June 22

Yesterday climbing until I could hardly walk- Nick regaled me with his tale of tragic love which quelled my fantasies about having my way with him in an instant, his resemblance to Dirty Rotten Jack being far too pronounced for my liking. Or maybe it was just the fact that he was hanging out the Access Denied sign (see? I can't just have a pure sex fantasy). I came home and fell immediately unconscious and dreamt about him: he had invented a very advanced kind of artificial intelligence which had an aesthetic sense. I said, they'll cut your head off for this, and he said (very proudly): No they won't. They'll hunt it. The computer (or whatever it was) liked the poetry of Basho and had built a fountain with some of his verses inscribed in the stones.

Then I dreamt I was a terrorist and two other women and I were going to burn down a dam. We spent a day dragging pieces of brushwood onto the dam wall while the dam guardians watched us from their sentry boxes behind barbed wire, doing nothing. It was incredibly high and I was scared of falling to the point of paralysis: below there was nothing but a vertiginous surge of jungle where we had to crawl about looking for wood. Afterwards I was euphoric at having survived my own terror, but as I was coming home a car pulled up beside me and a woman in a grey suit shot an arrow at me that administered me a shot of truth serum. They drove away and I crawled into somebody's garden (full of bright tulips)- determined that the woman in the car wouldn't have the benefit of my involuntary honesty, I went down some steps and knocked at the door and asked for sanctuary before blurting out the whole story.

This morning I had a message from Marcin who has provisionally booked a ticket for September 2. I felt instant relief and realised that when he has a visa and I know exactly when he's coming I will allow myself to feel something other than terror, doubt and indiscriminate lust for other men. I know that I'm luckier than I probably deserve and maybe that's why I can't allow myself to quite believe that everything will be alright. Hearing Nick's story (in which he exhibits deep interest and a desire to commit to a woman who has been demanding this for years, on the occasion of her meeting somebody else) I thought again about the pathological need to get what you can't have precisely because it's not available to you, and decided ( aided by a combination of will and logic) that what I have is indeed what I want, and will continue to be so for quite a while.