A word of two from Mr Rollins...

“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.”

The last of the Johnny Walker.

Every relationship is different. With every new love comes new desires, new needs, new reactions. It's hard to learn from past mistakes when you are dealing with a unique entity... the love that you have right now, as opposed to the love that you had with so-and-so in your past. It also makes each relationship special; not bound by the same rules, the same ways of behaving and loving as those that have come before, and also no better or worse. I believe that there is an essential truth in that common phrase of new love "I've never felt this way before". Most of the time we dismiss such statements with an inward roll of the eyes and thoughts of "You said that last time" but repetition does not equal falsehood, especially when we are talking about what we feel. Our emotions are a slippery beast, we try to take a firm grip and look the wriggling creature in the eye; to name it, to understand it's nature but despite all of our efforts it rarely delivers on our expectations. Chameleon-like, it morphs and mutates in front of our very noses, responding to and reacting with the unique external and internal stimuli of the moment. Every man I have ever loved I have loved differently, the words we use to describe our feelings may be the same but the experience is inimitable. I cannot see how it can be any other way... each new love brings with it an entirely new set of variables; a different man, a different me, a different environment, a different history etc etc.

And so each relationship is a journey where we recognise the road signs but where the landscape is as unfamiliar as a foreign country. A pilgrimage of the heart to find the place where, at that moment in time, we need to be. An odyssey for our heimat.

(Heimat by Kelly Humphries)