Today SHE showed me something perfect, something she had helped create, something she had high, high hopes for. Something tiny and golden, elfin like, something with dark inquisitive eyes, eyes exuding a seething but vulnerable innocence, furious little poppet jewels on top of a cute button nose.

This little something in a picture, standing rigid, young and already proud, glaring with a hawk like disdained intensity, bright orbs cruelly transfixed… yet she looking so adorably into the camera from under a bouquet of sunshine baby curls.

Soon she showed me her other perfect things, three others in fact… that she’d also helped create, two with him and one with another from the past. They were standing together, arm in arm so glorious in the sun…all four of her perfect young things.

At first I thought it was she in the centre, tall and slim, elegant like an hourglass figurine, hair identical, long, sleek and black as pitch.

Refined and tall, this was in fact her eldest daughter, long dressed in aqua blue, her mother’s true mirror image. It took me a real moment to realise it wasn’t actually her.

‘Oh my god, is that Jen?’ I said. By now I knew all their names.

‘Yes, that is Jen.’ She said.

‘Tall as you.’ I said.

‘Yeah, tall as me,’ she said ‘but only just, and now only because she’s just bought her first heels this week.’ She said then laughed, that laugh I long to, but will never hear.

A laugh in text, that I will never in reality… ever hear*sighs*.

All this and what came before with her was virtual you see, all part of an online chat room theatre. A fantasy where everything can be done or said without sincerity.

Hypocrisy does not exist here; sanctimonious preachers can be dammed in the same breath for the crimes they protest against… and get clean away, all because this is just a game, in an online chat room.

Be new here at your own peril, the rules are not written or shared by the old hands, oh no that is bad form. They who sit high up with the gods will stand back in the shadows and cackle as predators loom, and babes tremble and stumble to their doom.

But anyway…

We’re back here now, a month or so after a performed confession, where a single upwardly moving, motivated, but lonely young woman, has just told me she is in fact a lonely wife in a dying marriage with four kids.

This is a month where my forgiveness and sympathy, was replaced by my suspicion and accusation, only for my weak forgiveness to return.

Her unconvincing explanations, totally outweighed by my desire and the fear of losing all contact with her.

Pain with her, unbearable pain without her. So to survive, all doubts, questions, revenge and repercussion were bundled up and put clumsily to one side.

And for the sake of peace and us having something to continue forward with, I humoured and nodded at her act, an act attempting to modify and present reason, for the dreadful things she had done.

‘There never was going to be an us,’ she said, ‘I mean I thought you knew that from the start.’

And that is true… at the start that is, but things can happen and things can change.

‘I mean I thought I could flirt safely with you, because like me you were adamant you’d never want to meet anyone.’ She said.

And again that was and is still true, but I remember her ground rules in case of events, rules that she’d conveniently forgotten and hoped I had too.

And in any case, someone like me never expects to enthral or catch the attention of someone like her.

At the beginning of our thing…


‘I flirt and tease,’ she’d said, ‘ sometimes I go too far, and to be honest I have fallen for the man.’

‘I know, I know… it’s so easy to do and I too have fallen for the woman.’ I’d said.

‘Well to avoid that, I think either of must say to the other, if they think their feelings are getting too strong.’ She’d said.

‘Sound thinking,’ I’d said, not realising what was coming up a head.

And so without ever meaning it to happen, it did. And instead…

‘I want you,’ I said one night when full of agonised desire. ‘I'm sorry, but even though I’m ashamed; I am because of plain old primal lust…gasping to get my hands on you. And my feelings are intensifying beyond control for you.’

Expecting horror and a request for no more contact and of course instant rejection, instead I got this...

‘I want you too,’ she said. ‘ I want you too,’ words all in text, but words resounding and echoing in my dumb head. ‘I want you too, of course I do stupid… I lie awake thinking of your hands and mouth tracing a path all over my aching body, my body that aches for you.’

Wow so what was a boy to do? Oh boy these weren’t the rules, how could she or I escape, when we both ignored the rules.

But again that was then, and this is nearer now…

‘This is not an excuse,’ she’d said. ‘ By all means hate me and never talk to me again, but I honestly thought I was immune to falling this way again, and taking this kind of fantasy too near the edge.’

She then spoke of a husband, whose adoration she could not return.

‘I will not and cannot leave him… but I need something, something to make this existence bearable, a fantasy, a game, escapism. Call it what you will, but I need an outlet to express, to vent something that has been slowly suppressed for ten years. You having the same stance as me…well it almost seemed like fate had delivered perfection, someone who could deliver… what I wanted, take what I wanted to express, without wanting to get too close, without needing to know.’

But of course at least one of us was honest about yearning for more.

She talked about really adoring me, and the longing for other lifetimes on distant pure white sand beaches and the fact I’d like the famous Sinatra song had ‘gotten under her skin,’ and that this had been her wake up call, a lesson, learned the hard way. And in a way, this release had been overwhelming, the chance to express her guilt, without serious retribution.

‘ I’ll never do this again,’ she said. ‘ I never thought I’d get so close to you, I am truly sorry I deceived you, truly sorry i hurt you.’

I guess I naively hoped she would or hope she will change, I hang around, us still communicating, but it is not the same…there is this suspicion, a mutual mistrust wrapped up in a stupid mind fuck game.

And of course she has found others, she cannot resist the need to play, if indeed she ever intended to try, luring them with that fatal sweet charm she has. I sit quietly back in the shadows and true to the etiquette of those who came before; I utter not a word of warning, while this black machiavellian widow destroys all who cross her path, in her quest for so called perfection.