03 Jul 98

By Paul Ford

Breaking Up

Dear Reader,

I'm very unhappy with this entry, but don't know where to go with it. Please send me an edited, improved, or totally different version, and I'll post that, too. I'll post it with your name attached, or not--totally up to you.

pef

When I was sixteen or seventeen I believed a woman had spoken to me psychically. I was stretched out to the sky, atop the West Chester Municipal Garage, home from Milton Hershey School on Christmas break.

I was desolate, and a voice came to me. She spoke in emotions, not words, and asked me to stop weeping. She said I would grow up and out of my condition. She would wait for me, and watch over me.

I was full of shamanism, and felt convinced the voice was real, a person somewhere who knew me through time and across state lines. I vowed to keep my virginity for this invisible woman. I kept this vow for two years, but more because women didn't like me than for my chasteness. I waited and believed in the voice. I asked myself: is this her? when I yearned after a woman.

Four years later, I turned 21, and realized: I was crazy, and that woman was purely from my own mind.

It was hard to let her go, but she left peacefully, no longer at home.