12.03.2002 - 1:38 p.m.

(Written Saturday morning.) On Tuesday night I spent four hours on the phone, talking to someone who at the beginning of that time was almost but not quite a total stranger. Maybe first conversations, when you are really interested in meeting another person, are always like that. Maybe it�s just that it has been so long since I�d met someone new and had time to get into a discussion. But I don�t remember ever talking that way, wanting to tell stories I hadn�t remembered were there. I don�t remember that at all.

On Friday I went to a party he was throwing. I decided not to let much happen, but I also made sure I was wearing good underwear, so I suppose only my brain was really fooled on that score. That night, if the house had burned down around his bed, I am almost sure I would have noticed. I am less sure I could have brought myself to care.

I decided to start dating again back around Halloween. Casually. No commitment. Keeping all the doors open and a clear path to each of them. And all that is working out, except that I am being seduced. Now for one thing, if there is going to be a seduction, I should be the seducer, not the seducee. I am not a passionate person, to fall for these things. My heart is too pragmatic, and I am much too strong. And my choices are my own; I will not be tricked, subverted, or coerced. But that brings me to the other thing. My heart is not involved, and I doubt it will be, but it makes me exceedingly uncomfortable that the seduction seems to be working. I can see what he wants, what he is doing, so it should not work�but again, only my brain is fooled by my saying that.

This man is not what I am looking for. He leads too different a life. I don�t know that he�d take care of me and I don�t know that I�d want him to. I am only here for the good time, and although I haven�t asked him, I suspect he is too. But all those things that I never believed about passion, that it consumes you, that pulling away feels like tearing at your own skin, that you can finally, completely forget how to think, all those sayings I took to be badly applied poetic license, I believe them now. They are literal, terrifying truth.

The worst thing is that I am not being tricked, subverted, or coerced. I�m choosing. I am not choosing the way my brain keeps telling me to, but I am choosing. And I like what I�ve gotten myself into.

I am in serious trouble.

-stonebridge

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