So I have been awfully busy and running around these past weeks, haven't been in Pennsylvania since before Christmas and spent many many days running between New York City and then Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, where Massie lives at the Grail in a big grey farmhouse on 45 lush acres, which this time of year are covered in ice and snow and 500000 deer bounding about like they're on some audition. I spent one day writing in this lovely house called "the cottage" while right outside the window 7 deer just chomped on frozen grass and ice gleamed and glimmered all around. It was so wonderful I just wrote and wrote all day long and thought about ways I might lure those deer on my travels so I can always be so productive...

I spent Christmas in NYC with my family and then spent New Year's up at the Grail and met all the lovely ladies and we lit candles and talked about our years and then Massie and I wrote things we wanted to let go of on slips of paper that we burned, and we did many other fun things, and I went back to NYC and got my tattoo finished, and I went back to the Grail and wrote and rested, and then back to NYC to meet with my agent and editor and publicist and marketing manager, all gearing up for Godmother coming out in March.. all very exciting.. and just see 50000 friends..

And this whole whole time I was madly smitten with this boy I used to know way back when, this boy I'd had one date with back when I was maybe 19 or 20 but nothing much happened after that but I always liked him, and I'd hear little bits about him over the years, that he was in New Orleans that he was in Memphis, that he was a chef, and I would always sigh and say HIM, and then he popped up a few months ago on Facebook and we started to talk and talk and next thing you know I have a ticket to Memphis and we are all kinds of smitten and talking every day, and he's just so adorable and so funny and always telling me the most wonderful stories, and I was very nervous to see him again but then, as it's almost to the day I'm flying there, I was just all pure excitement.

He runs this inn and restaurant down in Memphis, gorgeous, 200 years old, full of history and ghosts, and I arrived last Wednesday but he'd taken this little work trip and wouldn't be in till Thursday, and he had someone get me at the airport and he'd set me up in this beautiful suite, with flowers and presents waiting for me, and it was so lovely and magical, and then he came the next day and it was thrilling to see him, he was just like I remembered -- so cool and adorable and sweet, with this way of going from serious to blissed out in two seconds, and this way of constantly spinning a story with you that makes everything better and more fun -- and that night we went out on the town, driving around and talking and ducking into fancy little spots for wine and food, and I was smitten and we were kissing and holding hands, and for the next several days I was just so fully immersed in him and his life -- that inn, that place, those ghosts, Memphis, his staff, his children (two kids, pure gorgeousness), his schedule, his worries -- and it was so intense and strange and wonderful and awful to feel stripped like that, to be thrust into this whole other world that was so all-consuming, and I felt exhilarated and suffocated both, and amongst all that immersion were many many moments of joy and loveliness, lots of blissful making out and dancing and driving around, and all kinds of moments with his children, but there was a lot of waiting around too, a lot of seeing him come get me long past when he could have, and ultimately I could see, I saw right away, that what he'd spun with me was more a fantasy and that in reality he was not open in the same way, and I had all my anxieties and fears too, and so this whoooole thing was sort of run through with heartbreak that got more and more intense as I was more and more immersed, especially with those luminous children.. and so I ended up changing my flight and leaving two days early, and it was all good and loving and I hugged them all goodbye and there was forgiveness all around, tho I did walk through the airport weeping in a very glamorously garbo-esque manner -- I'm sure the whole effect was heightened by my very fashionable Japanese leopard print suitcase -- and then later he and I had a long talk on the phone that made me feel much, much better about the whole sad lovely thing, which was probably too bent around fantasy and expectation and anxiety to proceed any way other than how it did, in one expectation-filled, panic-stricken week, and he will stay in my life I think and I'm so glad as he be really very extraordinary.

So I got back to NYC Monday night and I'm here till Sunday, and then I'm going back to Pennsylvania, finally, to rest and write and recover from all them heart-smashing adventures.

The end.