11:45

Dear Rouse, how is your body treating you? I looked up this thoracic outlet syndrome and it sounds like a hernia of the upper body, so I assume you had some sort of a hard-core waitressing position with lots of heavy lifting and your poor arms just weren’t ready for it. It’s hard for me to believe that you’re no longer the conga-playing disc jockey with your motorcycle and your parachute pants.

The photograph you sent me was hard to look at. You looking so pretty and trying to look happy when your eyes showed a soul that had come slap up against mortality during surgery. I sensed you might like the Reggae tape I sent, but I had no vibes urging me to get a hold of you like I’ve sensed when others I know have been in danger.

Congratulations, I guess, for being accepted to the graduate women’s department at UW, but to have a relapse the day the Gulf War began is a cruelty beyond acceptance. If I were there with you I’d dry your tears, fetch your meals and take you to People’s Park on a bright, cool Sunday morning, but since I’m here I hope you r main man is by your side for you.

I love you, Rouse, and we’re not going to let physical death have it’s way with you just yet. The deaths you’ve gone thorough I hope you’ve learned from, at least. There’s nothing worse than not being able to learn anything from a particularly excruciating experience.

Me? I’ve just had my main man return, like I wanted, with the deeds of his days not worthy enough to save him from the fate of his soul. It’s up to me to defend him and defend him I will even though I know I’ll lose him to reality, practicality, honor and romance,.

I remember when I first met this infamous rogue, J. Dove, after the completely-beyond-all-realm-of-function relationship I had with Doug. J. Dove had been dropped in my lap with perfect timing (just like my "husband" Vic) and I knew I’d fallen for him when he said to me during a night of reckless drinking and emotional bloodletting on my part, "The day your dreams split in two, take the high road, go onward. Don’t look back." Little did I know then that years later, now, it would be he that I would be leaving behind. Fate has a savage sense of humor, and all the subtlety of a mirror. More later.

Later

I miss my hair. It’s only been four hours and my neck is able to breathe after so many years...and I guess this doo is very 90’s, but I’m living for the 00’s. SO, what will we call that decade, anyway? The Zeros? The Turn? DO we have to call it anything? Can’t we just go back to "years" or is that too retro? Maybe in order to avoid confusion with this century we’ll just refer to the decades as era: W.W.I, IWW, Depression., W.W.II, Security, Paranoia, Heaven, Harvest, Greed and Millennium. Do you think history will remember Jeff Chandler? It was b/c of him that my lifelong archrival has been Loretta Young. That’s the complete and utter absurdity of me: Who would’ve thunk that this quiet , unassuming little waif who used to dream up universes for herself while she sang along to The Partridge Family and etching out charcoal flowers and Speed Racer’s Mach 5 on the sidewalk would wind up shadow boxing with Loretta Young. And how, years later, every time I’d pass the Comet I’d see the king lizards and queen scorpions meeting and flinching to each other as they’d crouch between the dumpsters and the lavender Nortons on the street, backs to the squalor with flies on their dolls.

I never knew that the purer a love, the stronger its defenses would be, but if the defenses are too strong, then the heart collapses into a simply functional, albeit meticulously run organ splashing between smarminess and cynicism, fawning its way around town in ever-tightening circles of bitterness, skirting the real causes of desolation while trying to look up the skirts of desperation. Of course, I’m thinking of that guy Pete I met who lived in Bellarmine Hall, who hung around Berlin when the wall was still up, trying to smash the state. He looked good in black, for a pirate, I guess. He smoked me out on DMT and in that half an hour of complete weight and exhaustion he tried explaining execution to me, courtesy of the anti-state. And all I had to say was "fighting fire with fire" to catch him suddenly realizing he’d covered his ass with the oldest excuse in the book: Overcompensation. Up until that point he wanted me. And when I’d said that, he wanted me more and he started firing questions at me, trying to penetrate my warmth. All I had to do to catch him off guard was light a candle and then he switched on his Crass tape.

He stood on his ground and I laid on mine I had wine in my mouth and he wanted beer. He saw desire in my eyes and in his I saw fear. And in one quick glance I saw him flick up his hair as he started fixing his ten-speed and talking about everywhere but where we were. The Man of The Century believing he’s the devil, speaking with a mere angel he thinks is a saint. Maybe I was nice, maybe I was a spike, but he edged towards me in the corner and showed me how what he carved on his body was more beautiful than all of his childhood scars. Violence for glory’s sake.

