished for a companion wondering if it would be easier, more pleasurable. But you know these decisions are harder to make as a couple most of the time. Besides negotiating for the item itself, you negotiate with each other over trifles. So no, the decisions are much easier this way, if seeming lonelier.

And I do not long for some warm body next to me midnight through morning; I do not need someone waiting at home for me.

Then what do I miss?

I miss the way worn-thin cotton hugs a man's hips when he walks. The heat of his whisper and gusts of passion, whether in anger or lust or fear -- they are all the same.

I miss the love?

I've been reading The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. I read it once and began immediately again. The deserted relationship at the center of the story reminds me of a privation I know. A man and woman remain unravished in intellectual relation, each depending on the other to be unemotional to maintain stability. And passion, irrepressible as it is, gropes for nourishment beyond that sterile atmosphere.

When Port observes a blind woman dancing in a brothel deep in the Sahara, he wants to possess her. When he learns he can't, he pities the loss - "that he had lost love itself." He reclines into fantasy, what he would have done with her; how "in bed, without eyes to see beyond the bed, she would have been completely there, a prisoner."

This desperation for an intensely physical encounter, one without the seeing mind, reminded me love is corporeal; that it's too easy to settle for the clap and chafe of relationship driven by power, fear, and need. It may seem fleshly contact enough to couple like this because it can quiet intuitive notions of self-independence toward a feeling of wholeness - of love. But the unnameable thirst goes unsated.

Love, if it is captive to the carnal senses, then yes, I miss this.

What's this got to do with what I was saying about changing jobs? Well, I suppose I don't want to suffer the resignation of living so detachedly. The passage in the book reminded me that I have, and that I do. Which brings me back to the work I choose, a not altogether separate compartment from love or passion. And the point: It's all too easy to trap yourself in a desert of your own making.

The job change may be inevitable despite my lack of effort, but it won't be freeing if I don't direct it. Remember -- all you have to do is step clear.