2002-03-26 - 10:25 a.m.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

—C. S. Lewis

Do you know me? Do you think you do? Do you have any idea what is inside me...what makes me feel and think and act? Can you even begin to fathom the mess that is me...the strange entanglement that controls the very essence of my being?

I want to close off - to retreat to things that do not hurt..to close my life, my love my heart to those that would be careless in their actions towards them. I want to hide deep in a cave of solitude where no force can make my heart shatter like the laugh of one I once loved can...I want to escape to some reality where the cry of a child does not make me bleed where the deceit of a kindred does not tear my soul where I can be safe. But there is no such place for me to hide.

And even if there were...

I would shrivel and die there for the very essence of me which I hate with such passion for its vunerability is what makes me live with vitality and passion and gives me joy and smiles and laughter. It is a cruel paradox.