October 12,

I was twelve, tall and skinny, almost the lofty height I am now, dressed in baggy overalls and flip-flop sandals. My mother had told me the night before in one of her rare moments of motherly caring that if I didn't wash my hair I was going to look like a grease spot in the morning. Of course I hadn't washed my hair because I never did anything that her mother suggested. That would go against all of my principals.

My friends all looked like grease spots, too. We were sitting on the corner with Cokes and bags of chips harassing passers by with calls of: " Hey dreamboat!" When the person would turn around in response, the obvious answer was: " Not you, you sunken barge." Then of course we would choke on gales of laughter until Coke ran out our noses.

It was fun until this boy I liked came walking by and he frowned at me, probably thinking I was an idiot. An idiot with greasy hair and Coke running out her nose.

I loved him, or so I told myself. It would last forever and we would have babies and a really nice house and a red car. I could buy whatever I wanted from the grocery store and my closet would be full of shoes.

Ah, the object of my adulation. I don't even recall his name now. I think it was Rick or Ron. He was a teenaged boy who lived one block over. He couldn't have cared if I had thrown myself headfirst off a bridge. But I thought he was beautiful.

Too beautiful to ever notice an twelve year old girl. That didn't stop me from dreaming. From kissing my pillow at night or from standing in front of the mirror with my pyjama top tugged down over my shoulders in a pose that I thought was so sexy. " Oh, Ron. Do you really like my dress? This old thing? "

I would read Seventeen and look at the ads and the clothes and I would dream and scheme. If I had that Bonnie Belle lip gloss that tasted like Seven-up, Ron or Rick would love me. He would kiss my lips and say; " Nikita, you taste so sweet. I don't care that you're twelve."

I remember how my heart used to squeeze up like a fist in my chest just looking at him. His dark brown eyes and his long, curly black hair. I thought his girlfriend looked like a bitch. She'd hang onto his baby finger. I used to say to myself: Yea, that's all he'd give her. His baby finger. If he had me he'd give his whole hand.

I remember when the love died. It was the stupidest thing. He cut his hair. Short. Crew-cut short like an air-cadet's and I took one look at him all new-shorn like a baby lamb and I didn't love him any more.

He had ears.

Not big ears, but weird. And they kind of stuck out at the tops so that if the light was behind him they looked translucent and pink and you could see the little red capillaries that ran through them like spider webs. So gross.

Little pink pig ears.

The dreamboat kind of sunk with the weight of a haircut.

I've always been like that. I think I'm sort of a shallow bitch. I will admit that I have loved Timothy Dalton since the first James Bond movie, but he's the only man my heart's ever been faithful to for more than a few years.

Tim has nice ears though. He's still cool for an older dude. If he ever goes bald, I don't know if I can love him anymore.

Actually, I don't really give a shit about Tim lately.

I don't give a shit about much lately.

************

October 14,

I'm thinking about Michael now, looking back on the pages of this diary, and thinking that I must be going insane. I have been away from it for weeks and I can't believe that I wrote this crap. That I ever felt this way. I write pages and pages about his green eyes and his russet hair and his wide shoulders. Shallow crap. Little girl, Seventeen magazine musings about a man I couldn't have.

Then I got him and ...

Funny, I don't remember, can't remember what I felt as I wrote this stuff, but it seems as far away and as meaningless as the teenaged boy with the transparent pink ears whose name I can't remember.

Maybe the problem was that I never really enjoyed the wanting and the longing for Michael more than the having. I built things up to like a big, frenzied, orgasmic climax in my head and then boom, the real thing wasn't all that shit hot.

It wasn't what I wanted at all. Strange, I don't recall what ticked me off. Maybe I wasn't ticked off. Maybe I just grew up and grew apart.

I just know that I don't like thinking about it. If I do think too much I get a major bummer of a headache.

Funny, I've grown apart from everyone. I like being alone. Being a loner is not so bad at all. Maybe Michael should go back to it. I hear his averages are down lately.

Michael. Writing his name means nothing to me. I don't know what happened. I don't know. One day the dreamboat just sank.

And now I don't love him any more.

He never loved me. I know that now. He's a fucking robot. I don't know why he bothered. It's just something I woke up that morning knowing. Anything personal between us was a manipulation. Don't ask me why I know this. I just do. I wish he'd stop this pretending. It makes him look even smaller to me. I don't want to start hating him. We still have a work thing to do. Indifference is better.

He keeps staring at me at work. He comes here sometimes and I don't answer the door.

I tried being nice. The let's be friends at work thing, right? He must be dense or something.

Anyway, he can pretend all he wants. He can tell me he cries his little green eyes right out. It means nothing to me. Why can't he see it? Right now I have a shell around me. A protective layer of ice and I want to keep it that way.

Sometimes I catch myself wondering about just what it was that turned things off. Maybe it's Michael's haircut. I liked it long. I don't know.

