Well. I have my practice opportunity. Lunch with j today. Plenty of spark. Fantasies start churning at once. This is exactly, exactly where I started with Marina. So this is my chance for do-overs. To be sensitive to the times of need, not in order to exploit them, but in order to back off, give room, cool down.

I want to have an affair. God, I so want to have an affair. I want *that* kind of validation, I want to be wanted, desired, thought special. And I want to be so special that someone will trangress for me, throw caution to the winds for me.

So there's two thoughts to carry carefully. The first is that this validation, which looks so solid and permanent in prospect, is in fact completely ephemeral, gone as soon as it comes. In fact I already have pretty much all the validation I would ever get from having the affair -- just in the sense of a mutual attraction. The sense that it's remotely possible. ("Oh how I ache for a part in a play I could say that I didn't want.")

The second thought to carry carefully, is that following out and having an affair would be nurturing, cultivating, the seeds of that validation's destruction. A real affair would become a matter of need and obligation and expectation -- all things that would eat out the heart of that validation, and leave me only hungry, hungry for more. To follow out would be to walk straight into the hungry ghost realm, where no food satisfies, no drink quenches.

Old enough, maybe wise enough.

Pray for steadfastness and clarity for me, O my reader.