Dear Santa Muerte

Love is like this terrible thing, right? Like in the sense that Yahweh is terrible and the greatest One Above All. Being in love is like living next to the ocean: it gives life and its constant motion soothes, but one really bad day and it'll wash your house away.

That is my way of prefacing that I broke up with my girlfriend, who made me feel so rotten. I met this lady and, well, she kinda asked me out. I didn't have a reason to say "no," soooo ...

No. Let's start this again. This girl asked me out as I was about to break up with my girlfriend. I said no, because I can't be a person who cheats ever again, even if the love is gone and I feel justified in it. Refuse to hurt someone like that again, lose that much respect for myself again. But I asked her out again once the deed was done. And we went on a date and ... well, it was a little magical.

No. Stop. It was really magical. There's the narcotic feeling of touching a person for the first time, right? I won't discount that. But meeting someone whose understanding you have, without having to explain, it's so nice. It's nice not to feel like I'm taking up too much space. Her lips are nice and I want to kiss them. She's tall and funny and beautiful. And I'm supremely scared of how much I like her.

I lit two candles to Santa Muerte. It seemed appropriate, really. I helplessly fall in love with death, and then I ask death for help with love. Her intervention was much appreciated.

I'm used to dating as a butch guy. Try to pursue with clear intent but without so much energy as to appear crazy and desperate. Make strong gestures while leaving enough ambiguity to make the other person fill in the gaps with their imagination. I'm off script and in a completely different country right now, something which leaves me eternally grateful and awfully tense.

I can't tease apart my desire to replace the phantom limb of my recently-dissolved relationship and my feelings for this new lady. I miss what I had, that field of flowers which bloomed in my heart for Leigh Holmes, the future I wanted to build with her, the love I still have for her that seems to be unable to get over that hump. I worry that the feeling my new flame ignites is not a desire to be with, but one to consume; to have, never able to be divested of. To erase the hurt. To fill up the empty spaces.

Also I would like to taste her neck.

Seriously, thank god no one reads this.