I’ve lived in my house for about 10 years and never once realized how dark it was. I would visit my daughter on the west coast and berate her for not having enough lamps and yet failed to note how I had to squint to read in my own home, couldn’t quite see the dust  bunnies lurking in the corners and just assumed darkness was my metier. When friends of mine added a bedroom to their house and it was filled with light and lovely lamps, I wondered why I had been depriving myself. But don’t we often do that? Maybe not in a literal way, but our soul secrets languish in darkness because we believe ourselves to be “bad” for having certain thoughts, tendencies or weak spots. For instance, part of me is utterly selfish. How awful, and yet until I bring it to light I can’t understand why or if there is a remedy or even if I want a remedy. When my Shadow comes out of the dark naughty spot, I can welcome it into the family of contradictory feelings, emotions, actions, wishes, desires that comprise my flawed and fatally attractive self. I love my new lights to live by, lights to undress under, lights to reveal all. My stretch marks mean I’m flexible. My wrinkles mean I’ve known anguish and ecstasy, laughed at bad jokes and worshipped the Sun. My aging hands have waved goodbye, wiped bottoms and scrubbed floors, grasped at love that was never meant to last, written a few real words, buttoned and unbuttoned, held too tight and not tight enough. Let there be light — to help us see more clearly, to allow ourselves to be seen, to reveal the hidden corners of our souls.

Tonight there is a sweet potato baking in the oven, a block of Emmentaler Swiss cheese coming to room temp on the kitchen counter preparing to mate in sweet butter with sunflower bread, and a glass of Malbec breathing quietly by my side. I’m home. There are days when I’m eager to go out to dinner, meet someone for drinks, dress up for a party. And then there are days when I can’t wait to pull into my driveway, have the motion light on the corner of the house welcome me, wash the day off my face and hands and sink into the bliss of home. When changing into pajamas feels sybaritic and the idea of a heavy down comforter makes me think of sleep as a lover. When dinner for one is not lonely but lovely. When the prayer flags are doing their job and spreading blessings with every breeze. When I’m not longing to be in London, Paris or Mendocino — anywhere but here. When my house lives up to the name my daughters gave it — Happy Shack. When I’m flying the mental Frida flag. When I feel lucky to have a fractured ankle instead of kankles. When my Kindle is filled with books to be read late into the night. Lucky, lucky me. Happy, happy shack.

Tonight I almost uploaded the photo of the man I loved to death. I think our love affair literally hastened his death or at least the death of certain romantic illusions we shared. But I’m a little shocked at how reluctant I am to put his photo up for public consumption. After all, isn’t that what we do on blogs? Reveal and expose in the name of sharing, connecting, getting closer? And yet, I find that there are still some people and events that I cannot share simply because a photo or a blog entry will not do them justice. I can say, “He was so emotionally hungry that I could never fill him up,” or he could say, “She withheld her love to punish me for me for my sins.” And both of those statements are true and neither of them tells the whole story. He loved and punished me. I loved and froze him out. We loved and yet could never bridge the distance between us. We truly wanted to devour and incorporate each other. Shocking, embarrassing, neurotic, but I don’t need to be forgiven. In Digital World we want to tell all, explain all, probe all, show how sensitive we are, use our lives for fodder and then move on, but I can’t. No memoir I write could contain our worlds, explain or forgive our flaws, make anyone else understand the folie a deux we danced. And that is why I hate memoirs–because at base they fake it or betray it or leave chunks of information out that they don’t even know they’re missing. Our truths shift every day, according to whether the sun shines or we hear “our” song on the radio or we are distracted by life or struck down by a memory. Odi et amo–a mystery that no longer needs to be solved. So this is what I looked like when he fell in love with me, but I will never show what he looked like when I fell in love with him. Because as long as it’s a secret that I refuse to share with the world, he still lives inside me and the love goes on.

One morning, my red journal seemed so inflammatory lying on the bed in my room in London. As if it could explode any moment. But in fact, I pull my punches in my journal, unable to be truthful even in the most private of pages. If I were, smoke would curl out of the pages, the fire of my words and thoughts would leave scorch marks of anger, lust, taboos, envy, desire, fiery sorrow, unlived lives. When I was a girl, I had a diary with a lock on it, but now I would love to have a high tech journal that would self-destruct if anyone but me opened it — maybe then I could discover/reveal the me beneath the brown paper wrapper. I think the reason I’m always irritated and unsatisfied when I reread my journals is that I don’t quite recognize the person in the pages. The one whose life seems rote rather than real. The one who is so used to hiding her thoughts from other people that she doesn’t recognize them herself anymore. Sometimes I catch glimpses, as if original me just dashed around the corner before I could catch her and bring her to fully dimensional life on paper. Instead, I find fragments of truth scattered through a series of journals, none of it adding up to a complete volume.

* The best vacation memories are unexpected. Although I took this photo from the London Eye, it’s not the Eye I’ll remember but this vibrant, color combination that I happened to catch accidentally. It’s not Big Ben but walking across Blackfriars Bridge and along the river on a cold, wet night.

* There’s no use looking back at what  you failed to do or anxiously awaiting the consequences in the future. What I didn’t do was plan sensibly for my financial security. What I plan to do is be brave about it.

*NEVER turn on your iPhone overseas. If you insist, just open your bank account and let the money drain straight into AT&T.

* I love watching the way British people use their silverware. So elegant that it makes me feel like I’m sawing a log when I’m cutting my fish.

