No resemblance to persons living or dead.

Something has happened between us. I don’t know what. She called it a catalyst. I called it a cauterization. Something about her last visit changed the way she feels about me. When we were together before, when everything was so compressed. She knew I wasn’t going to stay there so she compensated by holding as much of my time and attention as she could. Of course I let her and indulged/enjoyed myself. I had other things I could have done, I had many other circles I could have flown in, I suppose. Hers was the most enjoyable and comfortable by far. When it came time for me to leave, she must have felt truly madly jealous. She was being left for another woman, as if she wasn’t enough. I could have come to her room smelling like a gallon of whisky and a dozen women and she wouldn’t be angry unless it had taken away from the time she wanted to be with me. She has told me that she cried much of the summer after I left. I didn’t want to leave, but I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. My partner and my father were there to retrieve me. With no job, no financing, and little hope of making it on my own, my only choice was to return home. Of course home was with my Love. My Love and I had made plans (most of which I’d already fucked up,) we were going to live together again after this long trial. The intimate compression of the preceding year had distracted my affections too far to make what my Love and I had before to remain stable. Sancha had left indelible marks. I still carried on correspondence with Sancha, after I left. We wrote each other as opportunity provided. My Love and I tried to make our life together. (“Dead stars still burn” screams over the headphones now.) We had Hopes and Plans. But “the lies and deceit gain a little more power” (to quote someone.) We shared/shed too many tears. Sancha’s understanding of my Romeo/Stray Cat complex and my acceptance of her near-insecure need for love was still there as much as my desire for her intellectual energy and sensual explosions. Now, so much time has passed. I should have drunken away all the pain, but it still surfaces. I’ve lost both women, yet Sancha still wants me near. “I don't know how things would be anywhere near natural after what we've already had and done. As natural as they would be for us.” she says. So I should move to San Francisco to be closer to her, so she can visit me as she pleases and we can let whatever happens happen. I’m left here in Vegas with the baggage of Love and Life weighing heavily on my shoulders and she says I should seek Sanctuary on Golgotha.

Visions of the City keep hitting me, driving over the Bay Bridge in a clapped-out station wagon with Roz and Erica a decade ago. My first visions of the City, it’s shrouded in cotton-fluff clouds as if we are fighter pilots-locked on target-delivering our fiery payload on the unsuspecting masses.