My lovely wicked opera girl wrote the other night:

"I want to explore your body," my Older Lover said. "It's like a map to some foreign country I should have visited long ago." Why on earth has no man said that to me before now?

I remember saying that to her, lying there in the dark long after midnight, talking to her 'til the skies outside started to lighten. Reyka vodka-and-bitter-lemon on my lips, and her face in my mind's eye. I said it and I meant it. And it's an image I want her to hold in her own dreams in hotel rooms and on autumn midnight streets.

She made her own LastFM playlist for me. No one's done that before. I like the songs; I like the mood. I'll add the list to the Small Psyduck iPod. I want her to look at me on that park bench above the Met and sing Neko Case to me--- "Hold On, Hold On" is a given. But I'll have her playlist songs in my head, too. I've never had a girl do a playlist for me before. It matters--- it really matters:

1 Owen – Put Your Hands on Me, My Love 5:35
2 buildings breeding – beesting 3:25
3 Coconut Records – Easy Girl 2:17
4 The Good Life – Night and Day 3:29
5 Adele – Daydreamer 3:39
6 She Wants Revenge – Tear You Apart 4:44
7 Iron & Wine – Lion's Mane 2:48
8 Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Man 1:49
9 Aloha – If I Lie Down (Album Version) 3:41
10 The Get Up Kids – I'll Catch You 4:20

Details Matter. I always tell girls that. Always in telling Stories--- Details Matter. Dreams matter, too. And music. Music always matters. I'll play Lunascape for my green-eyed Perfect Co-Ed Victim on a winter's night and pull her close by her long university scarf and feel her slide gloved fingers through mine. And we'll walk through narrow streets in Milan or Krakow or even in the West Village and find shops that sell antique musical scores for her...and spend long afternoons at waterfront cafes while Scandinavian minimalist electronica plays.

We are maps, my opera girl and I. Maps to other, and unseen countries. I fall in love with ghostgirls; I always have. Laura is a ghostgirl for so many empty streets and half-lit train stations. But, too, she's a map of a territory I've known had to be there, past the mirror. I want so much to be the same thing for her.