8:32 p.m. - January 24, 2002
clear
This is quite a disappointing epiphany, I must say. Realizing that one is addicted to beauty. Simple, clear beauty and softness, so to speak. I mean, how cliched, right? I was at work today.... I'd been there for six hours already, so I had nothing to do.... I was sitting moonily in the back room behind some consignment tenor saxophones, inhaling the unique smell of valve oil and lacquer, and smiling stupidly as I thought about being in love someday, being in a secluded cottage with someone wrapped up in scratchy cotton sheets, naked, looking at.. I don't know.. the sunset. Whispering sweet nothings. The whole bit.
And I took a step back and looked at myself from above, this TV-like image in my head looking down at me, in a sixties hippie shirt and comfy baggy jeans, leaning back against the pile of cigarette-smelling coats and staring spacily across the empty room, dreaming about love. I thought; for Christ's fucking sake, you could make a movie out of this. Girl trapped in dead-end job at music store dreams of better places and better things. Tune in for the sequel, when an unexpected visitor turns up (played by Josh Hartnett, of course), comes to town and sweeps her off her feet!... or some such. And I used to try so hard to be unconventional.
I think I always had hoped to have some sort of weird fetish to set me apart from wanting the 'I love you' 'oh I love you too' shit that I kept hearing about. I wanted to enjoy bondage. I wanted to at least fantasize about having rape fantasies. But no, I never found it that appealing, not much, I would sit against the headboard thinking, now the man comes through the window... and instead of being aroused I got scared of the dark and wanted a sweet babyfaced lover to come hold me and protect me. Some outrageous sex machine I'm going to turn out to be. 'Honey, will you whip me with that piece of thread sitting over there?'
So I know now that I am more normal than I'd like to admit. I want somebody with smooth hands and moppy hair. Somebody who will be quick and cynical and wild in public and admit to me later that sometimes he gets tired out. Someone who doesn't think of sex in terms of how violent he can be and still have us both stand it. I wish I could fantasize about love being violent. But it's not appealing like that. All I can see right now is tenderness.
You could look in a teen magazine entitled 'What Girls Want' and find all of that. Which is what bothers me. I'm creative in all other senses of the word; why not this one? I should secretly want my lover to go postal when, say, his feet are touched and then try to beat me with a lamp. To pull an example right out of nowhere. Just.. I don't. I don't want any of that. There's so much drama in trying to find this and that, and him and her, and yourself, and what you want, that it seems exhausting to me to reenact that in sex.
I want someone I can touch noses with and who will set me on fire just by putting a hand on my waist. That's all it should take. Just a touch.
And so I discover, by way of these wants and these thoughts, that my addictions are really quite simple. Even disappointing. But pleasing to the eye. I want tenderness.
It's so clear.

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