Events from this past weekend evaporated in a smoke filled haze.
My break, my split, I sharpened it's edge this weekend.
Lives safely compartmentalized. Desires in their proper place.
I guess this is the way it has to be for right now.
For the second weekend in a row, Hugo and I have been at it -- the relationship on the chopping/butcher block.
Waiting for me to swing the axe.

- Just tell me to go and I'll leave. Call me when you're ready to talk to me again -- this week, next week.
Whenever you're ready. Please just tell me to go.

My mind is whirling. I think of the potential freedom this declaration would afford me.
I think of all the marvelous trouble I could get in to.
I think of the 200 lbs, 6 ft. grown man in front of me, crying.
Who would build a house for me with his bare hands.
Who won't let up on making me diversify.
Who loves me in my darkest moods.
Who sleeps peacefully one hour away from here, trusting me completely.
Shall I tell him to leave?
Gain the freedom, at least temporarily, that I crave so much?

- Please don't leave. I say, in a hard low voice. You'll only reinforce my abandonment issues.
- You're so cold, he says, it's unbelievable.
- It's not coldness, I say, why do you want me weak and vulnerable? Do you not respect that I have pride? I thought my strength is what you wanted from me when we first met.
- I guess it's different when I'm up against it, he says softly.
- There's so much you have no idea about. You have no idea what's going on in my head. I say.
- NO ONE DOES! He cries. No one sees anything unless you want them to!

Which is true. I can stare deeply, unflinchingly into his blue eyes and fill their depths with love and affection.
So he does not see the other worlds, my doppelgangers, who live inside.
With their own rules and moral codes.
Yes, I want to be exposed. I want to be seen. That's why I write.

- I wish I could express to you how much pain I hold inside because of you, I say. I wish I could communicate it to you somehow, in words you would not feel you had to be defensive to.
- Did I really make you this way, he asked? Have I truly affected you so that you are this hard, this cold?
- You're not the only one. But you're the one factor I had control over. I let you in. I wanted you. I wanted to be vulnerable with you.

And it's true. I wanted to give him everything inside me. As naive and romantic and idealistic as that sounds. I wanted him to consume all the pain with his love. Our love.

What do you mean when you said "you were first broken" DJ?
I don't even know. I'm 26 and I am a survivor of mistreatment by men at many turns.
And yet I still love men. But I have shields and defenses, especially developed to keep me from being harmed again. Why do women become duplicitous and manipulative? Survival skills.
We'll see, with my experiment, if there can exist a healthy duplicity. If multiplicity is a viable justification, excuse.

In the end I feel as if I cleaned up some, that somehow progress had been made.

Saturday, 03.10.2001
I stared at my face in the mirror for a long time this weekend. My shell.

My shell is an appealing enough package. I know it's the essence inside me that is what men want.
Very few of my sexual experiences with men have been purely physical. In the sense that there's an intellectual, mental quality, a sentience to fucking me that makes it important that they hear my voice, want to know what I am thinking, want to see the reaction on my face.

I know sex can be so much more than a bump and grind experience, more than humping. . .

Sex works things out on a primal level of satisfaction.

Sometimes I need to resist, to be controlled, to be seduced, coerced, handled.
For both men and women, I think this makes the yielding, the succumbing, so much more sweet.
And having the control being taken away allows me to abandon myself, to the moment, to the movement, to the sensation.

Abandon yourself to pleasure. Not just when you're on ecstasy.

But one night, out with friends, meeting someone you vibe with.

Abandon to the new scent of the opposite sex.
Fixate on a new pair of lips.
Massage someone else's hands.
Lightly stroke a forearm.
and Breathe.
and Breathe together.
With a stranger.