There was a girl once at D-Land called YrMartyr who wrote about someone she loved: I want to fuck the sorrow out of your bones. That took my breath away when I read it. I can imagine a girl whispering it, imagine her eyes in half-light--- a bedroom, a darkened club, a balcony overlooking open water. I want to fuck the sorrow out of your bones. I can't begin to say how much I need a girl to say that to me.

It's gray and close outside this evening: rainclouds overhead, that heavy thick slow feeling just before rains in the Deepest South.

I read Stella's very long entry today at stelladellasera. It's an essay she wrote in response to a question one of her correspondents posed about how her life might have been different if Stella and her Lucia had been more isolated, if Stella and her Lover/Owner hadn't had friends and lovers and the support of the whole interlocking geometry of s/m circles and communities. It's a very wonderful entry. Some of the best and most heartfelt and introspective writing Stella's ever done. I'm a great fan of Stella--- she's always been deeply kind to me, and she's been a good friend. I want to send people to read her 25 July 08 entry--- Lissy at emigree, Jess at bella_sumision, Alessandra at bel_ebat, Ginny at ginny_mccoo, Ms. Flox at besideserato. And I want vur' much to hear what they'd think, to hear their thoughts about what Stella has to say.

Stella's first entry at stelladellasera was on 09 August 06. I went back this afternoon and looked at her first dozen or so entries. 09. August of the Year Six... I remember finding Stella's journal. Not right away, but sometime that autumn. I know that Stella and I were exchanging notes and e-mails by Christmas of the Year Six. I remember...the first time I read her entries. I was at the suburban library where I used to spend my evenings, and I do remember sitting there at the terminals in the library atrium and finding Stella. Not directly--- I found a note she left somewhere and linked back to her journal. She seemed bright and sexy and sad, and when I read her first few entries I was entranced. I'm just glad that Stella responded to my first notes.

I want to fuck the sorrow out of your bones... Stella at first was desperate to find someone like that. That first entry in August of the Year Six began:

I'm Stella. I'm twenty-five, female, divorced, good career, a free woman, a brilliant failure, a miserable success. A beautiful bitch. I know I am, I know I'm beautiful, and I know they call me a bitch. Ask my ex. And it's true, I am a bitch. A bitch who cries herself to sleep for the want of the man who can beat the bitterness out of her, beat me and fuck me and make me scream and then make me lick my blood from the whip. And love me in spite of what I am. Or maybe even because of what I am. If I'm lucky.

I've known what I am for more than half my life, and I am no fucking closer to being what I want to be, in fact I'm further away than ever, in spite of, well, in spite of everything. I'm not a slave, except in my heart. I'm still living a lie, a clean cozy comfortable lie, with occasional flashes of the beautiful awful truth. I'm still lost in the suburban wilderness of a life I don't want to live, wondering where to find the life I was meant for. The man I was meant to belong to. The cage I was meant to be imprisoned in. The slavery I was meant to surrender to. The whip I was meant to kiss. Instead I am a prisoner of my own well-furnished freedom. Fuck me.

That's how Stella began at stelladellasera. That entry ended with something else that made me catch my breath:

Chain me to the moon and make me your evening star, you whose face I have only glimpsed in my dreams, and I will shine for you alone in your heaven until all the stars fall from the sky.

Right now I'm imagining Lacey or KdG at k_navit watching me read that for the first time. I know what they'd have said. They've each known me more than half their lives. They've have each just smiled and realised that I'd be completely taken by that entry--- and especially by the last line. I'm a romantic, in some hopeless way. Lacey on a Gulf Coast beach one September night in her teens, lying back topless in the sand in just a black miniskirt, drinking champagne with me, watching the planes fly over from the naval air station: You want it to be too perfect. If you're in love there has to be all the romance and all the melancholy and absolute devotion...And you'll always fall in love with words first... Lacey was right about me then--- she's always been right about me. I fall in love through words, and I'll always lose myself in dark romance.

GreenTeaLeaf at Diaryland wrote once a few years ago about sitting in tears alone at a bar on some Australian afternoon, and kissing and then going home--- no names, only a handful or words ---with a stranger who asked her gently why she was crying.

If I'd met Stella there in that second week of August of the Year Six, if I'd seen her sitting alone in some shadowed bar in an imaginary city, I'm not sure what I'd have done. Stella wrote on 10 August 06 that:

Stella is not my real name, but "stella della sera" is the evening star in Italian. I'm not Italian either, but I'd like to be, and I'm as alone and lonely as the evening star. And tonight I'm making a wish upon a star. I've known since I was twelve or thirteen that all I ever wanted to be in this life was a sex slave to the right master. Funny idea for a twelve-year-old? Ha ha. I've tried laughing it off. I've tried erasing the desire with denial and shame and therapy and alcohol and chastity and promiscuity. It's like scrubbing off a scar. And alcohol and slutty sex? Like putting out a fire with gasoline. I've tried telling myself I would outgrow it all, I would leave it behind like a bad teenage crush, I would find a real life and a real man and a career and a family and forget this awful impossible fantasy life that leaves me wet and panting and alone almost every night. Almost. These are all lies. I am such a fucking liar. A good liar, a brilliant liar. But not quite good enough.

