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[jholloway.livejournal.com]

"Your lover is awakening."

He didn't stay for me to ask which one, but I suspect he meant something else. They told me they saw my face in the wood of a tree, which seems a strange thing. Would my lover look like me? Then again, they also saw Rosalba. Given the gibberish my little clue has turned into, who knows what they really saw? And so here I am, painting like before, waiting to see if this absent-minded prayer has any effect.

Nemoa once told me that it would be easy to imitate me: my face, my voice, my body. In retrospect, I'm astonished I didn't ask her to do it then and there. I mean, I suspect it wouldn't have been quite right, but who could pass up that opportunity just once?

Lover is an odd word. I use it for all the people who share my bed, but it's hardly appropriate for any of them. Well, these days. Old friends, mostly, from the days when I prowled like that all the time, eager to find out what every pretty smile in the room tasted like. I would still like to, but I feel so slow these days. I go to work -- and how's that for a strange thing to say? -- and I have meetings and I hire young people to promote my brand and, I mean, of course I take them to bed, that's only normal, but somehow ...

... somehow I'd rather be here, watching some kind of meaning coalesce from the unformed nuance of my mind. Or no-mind, as the case may be. Somehow that pleasure, however sweet, no longer seems worth the effort of pretending that I can keep up with the constant spin of who's dating who and who's married to who and who likes this one but doesn't like that one. My old friends understand, and when we kiss, they tell me the truth, and in the morning, well ... at least they agree not to lie. A welcoming quiet: a little like opium, a little like this.

Mmmm. I should bring someone here, here to this spot I've chosen essentially at random to serve as the temple of my unspecified new religion, this unlikely ground zero.

All around me the thorns are dark, and they smoulder with a sullen fire that neither bursts into bright flame nor sputters out altogether. I think as I move my brush that the ink that spreads and soaks and dries -- almost too fast to see -- on the soft paper is like the shadow that flows and flickers between the branches, the same that pulses and coils around the stamp over my heart.

Slow and sluggish but I feel something waking up; something that I never knew was sleeping, or maybe something that dulled and died with Velvet and Mac and Neve and Temperance ... even poor little Ella.

Perhaps that is what he meant.

Or perhaps he's just a talking coyote.