You wake in the morning. A shroud of sunlight filters through a window. Your eyes slowly adjust through several minutes of re-focusing, body becoming more aware. Slung under your arm is the person you spent the night with, who you've spent many nights with. There's a conflict to which you don't pay attention. Light floods their face. You begin tracing their lines and pores in your mind, then look down and away; it isn't necessary to look at them. Memories file past on an off-white ceiling. You feel happiness and contentment in a vague, gray way. It strikes you suddenly: you feel alone. As their eyes open and smile up at you, you can't say anymore that it was just because they were sleeping. You're in bed with a complete stranger; it isn't the other person.

LushKinky is a sensual, touching, sweetly painful literary treat that I haven't had the pleasure of indulging in for quite some time. Although her wild exploits in ditching work might inspire the old, or her attempts at erotic dance might excite the young into laughter and fits of warmth, it is the quality of her thoughts and especially how she structures those thoughts that wins me over. As she recounts her loss of someone or how distant she felt from her lover one night, there's an concise, richly poetic melieu of emotion and description that becomes yours; you can't help feeling her anger or sorrow, or reacting strongly to what she says. Even falling in love feels realistic and touching where normally I would vomit and burst into a uncontrolled fit of snickering. That immersiveness in a diary is very rare; all the more credit must be given to her for compacting this immersion into relatively short entries (bless her heart).

While it isn't an explicit problem, some of her more sexual entries may be too explicit for younger readers or those who are more sexually conservative. We're not talking dabbling thick globs of white, capitalized font with a coquettish smile, but graphic, immediate depictions of sex or sexually related phenomena. Yet, I wouldn't throw down a red flag so much as install a yellow caution light, urging people to ah.slow down, for whatever reason you may have. In my opinion, the preponderance of sex in her life outranks all other things; it is the cornerstone of her diary. Even so, it isn't as overt as to be obsessive or offensive, nor is it raunchy or dirty. On the contrary, her sexual attitude is (seemingly) open and healthy.

More key to the psyche of this journal, though, is a sleepy sort of afterglow intimacy punctuated by the chill of a morning like I described above. For example, the sense of character about her gains depth as she describes how she genuinely wants a loving relationship and not just another fling from the men that seem all too eager to sleep with and suddenly 'fall in love' with her; the pain and desire at wanting to quench love and lust, feeling one and the other try to dominate, is clear and powerful. That same sense of want is brought out by her love for an old friend: curled up watching old movies, innocently sleeping in her bed: her hand on his chest, his cheek resting against her head. As fleeting as it may seem to some of you, I'm brought back to all the times where the warmth of love was just beginning and for once I enjoyed that memory.

In a way, though, you don't know about her love or emotions. There's a subtle sense of mystery to her actions and reasons. She herself tries to piece together what she feels and why she feels it, not by what she says but the structure of how she persues things and people. I can see her staring up at that ceiling and wondering what's become of her, maybe fighting with herself to snap back into the comfort she felt with a particular person, or a particular state of emotion and mind. After having read most of the journal, I deeply identify with this sortof conflict of character: wondering what you really feel and want.

In conclusion, if the journal itself dug into other aspects of her life, such as at work, and was more expansive in terms of using metaphor or other complex narrative devices, I'd be inimically smitten with literary want. For now, though, I'm 'in like' with this journal; very much in like.