1.

I am in Hollywood all week deconstructing my art collection.   There are piles of books on chairs, paintings stacked 5 deep.  Hooks on the walls.  Porcelain, silver and furniture all looking for a home and a price.  I am reduced to looking at all my beloved things for what they are worth and not the value they once had.   A dealer arrives from London to look and buys 8 pieces.   He buys the word works by Hamish Fulton found at auction some years ago.

He buys them immediately I tell him the price, so I’m sure I must have sold them far too cheaply.

Everybody seems very interested in a charming Richard Long mud work that I also bought at auction many years ago, that and a Gary Hume.

As homes are found for the artwork it is all at once hard and very, very liberating.  Now I just want everything to go.

Even if I kept it all, when I move back to Malibu, I’ll have nowhere to put any of it.  I’m desperate to travel light, just me and the little dog.

My instinct is not to own anything anymore, where as my previous desire was to own everything.   Somehow I traded people for things.

Which sadly brings me to my current heartbreak.

The truth is that when you choose to fall for someone who is already taken you only have yourself to blame.

I really wanted to sit here and blame him but as I let go of all my art and furniture and let it drift into the ether so I have to let him drift too.  There was a time when I did not know him.   There will be a time soon when I will no longer know him.

What brought on this sudden change of heart?

Well, yesterday I was with Jonathan my book dealer friend on Melrose Place and I meet a furniture designer, he has a huge jaw and a sunny disposition.  He is well dressed, intelligent, masculine (all the things my darling in NYC is) but Mr. Furniture is single.  He is not lying to his long-term beau about how much he loves them then telling me-and probably countless others-how much he loves me.  I met Mr. Furniture and I woke up.  I no longer wanted to be the mistress.  The other.

I suddenly owned up to one glorious fact:  I have self esteem!

Let me say that once more, in fact let me scream it from the top of the Chateau des Fleur!

I HAVE SELF ESTEEM!!!

2.

Oh LOVE, how seductive that word is, how my chest tightens, my loins gird when I hear that four letter word.

The first time I slept with Mr. Darling NYC, I was sure that he had spent the weekend with another-even though he assured me that he had not.  There was something bruised about his body, something already and recently taken.

How do mistresses do it?  How can they possibly justify being the ‘other’?  I have heard close, heterosexual male friends’ talk about how they maintain multiple lives, how they compartmentalize their wives and family from their mistresses/hookers/men.  Yet, there is a consequential theme-they are always surprised when the mistress falls in love, they are always surprised when the mistress falls in love.  When the mistress wants more, has feelings.  She cannot understand why the married man refuses to leave his wife for them.  Why?

Damn you Mr. Darling NYC for casting me in that role.  I want to live in the sunlight, I have no reason to live like a crack head in darkened rooms looking at pornography, gazing at the man I love jerking off when at any minute his girlfriend of several years might come bowling home.  Who would get the blame?  Not the innocent boyfriend, the younger guy who is powerless over the mean old gay sex addict.  I don’t want to be that bleating fool.  I have no reason to wait around for a man who cannot tell the truth to those he claims he loves.

Part cowardice, part conformity and a great deal of known comfort keep a man lying and cheating to those he says he loves.

Recently, every time I spoke to Mr. Darling NYC my heart felt heavier, I became agitated, my thoughts were dark and doomed.  It was so hopeless.  Such a waste.

I started thinking about the Big Dog and her crushed bleeding body on the street.  (I think about her like that everyday.)  Every day I am tortured by her dying in my arms and wish that I could have changed places with her.

Who would hold me in their arms and love me if I was crushed in the street?   Who would sit with me whilst I took my last breath?  Not Mr. Darling NYC because he would be making pasta for his true love.   His fiancé-minutes from meaningless vows.   Oh go to hell Mr. Darling NYC because you are a liar and a thief, you lie to her and you steal my heart.

Perhaps it is possible not to be afraid, perhaps its all one has.  I’ll tell him that..yes, he’ll know what I mean.   Mr. Furniture, the single guy who lives a mile or so away, the man I met yesterday, in the sun, on the street with no dark clouds on the horizon.  Unfettered, free and in love.

3.

There is a dream I occasionally have: I am necking a bottle of Montepulciano.  We are sitting beneath a leafy canopy in a wood outside Firenze; wild bore roasting in the open air.  If I started drinking again what would I be?  I have been thinking about that recently.  How long would it take to kill me if I started drinking?  I was a happy drunk-until I wasn’t.

When I first got sober there were so many people in my life who wanted me to start drinking again-including my lover at that time.  I am now a very long way away from those people who would say ‘call me if you ever start drinking’ because they were fascinated to see what I looked like fucked up.  Time has irrevocably separated us.  Now I am stranded with the idea of an unfinished party.

I am going to miss Mr. Darling NYC so much because he was my bad clandestine habit.  He was as much as I could get away with-until I couldn’t.

My mother stands before me in uncomprehending sorrow.

My dog is risen from her leafy grave.

Mr. Darling NYC tells the truth and liberates his soul.

My long dead father comes to me and tells me everything I ever wanted to know.