the most tender full force jolt of living

I had the use of a car today and, as ever, headed west to retread the path I've taken over and over. The searching path in a place I know intimately, footstep after footstep and back without ever coming to my feet's conclusion.
One time when I walked I had this girl all around me. She writes a blog in Slovenian and I was editing any of her English postings for her. I got to know the story of her life. I was in love with her, I didn't know her: I knew her more clearly than the steps I was taking. I was in awe of the rawness of herself. How she could be so fragile and open and wanting and grasping and loving and tender and hating and fully who she was. She was lightning hitting me from the storm of where my head was at that time, the most tender full force jolt of living.
She was a muse to an artist and he took the most amazing photographs of her. Really captured a spirit alive and free. He wrote a published book about her. There was a a film made of the book about her, about the journey of a child of a general in Tito's Yugoslavian army who became a Scientologist.
Yet she now lived a frazzled life with her overbearing mother where - on the twittersphere - her sorry heart bled plump as if in a butcher's window. She had come through Scientology and hadn't Gone Clear. She was deeply damaged by it all and her wounds leaked like stigmata into her online presence.
I have been someone who hides. I dress my butcher's heart in trimmings. I was in love with that picture of her and agape at how she would cut and bleed and cut and make me bleed and the way we bled into each other's lives. All this in the cyber world. It felt more real than the eye to eye stuff. Connection is such a state of mind.

I was walking the very steps where I took this photo today and there was another cyber-bloodletting. I was unused to directness and provocation. She suddenly left me high and dry and I sat and watched the Dunoon ferry come and go, shore to shore, and felt angry yet wanting the rawness of her fight dinging onto my phone.
We reconciled, of course we did. That always happened. It got to a stage where I realised that for her drama equalled love, that she needed attention above all. It was too much and I backed off.
I still have feelings for her. Maybe not love, but a deep thankfulness of the way she cracked me like a nut out of the carapace of self-pity. It was just what I needed at the time.
She is doing well now and that makes me smile. As I retread these footsteps she is one of a multitude of lives within my heart leading me to I know not where. Along this shoreline, thoughts travelling shore to shore and back again full of these passengers of the heart.

Onwards!