* There are very few things I’ve purchased in my life that I would miss now if I’d passed them up.

* I have no desire to make my own skin care products out of grapefruits, avocados, oats or whatever.

* If you have loyal for-life friends and a really good rechargeable vibrator, you can be reasonably happy without being married.

* Something I read in a magazine this month and wrote on a Post-it note: “Year by year all is unclear, but day by day we find our way.”

Although I fell in love with this mural in Shoreditch a couple of weeks ago, I think it would be very hard to either adore or endure me right now. Ever since I got back from London with a fractured ankle, I have been a proper bitch. The cast on my leg feels like a log, and all the Velcro strips holding it together want to snarl up together in one big clump when I’m trying to put it on or remove it. Nevertheless, I decided that a cracked ankle would not keep me from the gym, so yesterday I Velcro-ed up and stumped around the workout room being mad at my trainer and everyone there who had two good feet. Then I came home, un-Velcroed, showered and re-Velcroed, and by the time I got to work I was so fucking irritated I wanted to bite someone. I mean really bite. It’s ridiculous to be this maddened by a mere cast considering the disabilities and problems experienced by so many people I know, but I suspect it illuminates why I’m not very good at relationships. I want to be adored and I’m not good at enduring the daily aggravations and compromises required of living with a guy. If the Universe meant to teach me patience and humility by cracking my ankle bone, it’s just not working. Instead, I am becoming frighteningly feral.

If you’re single, do you ever feel frustrated reading the ubiquitous articles in women’s magazines or the discussions on Dr. Phil type shows that focus on the sex lives of married women? If you believe the media, the only women sanctioned to have sex in our country are those with husbands. There are no doubt thousands of single women readers who have the same equipment under the hood, but no drivers, and yet all they/we get are “10 Proven Ways to Make a Man Want You” or “How to Please a Man.” But what if you don’t — gasp! — have a man? What if these magazines ever woke up and commissioned articles that discuss the benefits of masturbation, the best vibrators and where to buy them or the role of fantasies in a satisfying sex life? What if they endorsed the idea that nourishing a healthy libido — single or married — enhances your general creativity and overall mood and sense of self? That you don’t have to be with a partner to nurture your sensuality and desire. That expensive lingerie and perfume will make you feel desirable even if you’re the only one to appreciate it on you. That if your tool box includes sexual toys, you’re not a loser but a lover. That some women believe that you can enjoy erotica and still be a feminist. What if we grew up understanding that life doesn’t start for Sleeping Beauty when the Prince crashes through the briars into her bower and wakes her from her long slumber with a kiss – that, in fact, she may have been enjoying a sexy little dream that didn’t even include him, just his best friends, Prince Charming and The Beast.

Coming back to Reality, SC,  after a month in London was like being Dorothy falling back into her black and white world after the journey through all the colors of Oz. I know “normal” life has to be filled with errands, laundry, dead plants, overdue bills, and just plain drabness sometimes, often. But I wish I could figure out how to see my little, familiar world with the eyes of a stranger. Kind of like falling in love with your predictable husband all over again. Maybe it starts with seeing myself in a new way. Wearing clothes that make me feel exotic and unfamiliar to my own being. Pursuing a project that is all mine, a personal passion, and carrying that around like a secret all day. Wearing perfume that makes me feel like an amoureuse even when no one but me is there to appreciate it. In January, the windows at the Le Bon Marche department store  in Paris were themed around different meetings in 2011: deliciousness, inspiration, greed, love, voluptuousness. The creativity of each one made me want to be, do, make something equally inspiring and witty and beautiful. Now that I’m home, when I walk in my neighborhood, I won’t pass a Middle Eastern grocery with piles of Turkish delight in the window and little cups of pomegranate seeds for sale on sidewalk,  or the news agent with a gazillion papers and magazines or the Waitrose grocery with its inventive packaging or the Tube signs beckoning me on a new adventure. I’ve fallen back into my black-and-white world, and now it’s up to me to film it in Technicolor. To see myself in lights instead of complaining that everything around me is so dull-colored. I promise to try to re-new myself in 2011.

Anish Kapoor has installed four large sky mirror sculptures in Hyde Park, and my favorite is the dark red one. Even on an overcast day promising rain, the mirror captured the distant passing moods of the clouds. Several people were there when I was, all of us angling to catch the fleeting images as they flowed over the polished mirror. At first it seemed blank, but the closer you looked, more was revealed. For some reason, it reminded me of the mirror in Tennyson’s poem about “The Lady of Shalott” and spurred me to go tomorrow to the Tate to see the Waterhouse painting (one of my favorites) based on the poem. How lucky I feel to be in a city where I can bow down in front of beauty every day.

I resisted it forever…the allure, the cliches, the hyperbole. London was my town, and Paris, I assumed, was scary, overdone, completely predictable. I would be out of control because I couldn’t speak the language, but she had me at bonjour. From the moment I got off the Eurostar, I was starry-eyed and staring at everyone and everything. How can the French look so different, so distinguishable — as if they actually think about how they look before they leave the house? Even the smallest things are remarkable, but of course all of you who already fell at her feet know that. I only had one day, but it was love at first, second and third sight. At the end of the day, I fell off a curb (ancient and full of history, I’m sure) and had to anesthetize the pain on the train back with copious amounts of Champagne. So Paris broke my ankle and leaving broke my heart.