I am determined that you not be my great love. I am determined to love another. To look into eyes which aren't yours and see myself reflected back--myself in my beauty, my pain, my essential sadness and joy. I will fall again and again into the arms of those who offer me some part of themselves. Some way to feel skin against skin. Tender. I will taste others' salt and know that I never tasted salt from your skin. I will mash a mango in its own skin and suck/slurp the pulp through a small hole at the apex. Then, I will tear it open, suck the pulp from the pit and inside skin. I will eat the mango and drink in its juice and not think of you but soley of the men who watch my lips peel pleasure from the golden fruit. A day will come when I forget to think of you when mangoes, or chess, or cafe R. comes up. That day is not today but it will come as I come under the quick fingers of men who eat with their's. Who share and command, who unashamedly talk around me without including me. At least here I understand that I am decoration--a bit of flesh cased in transparent black streaked through with silver thread. I will understand my sex in this context and not yours. I will dance for the band with my hips ringed with silver. I will think of those men and their desire for me. How I've felt thier passion. Felt them slide into me quivering with the gift we share. The third will come to me after the show and thank me for dancing and compliment me for sharing myself. My emotional tapestry will be complex, confusing, filled with unfulfilled longing--but, at times, the world will sing to me and I will find a soul within it who sings to me with the voice of the sacred lover and I will be swept into his life like water crashing on a cliff.

That day is not today but it will come.