09 February, 2002 - 5:04 p.m.

Hmm. Where should I start? The logical option would be at the beginning .. but like, where's the fun in that?

Then again, the logical approach would be the novel approach in my case - so I suppose starting at the beginning will be fine for this entry.

I was at tall, handsome, in-the-airforce guys' place down near the beach this morning (a bunch of them pool together and rent out a house for the weekend and spend weekdays up at the airbase), just hanging out with some of his friends because he's down south flying or something this weekend. It's nice to have a bunch of males who I can just sit around and be at such ease with again.

I used to have several groups that were like that, but for one reason or another, things always got kind of awkward, and I'd always get this foreboding feeling sitting in the pit of my stomach whenever I had to see them in a one on one or a just me versus the male chromosome situation.

I guess it's because these guys know that I'm off limits, and so there's no tension in the air of who's gonna get me in the sack first.

Umm .. that came out really wrong. I'm sure you know what I mean anyway. What I meant was that there's no need to worry about misread signals and stuff, so we can just chill out and be ourselves, instead of constantly looking in the mirror to see if our hair is messy, or our glasses are on crooked and whatnot.

Anyway, I was driving home, and sort of (but not really) on the way home from their place, I have to drive near(ish) the residence of he-who-won't-speak-to-me. I don't know whether it was the heat, or the fact that I'd had a great weekend so far, or maybe it was a combination of both - but I decided to grab the proverbial bull by its proverbial balls, and just make a surprise stop in there and say hi.

So I get there, and we talk for about an hour before I have to head back out to rescue some friends from the beach. He had to get ready to leave as well anyway. I think he was late to go check out some motorcycles or something.

My favourite moment was when we were standing out the front and saying goodbye. I was reflecting on the fact that he had allowed me the hour to spend with him. That he was running late because he hadn't told me to get out. That I had grown the spine to tell him about how I had felt when I'd found out that he'd been in an accident, and about the way I had found out .. through some vaguely worded recollections on his webpage .. but that's a story I should have told when it happened. The meaning behind it would be more or less lost by now.

But the moment that was by far and away my favourite of that short but sweet hour, was when I raised my arms up for a parting hug. It's a gesture that's been inbuilt into me whenever he's around, and sure, in the good old days it was always a given. These days however, it seems more like a defining moment between being accepted back into his life, or being told to bugger off in not so many words.

Maybe I'm being all too typical of a female and reading much further into it than its simple face value dictates. But it felt sincere. It felt like a "hey, things are tentative now .. but I'd like it if we could be friends again" kind of hug. And somewhere inside of me, somewhere within the person who was being engulfed by this 6'3 giant of a guy, there was this part of me that was flying with the birds. Soaring up somewhere high among the fluffy white clouds in that overly blue sky, and thinking ..

"maybe this is real."