Though it may not be apparent to my casual acquaintances, there was a certain amount of truth in my last post. The breakup didn't exist, because Alyssa didn't exist. Actually... I met an Alyssa this week, but she was 6 years old and that's a little out of my age range. She did have a pretty name though and I was happy to use it here.

However, I have been writing poetry and drawing pictures, many of them coded, for a neighbor. She happens to read this blog, which I didn't really know. I guess this is a strange way to go about romance, but she was able to see that my last post was really more a statement of how strongly I feel for her than it was a bitter stab at romance. I guess you can call me a strange lot, and you'd be right. But that doesn't change things.

This whole thing opened up a can of worms though. She had a lot of questions about whether my past relationships have really been that violent. I told her truthfully, of course not. I mean, I've been through some rough patches, but I could never dream of the kind of drama I put forth in the last post. She asked me if I'm really prone to losing faith in relationships when things are less exciting. I told her truthfully, probably so. Maybe this is something I can work on, maybe it isn't, but it's fair to say that the death of more than one relationship I've been in has been the inability to stay interested.

I laughed when she asked whether my friends are really homophobic, because I didn't even know how to answer that. Maybe some of them are, but most of them aren't. I did tell her that general acceptance and respect for others is very important to me, and that the friends I keep tend to reflect this attitude. She asked if I'd ever *really* become a monastic, I said "I don't know".

Come to think of it, there wasn't much in the post that she didn't ask about. I guess I did too good of a job writing realistically, and she wanted honesty on all accounts. She asked where I hide my secret notebook, and I told her it's called Meta-Metta. She was skeptical, but I explained how unlike my technical blogs where I'm bound by public image to not stray 'too far' from the sanity mark, this place is one I can call my own. If I do a good enough job of mixing facts with fiction, information with noise, art with .... crap, that I have the freedom to say whatever I want. Those are my favorite types of secrets anyway, the kind that are right out in the open for all to see, but require a certain bit of extra knowledge to unlock them.

We finally got back around to the topic of my infatuation with her. This is something that had been going on for a couple weeks, but mostly in a way that could be described only as friendship. She asked what I really thought of her, and I tried to think it through: