It really ought to be sold in tiny glassine packets, priced exorbitantly and slipped from palm to sweaty palm.

It's that good.

Cranked heart rate, dilated pupils. Tension. God-awful wonderful tension. Gum-snapping, knuckle-cracking, unabating.

I'm like a tuning fork, or a speed freak... vibrating at an impossibly high frequency for an impossibly long time.

It's simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating. My batteries are being depleted as rapidly as they're being juiced; a slight fluctuation in current would be deadly. I'd be over and done with, spurting acid all over the whole works or slowly droning down into oblivion.

I've written about it extensively... attempting to word it into existence, straw into gold. Off the paper, it's so much richer and more multifaceted. Words are Diamonique on the Home Shopping Network. This is the real deal, a little chip of brilliance shining in the palm of your hand. You have no idea how it got there; it seems way too good, way too beautiful. Armed thugs from the DeBeers Corporation are bound to show up to repossess it at any moment. You can't clench it in your fist to hide it... that would involve taking your eyes off of it.

So you sit, you squirm, you swallow (and it's softer than sand and harder than sugar), you feel gratitude and terror trickling down your back in equal measure.

You hide a tiny part of yourself in a pale blue eye, radiant verging on radioactive, the brightest thing in a cozy dark room, and you pray.

Don't blink. Don't blink. Don't blink...

Labels: Dating/Mating, The Compleat Thumbscrew