After all, he remains what he always has been. Which I knew, consenting to be blind-folded by love, but always keeping the metaphorical slit through which I peeked through constantly. It does not bode well for me. This paranoia, this hard-headedness, this cynicism about relationships. My mother tells me that I am naive. I am not stupid. I know what I get myself into. I consent to get my heart broken or to break hearts. I know the consequences, but be damned to them. I have this immature rose-tinted naviety that love and time will bloody conquer all obstacles. That whatever I have set my heart on, I can transform, transmute, transcend.

There was nothing binding us, except passion, lust and love. And when love dies, lust dwindles, and passion is slaked on an unobtainable object of desire, we are left with nothing. We were never friends. If we were, it was the illusion of one consenting to pull the wool over the other's eyes.

With his typical arrogance, he insists I do not know my own mind. And that draws the battle lines. When a girl says, "No," and a resounding one at that, and you say "Nay", then gird yourself well.

I do not care if you think you are right. It is my own mind that has been set, and I will not brook another's interference, especially one as obviously biased as yours. Moreover I do not care for the poisoned fruit of friendship, offered under the auspices of blatant emotional blackmail and the heavy warships of guilt. A wooden horse under the cover of darkness.

You wish to make yourself the martyr? I allow that I am the cold hearted bitch. You can play the martyr. But when you persist in inflicting self-torment upon yourself time and again and wanting the other to take responsibility for that torment, when I no longer wish to maintain contact with you.

It was a terrible thing to do. The abrupt severing of ties. But surely, surely, the signs were there. And even if they were not, there was no denying that my mind was made up. We remained friends until the terrible day you lost hope in reclaiming what you saw as your property.

I warned you explicitly not to read my journal, but you persisted, and now you wish to foist the blame upon me?

And after that you still wish to remain friends? And blame me for being wary of that poisoned fruit? With the evil that you saw placed squarely upon my shoulders? Who was it who circulated my email around the office to justify your illicit peek at my entry? Who?

I could be an owl. A grey owl endlessly whirling in a careen of mad hooting.

I did become for a while, one of the long string of seemingly mad maenads you strung your thin soul around.

I knew, I knew when I first met you. The smallness of you. I was, I admit, drawn to the little boy lost in you, the poor abused child, strung along by faithless women. I have a crack-addict's habit in men like you.

And now I suppose I must pay the price.

And sing my maenad song.