It's crazy really. I hear the sounds of early traffic outside joining the birds; cars in the street filling with those heading off to work. Earning a living they call it. Always thought it strange, how one has to earn a living? When we were returning from the snow Dylan and I, we watched the endless snake of vehicles making their way back home; some of them travelling over two hours, once in the morning, once in the evening. Four hours of every weekday swallowed up by this snake-like to and fro. Don't know why I thought of this now. Maybe the nearby freeway sounds? The wasted hours?

There's light outside too though it only sends me another grey and bleak day. When did the sun last shine? I have no clear memory, the view from my window unchanging; dull shades, rustling sounds from the nearby trees and rain, rain almost every day. I long for heat. The cold of winter is not just a sensation, it seeps deep, it invades every space and even the heat flowing from the duct above - damn it's not real?

Think of escape again. Somewhere warm. So many places I can go to... spoilt for choice really, but only one in mind, only one. I click on the favorites tab and bring it up again, that house. It's been viewed over and over for some weeks, ever since I first laid eyes on it and the idea took hold. I look at every photo one more time, only because it feels like home to me? The kind of house I could live in without the accompanying trapped discomfort. There I sit again on the wide balcony, sipping wine and writing; the soft breeze bringing me fresh, untainted air; the small lake glimpsed a short distance away. Was meant for me to find this house - more a shack really, disheveled and thrown together from bits and pieces collected over time, no form to it, no angles - much like my haphazard mind.

I hover over the reservation button again. Out of all the places in all the world, I am about to spend what could well be my only time out in a long while... in a tiny corner of a large country - very far from home. I pause, dithering, dithering, mind crammed full of what ifs and some rather distasteful suppositions.

Never travelled abroad alone, always with someone and mostly meeting others at each destination. This endeavor, yes it will test me. There is no certainty of a particular someone at the other end, only the assumption that my nearness might bring on curiosity? No expectation, no imposition, just me there at the shack, laptop and wine and chilling. Heat! And strange too, sitting on that wide balcony I cannot picture him sitting across from me - a curious scene since the very reason for my being there is instigated by emotion, an excruciating need to meet at last and talk rather than type, sit idly side by side on the outdoor cane sofa and simply be? I try, I try all the time to fit him in, place him nearby but he elludes the scene damn it, he cannot be brought in!

"Just go, the only one stopping you is yourself." My son's words echo. How many times has he repeated them these past months? "Just go!"

I think briefly of the other one. He's definitely not from Kansas and he'd come. He with his intriguing words and trickster mental games, he who caught my attention and allowed me in, me, out of the many he scorned and he burned through exquisite poetry.

I wander over to the other tab and click on his latest offering:

"The sunrises on my terminal

Awaiting my flight to see it all

Connecting with another one

And a different excuse

Again

The sunsets on my terminal

Departure upon arrival

Sans disaster

This should continue

Until you find me

At the bottom

Where i cannot fly away

Between terminals

Where the sunrises

In a different way"

"One of my sisters lives nearby. I'm down to have a drink with you," he'd said when I'd mentioned the possibility some weeks back. "That sister and I don't get along very well at the moment. It shouldn't be a problem though."

Yes, I can picture him on that balcony. Getting drunk, trying to be disorderly with me. A fling, sure, a fling, coming home with a smile and some fantastical conversations with a mind so acute it leaves me breathless, confronting depths previously unimagined; a mind far more acute than mine? Tortured too, much like my own; a body misused, a spirit broken, broken still but continuing the struggle to rise. Just like me.

Oh but there's no emotion there, only sensation! I can sense his presence but do not feel him? And I crave emotion instead damn it, eyes in eyes and lingering could have beens; I crave reaping the almost year-long cultivation of this back and forth creation between the one I believe I love and me? Funny life. Or tragic life. One adjective never far from the other in my living... resulting in irony more often than not?

"Screw it!" I hear myself say, my voice directed at the wall. "Screw it all." I fill the reservation form, get out the credit card and after entering the necessary details, click on 'book now'. A few seconds wait and then the green confirmation tick appears. What have I done? What the fuck have I done? I sit back staring at the large chunk of money given over. A whim. A momentary lapse in dithering and a woman called Lucinda is waiting to welcome me six weeks from now.

Didn't even check if there are flights available! The house called me; the house was the final push I needed - so it seems? I open another tab and do a flight search. Oh crap! Twenty six hours spent either sandwiched in a tube or wandering unfamiliar airports waiting for connecting flights. What have I done? Hmmm... there's one gets there the same day my stay at the shack starts. I quickly fill in all the details on that form as well and click on the 'pay now' button. There. Done; an even bigger chunk of money gone... committed fully and without refund.

I am crazy, delusional, I am - hell is this what love is? Catapulting across the world without a safety net at the other end? Or is this the product of almost two decades of aloneness; ignored on the surface but festering, brewing and bubbling over only because someone singled me out and made me feel important to him?

Oh he will be hit so hard by this! Sitting here pondering my actions for long silent minutes I understand I have no right; this intrusion like tearing a page of words and making them real, yet the book itself a fairy tale, something to wander loosely in without any ties to reality? Now those words have become actions, evident and invasive and so at odds with our separate lives. Yes I can argue time, the fickleness of a tenuous hold on my life, the abandonment of fantasy for the tangible, the real?

He will be pissed. No doubt about it, he will seriously question his involvement in what may well turn out to be an ultimatum issued - for whatever this catapult leads to will determine the very meaning of us. If there is an us; if there can ever be an us outside of the screen and if indeed this us must be shut down, obliterated, escaped from.

Shocked, I realize I am planning on living a story I wrote. The whole disappearing, taking pictures and words down off my wall, returning this new me to the obscurity I emerged from. Huh. I have already lived it, I have already predicted the outcome and contained it within words. Huh. But there's still a tiny flutter, an enticing, poignant thought of this feeling right; a snatch at a brief reprieve, a chance at being, not describing for a length of days?

Excitement and also unease. There is no one to discuss this with, no other opinion to be sought than that of my sons and my offsider, all of which concur: "It's something you need to do."

It has not sunk in yet. This past hour has been monumental - unlike any hour previously lived - taking initiative, following instinct rather than logic and the common sense I have largely lived with since becoming a mother. This is for me. I hope over the coming days to accept this is for me alone.