Caught on the crossfire

Remember when you were young,
you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes,
like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire
of childhood and stardom,
blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
come on you stranger,
you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon,
you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night,
and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome
with random precision,
rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver,
you seer of visions, come on you painter,
you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

The day had started off with one of the new slaves making some Lisa Douglas blackwine that dulled a sharp knife trying to cut a piece off. It was the kind you chew rather than sip. The rest I don't think had anything to do with being wired for sound ... I ... didn't drink any of it.

I had to race back to brew a new kettle full that didn't make the healer jitter so bad she shook off her saddle. We talked. We talk openly as several of the women allow me to. They watch me or perhaps it is best said they watch over me. Which is a bit odd at times since they keep telling me I am a slave as if I don't already know that. My thighs may still be satin smooth and free of any marks but I am clad kajir, my throat bears the ring of steel and I offer ... well all that I offer ... on my knees but each day I am reminded none the less. Still they probe and prod and push things inside like turning the soil, adding fertilizer so a seed will sprout and reach for the sky.

Falon was doing that while we walked. She wanted to know what was on my mind. She picked a hell of a day to ask. I'd woke up ravenous, not for food but to sink my teeth into ... vivid, bite off a nice hunk and chew on it. I read off the thoughts like it was a recipe ... There was a dollop of sadness, half cup of sorrow and pain, three handfuls of joy and enthusiasm, stir in lots of new friends and maybe a nemesis or two to taste. I suppose beneath it all there was just a hunger for ... more. Though that last word was held apart so it had a different meaning than its context.

The ride from the day before came up and I told her it had awakened something inside me, something I thought maybe I had lost, something vital but maybe it was just misplaced. Her answer ... 'tucked away forgotten until that one moment that sprung the doors wide and let out that which you put away for so long' received a hissed yes as my reply.

More what ...? Excitement? Adventure? I took a long breath before I told her ... 'everything'. We had to laugh as we spoke the same thing at the same time ... that want to feel more, see more, touch more, to express more. Mediocrity had no flavor now and I had to glance at her to see if I had overstepped my bounds. The reassuring look said there was nothing wrong with saying it .. she said I was of the ground, the grasses, the skies and the very breath of the bosk. She told me she felt like there were two types of slaves here ... you have slaves of the Tuchuks, and you have Tuchuk slaves. I was one of the latter. Oooh, stroke my ego a little will ya?

I was more free than I had ever been. It was a freedom that began long ago next to his wagon. Now before all of the Gorean rules and regulations thumpers go jumping up on the soapbox ... let me say that everyone that is human is slave to something, something they give control over them ... it may be thumping rules and regulations, their creator, a Master or dominant, maybe just their blackwine every morning. Maybe it is the fierceness of remaining in control they lose control within. He had begun to build a free woman .. or setting her free, one that had no fears, allowed nothing that would prevent her from being who she was inside. That was what I had lost along the way, that vitality of being .. me and the woman I was within. Now I was sinking my teeth in and pulling off a healthy bite. I was far from finished but the first true taste of freedom was sublime. Hey don't blame me ... he started it.

I was loving every moment of walking among the tribe as a woman free of fears, steeped in the passions of being a Tuchuk woman ... until ... she began working on that wound again. I tried so hard not to let it show how ripped apart inside I felt. I knew it was infected. She knows too. She spoke it openly how she could see everything that was painted on my heart, brimming behind my eyes, how my soul screamed it.

How gentle and soothing her words when she advised me to begin making sense of it all, to pick up the pieces and put them back together, to look at him again and see if there was anything left to salvage. She reminded me that I had said he was worth ... everything to me.
It was from inside that rawness that I cried out ... I was not nothing, I was not one that life will smudge in the dust beneath a heel and merely crumble. Skies, if she didn't let out her own war whoop and yell that's what she wanted to hear. She was going to clasp my hand and drag me with her.

It was a good day but I felt caught on the crossfire. There was still no inner calm, no release of the healing tears. They didn't feel like they were mine to cry ... they were another's pain, another's hurt and I mourned them deeply.