I forget the words I used with him, but I recall how I dusted the marble floor with my socks. They used to hang people for having this much fun, I thought. I guess it just goes to show: You can’t always kick the devil when he’s down.

I’m now smoking filter. Time to go toss this butt in the rain.

Boys, guys, men...let’s see...J. Dove, Jack Bivouac and Jack Pratt. None of them could ever fly a kite around the sun so I wasn’t blinded. Bastards. J. Dove hung around Jack Bivouac too much, Jack became Pratt, and back again to J. Dove. Always wanting to be someone else, never wanting to just be with me. As if I ever let them.

And who have I become? I frankly don’t give a damn anymore. Bivouac has a long slow death dance with memory; Pratt’s LTD will drive him off a cliff someday, I just know. And J. Dove is just too much like me. Interference of Interdependence. Interdependenceference. Interdependencefuckingference.

Why did I sleep with him last night? Probably b/c I knew it would be the last time I ever would. He held me like I wanted and I didn’t have the strength to hold him back. I straddled him and wedged my heels under his legs. The toughest part of the day is always too much for the tender part of the night. He’s always been scrambling around with his penance so he could drive over to Mulligan’s field and dance in the dusk on their fence. Maybe whisky, maybe black, maybe the flood was nothing more than his father’s blood dripping onto his back as the thunder cracked and the rain slid over the hills. Bells bells bells shone the morning awake. And I had no light in my eyes, only lighting with no acre to torch beneath me. The only words I needed to hear last night he wouldn’t say. Probably b/c he knew I wanted to hear them. Manipulation what?

Just say it once and I swear I will never ask again. Remind me of who I am when every day all I see are them. The millions in the Netherlands, the billions there in China, the Russians, Croatians, Kurds and Americans. All I ask in one friend in each country and I’ll be one in his, until we take the planet by numbers, too many to forgive. What will we do with their sweets and their swats, their meat and their twats and their tunes? Held hostage by their own gun. Just name the day: We’ll all be there at noon. I’d do it for the boy I knew who had just become a man, shot down at the wall nine months before the wall was torn down.

I sometimes wonder if I’m just writing these letters to myself. Closest I’ll ever get to the sky, sometimes I think. I should ask my friend, Pete the pilot about that. Do you think he’d ever understand how last night I lay with J. Dove as he told me as he told me how he put my best friend to death. His fling, her loss His mistake, her strength. And not to turn him in, as her parents wish me to. Laying with him as he said that, when not two hours before he danced with her sister the tarantella he had saved for me. And I watched as he fell in love with her. "Marry her. Take her to American and marry her," he told me Elysia said before he put the pillow over her face. And... I could very easily hear her saying that. The very night I needed him, the very night I saved, I touched him so gently and he simply held me and loved me like he’d love anybody else. I knew I’d stump him if I asked him to say my name. Fine. Let him call me Mosquito or Fruitjuices or Junebug, but...let it be him saying it.

Pearl and Ian came by Mick’s’ today and strutted in caa-ing "Estrelica, you’re my savior. Estrelica, you’re a jerk."

You know, if God appeared to me right now, I’d simply ask how many "sorrys" do I have to hear before I never hear that bloody word ever again.

Oh, check this out: I found this note waiting me under my door today written by this guy I started seeing over the holidays.

Dear Estrelica,

I came home from seeing you feeling pretty angry, and want to hand that anger over to you to deal with -- I figure it’s yours!

I feel deceived and am angry about that. You should have told me that you were interested in someone else and were interested in someone else and were seeing him (instead of theoretically planning to see "a lot" of other people). If I had known that I wouldn’t have gone so far out on a limb, or at least, not so fast. It is particularly disappointing and deeply discouraging, in light of our discussions, which I thought were unusually candid. I had no idea that there was a big part of the picture that you were concealing - and you had so many opportunities to bring it up!

I don’t have any enthusiasm for trying to be friends, Estrelica. In lying to me you’ve hurt me worse than was necessary, and I don’t see much point in trying to overcome that hurdle and undo that damage to become friends. It’s particularly hard to trust someone that has hurt you when you’ve so clearly made yourself vulnerable. Perhaps these feelings will change with the passage of time, so you’re welcome to contact me later (months late) to see if it’s possible to be friends then. In the meantime, I wish you well.

