"I Drew a Map of Canada, with Your Face Sketched on it Twice..."

I sit in full lotus on the grimy station floor, little white headphones in my ears... humming Joni Mitchell as I wait to board the London train.

I feel happy.




I am still leading a surreal life -- hovering between nations and suitcases (linen skirts and poetry). I feel content here, in this state of suspension -- more content to hover than to land.

But it seems I am landing -- gracefully, like a weightless dancer -- in the second land I've grown to love; Ariel has asked me to return to Toronto in October -- to love and live with him -- and I have agreed.




For several months now, I have been thinking about the nature of love -- feeling gratitude for my loves (past and present). I've grown so much with them, and in such unexpected ways -- just as I have also grown (in different but harmonious ways) in the spectrum of my solitude.




I'm agnostic, with no desire for illusions of god, fate, or destiny. I do not believe in "soul mates" -- cannot imagine that each person has only one partner they are somehow "meant" to find. I simply believe in the love, friendship, and trust that two people can mutually construct over months and years. I believe in passion -- and (atheistic) transcendence.




And I know of at least two men who feel like part of me -- who I love more deeply than my jagged tongue can say. Each man is so much of what I want (close friends... romantic lovers... intuitive artists... trusted companions...) and so much more than I had really hoped to find.




There is no right choice here -- and no wrong one.

The fallacy is in the choice itself: the insistence of monogamy, the dichotomy of "lover" and "friend," and the fear that imposes limits on ineffable love.




To the one I couldn't choose: I love you. I do. And I'm sorry...