Hello dear love, up in the aerie at dusk; here's the view from the westfacing aerie window. My mind is blank. What did I do today? A bug darts by. I have a fleece settled over my shoulders. My fingers move on the keyboard. The keys mechanically clatter. I backspace to insert the modifier. This is not exactly being very Zen, is it, writing about the edits I think of doing as I'm doing them. I washed my hair this morning. It feels nice and clean and full and frames my face and falls in soft waves to my shoulders. Ice clinks in my glass. I sent up a round of heat so for a time the pipes clacked and clanged. They're remarkably efficient at warming up the room very quickly. And so now I've shut off the heat. I check for your page hits. Maybe it's you, probably. Most page hits, I've decided, are you, except a few that obviously aren't. I have all sorts of thoughts, that I feel uncharacteristically reticent about. Pain, frustration, ridiculousness. I think about 1.0 and I think that even if he were free & clear and suddenly available, he would never pick me. I don't know why, but I just don't have any illusions about that. A compartmentalizer, as Chris Matthews correctly described JFK, and so I'd perked my ears. And it occurred to me that in some ways - the Aphrodite in me - I'm not unlike Jackie, though of course I'm not Jackie, not like her. Or am I? JFK & Jackie. They were mythological beings who worked on our consciousnesses as we were growing up, six-and-a-half years apart. But then today I flipped on the TV at lunch, and there was Gregory Peck, who I'd had a massive crush on when I was a girl - which I mentioned to D, we were eating lunch together, and D said he understood completely, Peck is just ultimate crush material, of course. I don't quite recall the title of the movie - Purple Something. Purple Road? Purple --- perhaps it ends with "ain" - because D quipped that he didn't know that Peck had starred in Purple Rain. [Ed: The Purple Plain]  Anyway, I was just flipping channels, and there was Peck in his luminous wonderfulness gazing down at an alluring misty-eyed Asian woman - Vietnamese? Thai? - and she seems to be an Untouchable Annabel Lee exotic type to his dreamy military-uniformed self. They chastely hug, in this brief scene I caught while flipping channels, but clearly The Passion Flows Deep, and I wondered why they didn't kiss. In this black-and-white film, which I guess to be from maybe the early 1960s [Ed: 1954] - was it too risqué for a mixed-race couple to kiss? Probably. The film, I'm sure, predates Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. But the snippet of the film I saw was acutely & immediately painful to me - I watched for only a minute or two, until I really couldn't bear it any longer. And then it was the top of the hour - 1:00 - and C.R. was on. It is uncanny how when we sit down to eat, D and I - and I need the TV on, because I cannot abide the sound of chewing - it is almost always "five-of" or "twenty-five" after. I've remarked on it, and D's noticed it too - and it's completely unplanned, it just seems to keep working out that way. And that's how I caused myself some inadvertent, ridiculous, driveby pain, seeing that glimpse of Gregory Peck with his "Asian Ideal."

I don't quite get why it all still gets at me so. Maybe because I'm just so frustrated here. It's a strain to live this way. Things are so strange between D and me.

I don't know, sweetheart. This is a pretty accurate driveby snapshot of where my head is at the moment. Sometimes when I emotionally plummet when I happen to go over a broody deep end thinking of 1.0 - I'm able to cheer myself up to think of you. Actually I'm quite serious about that. It's as though I "self-medicate" with thoughts of you. Because I view you as, towards me, constant and abiding. You're unavailable, but I guess I get the feeling that if suddenly you were free & clear - that you would pick me. Now maybe this is all false & delusional as all the rest of it - and yet - well, anyway, I just find you extremely, extremely genuine in that way. There's no way you would have picked me lightly, I don't think. I can't imagine it.

Speaking of Dorian Gray darling (apropos an apposite page hit) - to quote or paraphrase Oscar Wilde - a memorable line I remember from a college course on Aesthetics taught by a tiny woman who in her Viennese infancy had sat on Freud's knee - the best picture of a fuzzy picture - is a fuzzy picture.

And so yes, dear love, here, tonight, is my fuzzy picture to you. I can sense that things aren't easy for you either -

Many kisses. You are very dear to me -