they vote in leap years only, like clockwork. no edge, no waiting, just a bored, disinterested countdown. the last [i thought it would be, in more than one fashion, all] time i travelled west on such a bus, it was late at night, i was drunk, and it was the eve of a federal election. i never got around to voting, but my candidate won anyway. luckily. otherwise, i would have felt more guilty about spending the day fucking, not voting. the polls long closed in all of the time zones of my little country by the time i stumbled home, sex-drenched and doused in lust.

your lust slowly worn into a groove in the kitchen floor, long forgotten and forlorn.

No more fucking redaction. Full stop.

It is about meeting someone or knowing someone for whom the passion, the desire, the lust, the pull is so overwhelming that it is unavoidable, almost inadvertent. While at the same time, knowing other things would get in the way.

The most intense relationships [if you may even call them that -- affairs, more so] are the ones which you allow to take natural courses, never imposing deadlines or guidelines or structures or institutions upon them. Instead, allowing them to develop and unravel and reinstate themselves as they naturally and readily will, keeping the ebb and flow of passion and desire in the actual method of interaction.It has everything and nothing to do with physicality and a lack of attachment. In fact, the attachment is so intense that it can never remain constant because it would very certainly interfere with life itself.

These are the affairs that send you reeling with every moment of interaction, the ones wherein the world disappears, fades from view when you are between the sheets, pressed against the brick wall, prostrate on the grass of the Supreme Court of Canada. You are on your knees at the altar of desire and you dare not avoid it, but you equally dare not indulge too greatly. One can be consumed entirely by lust of this degree and kind.

Its classification is beyond anything you have ever experienced before [or will again].While those un-versed in the practice describe it as unattached and, in fact, de-tached, it is explicitly and entirely the opposite. The attachment is so fierce and so all-consuming that it could never maintain itself consistently, day to day to week to year or more. It must come in flames and go in fireworks…

I never regret what I have done. The only regrets I ever harbour are the things I did not do. Or, you know, the people.

This evening, my mother compared all the boys I’ve ever dated to octopi. I am not making this up. One offhand comment would have been humourous enough, but, instead, she continued to insist for the rest of the evening that I “knew what she meant.”

What does it mean when one’s mother tells you that you perpetually date cephalopods?

I am thoroughly convinced I would trade just about anything for one erotically-charged conversation with Mr. Leonard Cohen.

//I know how weird that is, don’t worry./

Finding this a full five years after it was written makes me a horrible person, doesn’t it? Apparently googling yourself pays off sometimes… five years later.

I am always the mistress and not the wife.

Ever the lover and never the date.

When I used to call her to talk about my indiscretions, I would wander around my neighbourhood in the middle of the night. I could not go home and talk in the warmth and silence there; he was asleep or, at least, pretending to be and always listening. So I was forced to stumble around, whispering and laughing as I pushed through snowbanks and blizzards and freezing mittens, with a metal phone pressed against a frostbitten ear, all for an ear to listen to the ridiculous tales. This is all that winter reminds me of now. Late at night, after a decent snowfall, all I want are indiscretions to call her up about. I crave the leaving of his house, laughing to myself for a moment before I whip out my phone to call her, never having to say what just occurred. She always knew. She never much liked it and never stopped telling me as much, but still, it was always entertainment. For her and for me, too. If only to have stories to tell, I used to laugh. If only.

Upon request, I begin to tell a story to k to cheer her up, about a past I-am-awful encounter [that is, arriving at Barrymore's with d, leaving halfway through with t]. In the midst of it, the very beginning, she looks questioningly at j, as the story sounds suspiciously like the beginning of our re-relationship. I laugh, no, this is another one. My life, sometimes, is one big repetition of relationships and reactions and non-actions. A tiger never changes her stripes. His joke, too [later], about ‘when would our anniversary even be?!’ Good point. I have no idea, nor care to quantify or qualify.

//researching later only to find out that when that event occurred, I had also watched storytelling for the first time… which we, coincidentally, had just rented to watch, alongside palindromes/