One more thing about my face. I photograph well, almost well enough to hide the pain and emptiness in my eyes. I lie with every laugh. But I can see the pain in almost every frame. It's starting to show. Soon everyone will be able to see it. I'm running out of lies.

If I'd known that--- or if I'd seen the pain in her eyes ---I'd have wanted to speak to her. Stella always addresses me by my academic title these days. But in that summer I'd have introduced myself simply enough: Eduardo de Guzman--- the Hokkaido De Guzmans. Eduardo-kun. And I'd have smiled. Or so I tell myself. Stella is blonde and five-nine and slender-lovely and bright and intense. I might have seen her looks and her sorrow as armour. I might have known that I'm not someone who can whip the bitterness out of a beautiful girl. I own riding whips; I've used them on girls. I know how to use ice and candle wax and blindfolds and crafted objects on a girl. I've drawn blood before. But I'm not the kind of figure Stella was masturbating over in her teens. I can love a girl not just in spite of her tastes for self-destruction, but very much for those tastes. I know that. But I'm a flaneur. I'm a dilettante. Diletto--- I do things out of a sense of intellectual delight. I'd never have the emotional commitment to be the figure Stella was seeking that summer.

I very well might not have been able to speak to her. Kelsey at clush is now a certifed combatives instructor at an army base in South Korea. She writes that The defining characteristic of a warrior is her willingness to close with the enemy. I agree with that. I really do. There was a time when I'd have thought of myself as chevaux-leger, as a hussar who'd have to ride in and close with the sabre. But I have to be honest with myself. At twenty-five or twenty-six, I'd have closed. In August of the Year Six, I might only have watched the blonde girl at the end of the bar and speculated about her in the pages of my Moleskine.

Still...if I did have the nerve to close, to live up to the Queen's Royal Lancers tie Stella urged me to buy last October...I like to think that I could have sat there with Stella and ordered vodka-limes and talked long into the evening. I'm a De Guzman of the Hokkaido De Guzmans; I was raised to be polite and listen. I've told Stella that any time she and I are in the same city, she has drinks and conversation for the asking. She does have my keitai number. In August of the Year Six, I'd have signalled for drinks and tried to be a listener. I'd have hoped that Diana Krall would be on the sound system--- or perhaps Cocteau Twins.

Would I have thought Stella would take me back to a hotel room? That's an awkward question. The girl at GreenTeaLeaf took her stranger home. DRL in Houston would certainly have done it. I'd like to think that Lissy at emigree would've gone home with an Older Man who'd spent the evening listening to her in a silent bar. I'd have gone, of course, if Stella had ever asked. I couldn't have been what she wanted or needed. I couldn't have been anything even like the more vanilla men she'd had after her divorce. I'd have gone and done...what I could. But I wouldn't have asked. I couldn't have given her the things that Ms. Flox at besideserato regards as requisites for any male lover. But I'd have gone. Room service could send up champagne; the bottle would make up for some of my failings.

Lacey agreed with me once that my key skill was my ability to construct stories. I've always talked girls into bed. Not looks, not body, not the "iron hard cock" Ms. Flox rhapsodises over. Just...talking. You make girls think that they can do anything, Lacey once said to me. If I could've done anything to be of service to Stella that summer, it would've come from what I could say, from whatever it was that I could've constructed for her out of words.

Stella in the Year Eight--- Stella as a girl with a Lover/Owner to whom she's offered up her life ---has a place in a whole interlocking geometry of s/m communities and networks: Island, Hexagon, Chateau. I read her entries about summer in NoVa amid the geometries of her life and realised that she's grown and changed and become...deliriously happy. I'm glad for her--- always.

I realised, too, that the whole Chateau scene would've been No Country For Eduardo-Kun. Single males aren't welcome at any sex-themed events. That's a given. And my real fear would be that if I walked in, some more usual Chateau male--- someone like Stella's Dante or Brunetto ---would've noticed me and assumed that I was part of the catering staff.

Still--- 09 August 06. I'm glad that Stella has found a life and found someone who loves her deeply. Two years--- almost two years that Stella has been writing her. I've been reading her since autumn of the Year Six; I hope to be reading her down through the years.

I'm still thinking of YrMartyr's line though: I want to fuck the sorrow out of your bones... There's no girl who'd do that for me. I take it as statement about my own value. Not in any of the nighttime cities, not anywhere with open water, not in any diner on the edge of the high desert--- no girl thinks I'd be worth that.

I'm always obsessed with the architecture and geometries of sharp, stark collarbones and ribs and hipbones. I'd like to think that some girl in the night wants to do what YrMartyr did for the lover in her entry. I'd like to be worth that. I miss the touch of a girl's fingers on my ribs and hipbones and cheekbones. I miss feeling sorrow drawn out and cauterised by passion. And I'd like to be able to draw sorrow out of a girl's hipbones and eyes. I'd like to have a girl lead me out of a darkened bar and take me by the hand to her room. Even if no one falls in love with me, I'd like to be able to offer passion and comfort and belief. I miss that more than I can say.