I want to write about the sweet love. The falling apart and piecing together, the breaking and the cracking and the plaster and the spackle and the crazy glue in the creases. The insane, head-banging against the wall pain and the vague uneasy sense of maybe over-ness and the tender coming back together. Laughter after tears like a thumbprint of rainbow flickering in the gray sky while the rain still muddies the ground. Kissing before every naked snatch of moon. The screaming sex. Whole hands reaching inside for warmth and for pleasure, delving into and under bruises that have become bone and confusion that has stood in for understanding and landing, wings wet and sodden, heavy and hopeful, the only truth a maybe, all promises and long-standing pain burned down to ash. We re-emerge, faces bodies spirits scrubbed red and raw with I’m sorry and I’m sorry and Oh my god and I don’t deserve to be anywhere near you, not after all that I’ve done . . . Mutual penance falls from each other’s lips: love yourself. In the face of everything horrible you have done, to make up for it, to set things right, to deserve the connection you desire, you must love yourself. It is much more easy to despise yourself, to abandon yourself to self-loathing, than it is to do the hard work of loving yourself, of looking at your behavior and your hurt places, your pockmarks and scars, and reaching a tender hand to yourself and loving and smiling and holding, and believing that you are worthy, that you are deserving, that you are brilliant and beautiful and exquisite. That is the difficult task before you. To respond to one’s own undesirable behavior with self-loathing just perpetuates the force that makes these behaviors possible and does no one any good. Just makes it possible for all the pain to duplicate itself again and again. If you are interested in atonement (and even if you are not), love yourself. Self-flagellation will get you nowhere. And certainly not into bed with me.

I want to write about the man and the woman. The woman who has loved me and loved me and loved me even in my absence, even in the face of my neglect and abandonment. We reconnected with truth and touch and heart and hurt rising to the surface and melting. I want to write about her wisdom and her constancy. I want to write about the beloved man who unexpected mentioned possibly wanting children. Possibly with me or with the woman we both love. Babies. About the vivid dreams of my belly baby-full I’ve been having. And now is years before the time. Years upon years and still the visions have begun. Expansion and midwives and labor, my partner and my most precious friends within hand-squeezing reach. Visions and dreamings and I told the man to ask again in four or five years or so.

I want to write about the secrets I can not be so cavalier as to spill in an online diary for the whole world to see. And the bedroom is pussy pink now. Orange fizz. Somehow the color of sex. Orange and brown and rosy and glowing. Step into my pussy. Baby, it’s cold outside. About the friend, the tender connection drawing my attention and distracting me in the middle of my day. About my grandmother. Her father who she didn’t live with after she was eight. He died on a ship, when she was in college, this elusive man, half Cuban, half Chinese, who left babies in many ports, who sent money to my grandmother’s mother for pictures to be taken of two of the children he left behind. My grandmother tells me stories and I try to hold onto the picture of the world I am connected to. Three generations, too far for me to see clearly. I want to write about my father, so much easier to talk to in the presence of my mother—we both seem more at ease with her nearby to lubricate our rusty connection.

I want to write about everything, but I am out of practice, forget how to balance discretion with honesty and self-examination. Be careful with your secrets. I have difficulty keeping my own.

Dawn threatens to chase me into bed. I am not prepared for Christmas. For the questions I never know how to answer. (And for the absence of certain questions I never know how to bring up in front of my whole family.) My partner is a woman. We are polyamorous. We do illicit things. I am a deviant in more ways than you will ever know. Rest easy, I want to tell them. I am safe and still alive. And mostly happy, when I'm not suicidal.

Relax. I have no plans to die today.

Thanks for all the love and well-wishes and support, everyone, by the way. It means so very much to me . . .