Certain kind readers have decided of late that I write well about affairs of the heart, which have at times played a considerable part in this log.
A few people have expressed surprise that I have manifested a healthy interest in sexual pleasures and the acute physical attraction aroused in me by a number of women, only to reveal that I have been celibate for a dozen years, largely out of choice.
To the most intimate of friends, I've privately explained of late some of the reasons for this apparent contradiction and self-denial. The truly Faithful 5 ¾, who have followed one or two adventures recounted here with an alert and constantly surprising interest, must, to some degree or another, work it out for themselves.
But one or two of them are more experienced and wise in the games people play, especially men and women, than I've ever pretended to be.
In recent weeks, one Lady E joined a little list of characters increasingly well known to regular readers, ranging from bloghero Yang to the Wildcat, from the Literary Lion to the Apprentice Dragon. And, of course, the Kid.
Particular interest has been shown by close and distant friends and Factory hands alike in Lady E, especially since I shared part of a true story which has since been referred to by a handful of such people as "the Kiss".
Indeed, at the Factory, the occasional colleague has expressed a mild but real irritation at the outrageous fashion in which I have decided that the unanticipated explosion of a fragmentation bomb, which scored a direct hit on the kernel of my being and was followed by a series of aftershocks, is a matter of infinitely more importance than pressing incoming news bulletins and urgents about the outbreak of yet another battle in a place called Bukavu on the Democratic Republic of Congo's border with Rwanda.
It may be a huge failing, but in the past few days I have been almost blind to the fact that a new conflict, very closely resembling many years of other murderous struggles somewhere once known as the "heart of darkness", is far less boring than a personal encounter.
A meeting set fair, in my current disturbed frame of existence, to be the fulcrum of my life, the moment where all previous nanoseconds of breathing and feeling and reflecting and dreaming have been illuminated and found their meaning.
It is true that the often untold brutality our species perpetrates on itself and the certainty that thousands of people are now going to die of starvation if not directly of "ethnic cleansing" in another rarely highlighted part of Africa -- Sudan's Darfur region -- is of greater significance in the history of humanity than one individual's meeting with another and the gradual dawn of understanding that the other person is the very reason he was born.
Yet such things happen.
It's one of life's best-kept secrets.
I believe, in fact I now know for sure, that the explanation of all things conceivable to us lies, in English, in one-four letter word. In French, five letters will say it. Neither language is adequate.
I know, equally for certain, that when any one of us has the astounding luck to be awake enough to recognise that other, out of millions, and also to understand with heart, head, blood and guts and spirit that the other person is it, the only one, always was and will be, then that's well worth a sleepless night or a week of them, a complete re-evaluation of your whole life, and allowing events in the rest of the world to take a back seat.
This has happened to me.
I sought wise counsel and have been given sound advice.
I have learned that it is perfectly possible not to believe in God and still be certain that some things are so sacred that you only know it when you find them.
I know that it would be absolute folly, crass disregard for almost all the rules and conventions of daily life, to tell someone you thought to be a total stranger just a very little while before that in them, you have met the other, who is your future in as much as "normal" notions of time have anything to do with it.
To those who gave me sensible and excellent advice, many thanks. Most of it was common sense.
But common sense ceases to apply, reason becomes meaningless, questions pointless, analysis futile and hesitation absurd when your whole being knows that the other must be told of what has happened to it and asked whether she (or he) finds even the remotest echo at their own core.
At such times, you have to stake everything on trust.
The risk has to be taken because the outcome just might be a gift, an opportunity, an opening beyond price. And forever a miracle in the wake of one you never had the slightest right to expect.
At which point, good readers, the lady must leave you. She has a life entirely of her own and must go very far for a few days to pursue it, in her own time, her own space and her own way.
And she must disappear from this journal.
Because she is real.
She exists.
I have found her.
If ever I knew how to pray, believed in something perfectly unfathomable to pray to, beyond all hope and far beyond every dream I've had, then my profoundest prayers have been answered.
Since she has told me, cautiously, "Yes, I'll play," the most perfect game of my life begins and the only possible first move is forwards. Never entirely alone again. Not while either of us breathes.
That's also part of what a kiss can do, but what lies behind that kiss and how we choose to play this marvellous game can be nobody's business but our own.
So, the lady vanishes.
But do I have news for the Kid!
Real news.
You never find the like in the papers.
2:12:02 AM link 
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