...Oh, yeah? No shit? And who said you got to read my last rites, asshole.

It’s strange how, as soon as I put my mind to do something, just when I heat up the alchemical anvils of tenacity, that is when the pressures fro the outside world mount, like an onslaught of assassins the mere mention of a dream or a plan of mine is always always met with the negative views of wet-rag chewers. My real friends always used to ask me "Why do you take it, you wimp?" Now I take it and observe it, like reading television. I’ve gotten to the point where I want to find where the envy, jealousy, anger and rage is motivated simply by my being. I guess that’s the price exacted by self-appointing yourself a queen: By decided and trying and revealing and pursuing, all the scared, lazy, indecisive others hiding behind their own shit feel your life, work, ideas and ideals are fair game for target practice. Maybe that’s why guys turn so cold and aloof. What else can you do after your heart has been hammered so much by rejection from us girls and by having to constantly compare the size of your job/car/knowledge/sports prowess to other guys?

I didn’t think striking out on your own would change your perspective of others so much. I mean, I’m sure I will have changed drastically by the time I get back to Seattle or Spokane or wherever I’ll decide is home, but I’m sure those I’ve left behind will set me up for inspection as if my life has escalated into nothing but martinis on the verandah and billowy shirts draped on my pillows come to go down with me and see where I’ve been.

I even got the guts up to call Audrey last night after nine years of excommunication. Audrey, whom I met when I was five, Audrey who was closest to me all through school when we knew there was life beyond Burger King, AC/DC and the mall. She’s still living at her parents house, her brother just moved out for the first time at age 32. She said she was in the corporate world for three years, but quit three years ago when she found her asshole getting tighter and tighter and her drinking getting out of control.

Yeah, it’s been nine years since she had her nervous breakdown, when she realized she had to come out of the closet to herself and her family. It didn’t help that Georgia mysteriously died at the same time, even though her life was a death waiting to happen.

The conversation started out well and I must have wished her a happy birthday three times, this being her thirtieth. But as soon as I showed deference and tenderness she jumped into the most maniacally sarcastic mode I’ve ever heard anyone get into. I told her about the jobs I’m doing and my abysmal attempts at getting my photography career off the ground, b/c my prints will never be mainstream b/c you’re not getting any younger." Apparently she’s making Indian masks, her father being an Indian from a Vancouver Island tribe. Her folks are about to retire to their house up on the Island, so she’ll be moving up there with them.

She told me she’d had three dreams about me in the past month, and I told her about the psychic I went to see seven years ago who told me a few of my past lives. In one life, in Constantinople 500 years, I was a woman married at a young age to a sailor who was forever away at sea. I worked with a female cousin of mine in a little stall in a bazaar and we’d just natter on all day. My cousin wasn’t married and wasn’t very interested in men, but we both needed affection so we ended up sleeping together regularly even though we both knew it had to be our secret. That very tidily sums up my relationship with Audrey I school, symbolically, all those years ago. Must be why I’m drawn to Robert and Jules at the stationers shop as well.

Audrey asked about Kip, whom she took as her new best friend when she changed schools for fifth and sixth grade. When all three of us went to seventh grade together Audrey had Kip stab me in the ass with a sharp pencil as I stood dumbfounded in the hall. I can’t believe Audrey had the gall to ask about Kip in such a mocking tone, who she abandoned when Kip went right on being the extrovert she always had been, just as extreme a case as the introvert Audrey had always been. Now Kip and I still have a strange bond all due to Audrey having Kip stab me in the ass. Quite a few times Kip has said how she’ll never be able to forget that look on my face when it had happened.

So, I told Audrey on the phone of another past life I’ve apparently had, around the time of Christ, when I had been a city planner (like Kip’s father) who had been praised in the city state. A neighboring city state didn’t have a city planner as good as I was, and a cousin of mine had tried wooing me over to their city. I could have cared less when I worked so long as I could do my work. A battle for my skill and Artistry ensued between the two cities and I was killed as a result. I heard Audrey gasp on the line before she went silent, then she told me of the psychic she’d gone to see who told her that in a past life she had been a Roman soldier who was killed at an early age and was still bitter about it. Makes a lot of sense to me, everything from her being a Roman and always mocking God to the point where she’d try and get me to read The Satanic Bible in high school.