Something died. Something inside of me just fizzled out like a candle in the rain.

I don't remember what happened the day I realized that I didn't love him. I was antsy that day. Empty. I drove home thinking about work. Work seemed like the only real thing suddenly. The only constant. Work is important to me now. I'm working hard to keep my levels and averages up. It just makes me feel competent. The smiles that Ops and Madeline have given me have made me feel worthy, while the looks I get from Michael just make me feel uncomfortable.

What the hell's wrong with him?

I told him how I felt. He always expects me to get how things are the first time he tells me. Why is he so dense all of a sudden?

It was just sex. I wish he'd go get it from someone else. The dude needs to get his rocks off. He's good at it. He fucks like a dream.

I personally, don't care. Men are such slaves to their dicks. I don't need sex. I don't even think about it.

He was the one who always told me to do the job and now that I'm doing it he's pissed. He stares at me. He follows me home some nights and sits in his car just looking at the building. I shut the curtains and I go to bed.

The world just turns off. I don't think about the people I killed or what they did or what this fucking world is coming to. I can only do what I am sent in to do. I'm never going to change anything, so why sweat over it? I read up on work stuff and the I have a shower and I am like a dead person. I wake with the alarm. No dreams. I don't even move.

It's so cool. I always wanted to be one of those people who could fall asleep the minute my head hit the pillow.

I don't want anything to be the way it was. I changed the apartment again. It had too much colour. It was too much work. I like this better because I don't have to think about it.

I got rid of the night lights. I'm not afraid of the dark these days. The darkness was all inside my head.

The soft blue walls just seemed odd to me that day that I came home and realised that I didn't care about him any more. That I didn't care about anything. I painted them white. It's clean and sterile.

I threw out the candles and the flowers and the romantic shit, too. I don't have time for it. My plants on the deck are dead.

This is a new journal, too. For the new me. The other one sucks. The one with the white cover is a pile of crap. I threw it in the bottom drawer with the sketchbooks I filled. I am a truly shitty artist. I look back at that stuff I wrote and drew and I cringe. What made me think this stuff was good?

************

October 16,

Today is my birthday. So what. Happy Birthday to me. Who gives a fuck about birthdays?

I threw the roses Michael sent me in the trash. Yellow is an insipid colour.

And roses are dead before you even get them.

***********

October 16

It's eleven thirty. I went to bed at nine.

I woke up after a dream and now I can't go back to sleep. For some weird reason, for first time in four months, I had a dream. Such an intense dream I recall almost every minute.

It was a dream like I used to have when I loved him. Before we were together. A dream where he would come to me.

Naked and beautiful and wanting...

And my heart would ache and pound and my knees would get weak and I would telepathically beg him to come to me and love me and he knew everything I wanted and where and how and when....

I just stared at him in this new dream, just drank him into me like I was parched by thirst. I was feeling things that I did not want to feel, that I was afraid to feel.

And yet I wasn't afraid at all. I was breathing again. He was giving me his breath, his warmth. I was looking at his mouth and his beautiful green eyes. I was trying to tell him: Michael, you shouldn't be here. You should not be invading my dreams this way.

I don't want you here.

I don't love you now.

But my lips were saying something else and the words in my ears were not what I was thinking.

I love you, love you. I need you. Stay with me. Make them stop this, Michael. Only you can save me.

Save me.

First he smiled. Then he just raised his hand, his fingers smoothing my eyebrow with his thumb, because that's what he always did. A feather light stroke. He was smiling.

I'm still here, he was saying. I'm not going to leave you.

Never leave you, Kita.

Never.

And then his warm fingers trailed down my face to cup my jaw and he drew me close to him, into his arms. I was thinking: No. No. No. I can't want this.

I want this. I want you, Michael.

My love.

My heart began to pound as his mouth covered mine. The kiss was long and hot and seemed to spin me in a circle like a vortex. Just his mouth on mine, his hands tangled in my hair.

Michael. Michael. I kept hearing his name. His scent filled my nostrils. His body, aroused and hard pressed against me.

I love you. I love you. I will find a way for us to be together. He whispered it over and over, like a litany.

A prayer for us. A prayer said softly into my mouth. A part of his being, absorbed into my blood. The words seem to fill every pore, every cell. They made my heart fill up and warmed me again like I had been touched by fire.

He is fire. And I am melting ice.

I tried to tell myself that it was over, that I did not want him, because there was part of me that had to believe that. Believe that or go insane. It was over, but I kept kissing him, touching his smooth back, my fingers pressing into satin covered muscle.

He lifted me up, up against his body.

I looked down at his face. Determined. Gentle. Handsome. Fierce. All at once. All that is Michael. All that I love and I long for.

I woke with his name on my lips and the feel of his mouth and his hands still on my body.

I write this here. I do not want to write it. My head aches now in a way that no pill can fix. There is something wrong with me.

I remember and I do not want to remember.

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