Where do you go when your voice has vanished. Do you blame it on love or do you blame it on fear. Is it some profound superstition, or is it just habit. All of those words, fragments of thoughts, sentences teased from my unhappy heart, thrown up into and onto the interwebbyhinternets, because I was drunk and a girl has got to puke somewhere if the loo is down the hall and miles away.

The conundrum is that I am not being completely honest, not really, not really at all. And I'd really rather go out dancing and smoke imaginary cigarettes, and I would really rather not acknowledge that I have months overdue phone calls on back-log, and I would really, really like to avoid all mirrors at all costs because my physical manifestation does not mesh with the slight woman in my head.

Pardon me interwebbyhinternets while I rationalize with myself for a moment - is there any ethical reason (interrupted by subject in question, "what are you doing?" -- "writing")that I should tell him that I keep my "journal" online for all the world to gaze upon... Out here in this imaginary world I can write out vicissitudes without fear of repercussions, the few that really know me indulge my writerly inclinations as an exercise as the extrovert that I most certainly am not in my day to day waking life - that is when I am not falling down on accident and making a fine fool of myself.

So no, I reason soundly. This can be mine, and maybe I need to take it up again, because the truth of it is I have missed it. Missed as much as I have kind of missed the girl who was out in the world with her guard up and defenses down, missed her like I miss the girl who was going through batteries for her vibrator like mad.

Don't misperceive, I wouldn't trade the chatty engineer for all the batteries in the world, wouldn't barter his lovely limbs for solid latex. But with this nacent love comes doubt, and where there was recklessly insecure bravado there is now just insecurity, and with this fleeting, oh so fleeting happiness, comes the dread of loss, where before I had a certain rakish jauntiness, which was a carefully composed mask, but it was there nonetheless. Now I just think that I'll lose. Ah hello defeatism! My old friend, it's been such a long time, good to see you now get the fuck out. Get me a drink and an imaginary cigarette before you go. Go ahead and stay good and gone this time.

I seem to be stuck in a curious cycle of late, I get the figurative four minutes of bliss and then everything goes hinky for a bit and there might be a minor earthquake in between, or there might be a new war on another continent and another ancient city might be pulverized, but I am well fed regardless. Violence hiccups elsewhere, while I am kayaking with a very good friend, there where the mouth of the river gulps the sea, and the seals bob up about us curious, indifferent.

That is when the world falls into context, the worst thing in my life is that I am sitting in a puddle of slightly salinated river water and I am very real peril of being shat upon by a flock of disturbed of squawky pelicans, it's such a thing of real and substantial beauty, they rise out of the water just over our heads, it's nine o'clock in the morning and the save where the river meets the sea all is as quiet and polished as an opal. And they lift out of the water, and we paddle, it's a good cliche, but it's unbearably beautiful just as the pizza and the hard cider will be unbearably delicious when our aching muscles ease out of the life jackets four hours later, just as falling into my bed with the engineer will be eight hours later, into kisses and intanglement and disparate dreams and incongrous expectations.