It’s a good thing I’d had a Sheaf Stout under my belt (and a call from Robert) before I called Audrey, b/c thinking back on the call it feels as if I had pried open the lair of the fiercest dragon of my past. No, bad metaphor. More like I was sailing around in my glass bottom boat and decided to go into shark infested territory. Scary as fuck, even though there’s a barrier between the two of you. I mean, it’s taken me nine years to get up the guts to call her, and, as we both admitted, neither one of us has really changed, but, for my sake, at least now I can see how I should never had been friends with her back then. To think that the first close friend I had, and for fifteen years, should end up having psychic claws in me that would stretch this far. She’s made me rethink every friend of acquaintance I’ve ever had and realize that those who wanted my friendship immediately (and whom I gave it to, desperate for friends) were the ones who have done the most damage to me psychically over the years. Makes me think of Vic, whom I, Christ, married after knowing him only 23 hours and wondering what he’ll turn out like when we meet again.

And now I wonder what damage I’ve done to Robert, trying desperately to be as romantic as I knew he’s appreciate even though my guts told me to be ever so cautious. I wish he could realize that although both of us have found each other, that if we give it time, it will be worth it. Neither one of us is ready, and to me, sex is just the icing on the cake. Never thought I’d say that. Must be overcompensation from all the lickable liaisons of my wild years. Now all I can do is mourn who I was when the sex was the only way I knew hoe to express my affection, share intimacy and achieve self-validation. I mean, the language of bodies and innuendo battered into us by the media has all but strangled the life out of real romance and god old-fashioned love.

I look at Robert and see he distilled pain in his eyes that, however much he’s been through, whatever the social circumstances around him, still shine up so bright. I know he has the heart of a rose, but it’s carefully guarded behind more barbs and thorns than anyone I’ve known except, of course, unfortunately, J. Dove.

Can you love the same person twice? And if you dare, what is the lesson that’s so blatantly laid out for you, or is it just a trap of the heart? A snare to once again catch your tenderness and innocence it it’s grip? Maybe now I know why people get married for every other reason but love: Mess with the emotional challenge of love and you’re setting yourself up for a spectrum of raw nerve stretching all the way from the initial coddle and scold of a parent, to the first crush, the first abuse and all the way to the end of the line, when heaven dips it’s clouds down for the two of you to step up. Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt just b/c he looked back. What a test of strength: Not to look back. Poor Orpheus and Eurydice, too.

No wonder I feel like I’m shedding the skin of another part of my life like a snake: I find my changes have always happened after I’ve charge into some place exotic and mysterious, sucked it to the maw, and then lay satiously panting like a lion oblivious to it’s own sentient condition.

But, with Robert it feels eerily like I’ve found all my past lovers and my future lover at the same time. This may be soul mate territory. I mean, apart from how much we have in common and how similar we are, his internships at the local TV stations remind me of LAR, his taste in literature reminds me of MS, his eyes remind me of MS, his incomprehensibility at anything outside of his own experience (read: confusion) and retreat to his youth reminds me of JM, and, of course, his taste in music, love for animals (which usually signals giving up on human intercourse), zeal, and strenuous efforts to stay on the threshold of childhood and maturity remind me of J. Dove...and me.

Could it be that I’m his angel to help him through this part of his trek and vice-versa? What a needle to thread, as if I don’t already have enough on my plate right now. Sometimes I think I’d have more success helping him, and in turn myself, than trying to deal with everyone down at the shelter and the bar. I’ve stretched my freedom as far as I needed to, and now all I find is aloneness. And the jaws of loneliness are poised ready to gnaw away at whatever’s left of my heart.

I remember the first dream I had of Robert, when his friends and he, all fully clothed, wanted me to take the towel off from around my waist, the only thing covering me. I am more than willing and able to reveal myself to him, but that intimacy is too sacred to be so casually approached. I’ll never understand why most people are satisfied to let their hearts be kidnapped by the staggering thieves of hormones, sympathy, security and passion, when love is empathy, balance, courtesy and restraint. I mean, I don’t mind dying for a man any more than I mind dying for a country...as long as they’re grateful.