Everyone agreed. "Everything will be better when you get moved out of this rat hole." Mice, I muttered. No rats.

Too much has moved with me. I needed to leave HER behind, and yet she still lurks, inside, insidious. So I play computer games, laugh with the friends I have left, after dropping the leeches, not too many. Leech free, that's me. For the first time in my life.

Starting over. I've spent enough time looking back, trying to figure out what I did wrong. Often, it was just letting the wrong people into my life. A basic need to love and be loved, warped into something dangerously damaging. Part of me still wishes I could "fix" the situation, but that is the recovering control addict speaking. I'm good at letting people do what they wish to do. I'm still learning to run, not walk, away from the actions I don't like.

So many times I've counseled addicts that they have to cut free of their old life, and sadly, old friends, if they want to stay clean. I know this lesson. I've taught it often enough. Time for me to learn it. I never promised anyone it would be easy.

Slowly, I'm learning to fall in love again. Granted, with people who I will never meet. It's like being a preteen again, falling for the cute guys on the posters cut out of magazines. Only now the criteria is a bit more mature. Still based on talent, but maybe a talent for kindness, not music. Although music still makes me fall in love, for the length of the music at least. But nice safe men who are only pictures and voices and words. Characters in books. Always predictable, always there. No more living in crappy Movie of the Week plots.

My best woman friend, we don't even speak the same language. It doesn't get in the way much. We both like chocolate. We like icecream and she and her husband are pizza fiends. I get great joy out of getting pizza for when they come over. We all laugh a lot, allthough we aren't sure about what sometimes, just for the joy of being together I think. Sometimes at my accent trying to learn her language.

It's a start. Sticking my toe into the water, but not ready yet to jump back in. I may never be. The thought no longer bothers me. I have stories to write, art to do. Animals to love and raise.

We are thinking of making pinata's, the real kind you can break, full of goodies. Maybe that's my life, it had to be broken before the good things come? Will they? No matter, my prize is making the pinata itself. And listening to the laughter of my friends.

I survived. Sometimes I've regretted that, but there it is. As long as I'm stuck here, I might as well try to pretty the place up some.