It doesn't get any stranger than this. It's as though the planet now has three equally powerful poles, each charged highly positive, and I am sitting still with my arms wrapped around the dog named Ling trying to prevent implosion, trying to hold my negative center intact. Worlds are about to converge and collide in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where Doc Holiday used to soak his bullet wounds in the healing mineral waters. And to lend his own interpretation, Van Morrison's co-incidentally singing about feelin' stranded on his own little island with his eyes wide open. The radio station here is fantastic.

"What are your plans?" he asked me. I have none. I am free. I have absolutely nowhere to go, nowhere to be, no-one to see, no-one to be, in fact, perhaps I've become nothing. Is that possible? I've become nothing. Yes, then I am free. "I was joyously hopeful you might be available to accompany me back to Santa Fe," he said. So much for freedom. I've brilliantly restricted that by falling in love with the dog named Ling. And what the hell are you doing in Glenwood Springs, anyway?! As always, he's vague as ever. "Wanted to get out for a ride. Been wanting to all summer. Haven't had a chance til now. Telluride is beautiful, by the way." No kidding.

I'm supposed to sleep tonight knowing that "the man who rocks my world," as Brett empty-guttedly calls him, is ten minutes down the hill somewhere nibbling on fajitas, wondering what I'm doing for the rest of my life.

I'm in a dangerous place. Another crossroads--this time no time for reaction. Part of me wants to call Ron and scream from the mountaintops, as he said I'd need to do if I wanted to come "home," even though another part of me knows that place no longer exists, even though I dearly miss my life in Toronto. Part of me wants to fall in love with Brett and Ling. In two weeks I've discovered it would be easy to do. Very easy... My newly blasted open heart, though, tells me I need to dive in to what's occupied it for the last five years. What's prevented it from loving fully and from giving everything. If it turns out that he is, indeed, the love of my life, I have nothing to lose. If it turns out that it was all an illusion, I have nothing to lose.