Lauren writes to her penpal, bootleg trader Nikki. 

Wednesday 17 May, 1998 

Dear Nikki,

I think by now we have both forgotten who is to blame, for our correspondence being but a shadow from what it once was.
How the compact packages where your letters provided the padding to the cassette tapes you sent me, and that dropped with a heavy thud into the hallway, turned into professional cardboard boxes that rattled in their hollowness.
With 2 handwritten A4s, folded just once, and neither wrinkled nor marked around the edges in any way.
If it wasn’t for your sexual remarks, your song lyric quoting, and the always present secrecy, that our correspondence has never lost;
It would be as if my accountant had mailed me.
That clean.

But no more, my darling Nikki. No more.
And neither will you have to wait for weeks for me to answer, oh no.
Because I refound myself, Nikki. And you’re coming down with me.
And found a woman, a girl, you have never met, and I know you’re going to like her!

It all started last Queens Day, which is at the 30th of April. I never go to bars or parties or anything, but I do love to walk the flea markets, that are part of the festivities in almost all municipalities.
And I found Prince’s biggie, Purple Rain.
Although I have never owned the album before, I have always felt affinity towards it because it was one of the first grownup films I ever saw.
They played it in the school auditorium, and I was only 12 years old, because that was not my regular school building.
Still being in the youngest highschool class, our building was a different one.
That’s why I so vividly remember going there, to attend this viewing for the whole school.

So I was 12 and I saw Purple Rain.
When I listened to the album it all came back to me, and it was like I had received a gift from the heavens. And one I had been searching for, for months; Just in the wrong places.
Because I knew I had to get back to where it all begun, sexually. 
I knew that the answers to recovering my sexuality to what it was last year, my body to what it was in my college years, and my faith in myself to those first years with Bear;
I had to go back in time.

I knew that to recover from losing Bear, I had to go back to the time I didn’t know him.
A time I had pinpointed at the year I turned 16.
That had been the year when my sexuality was still in its earliest of stages, and my heart had been mine. I projected my infatuation at Jon Bon Jovi, who rarely (if ever!) broke up with me from behind the poster wall I had created for him. 

But no matter how hard I tried to get myself in the virgin state of mind I must have had in that year, it didn’t work. I had too little to go by.
I knew the music I must have been listening to at the time (Bon Jovi!) but because I still listen to that, as you know since you always send me the bootlegs, they didn’t characterize a specific time for me.
That music has become timeless.
Which was one of probably a thousand reasons why my action plan to get myself back into a healthy pre-Bear state of mind, and back into an agile pre-gaining a lot of weight body, wasn’t working.

Wasn’t working until two weeks after buying the Prince cd at the flea market, I put it on and immediately felt myself drop back in time.
And the portal to the earliest stage of my sexuality opened itself.

Dearly beloved
We are gathered here today
To get through this thing called “life”

You’re the first person I am telling this to and maybe the last as well. Because I wouldn’t know who else to tell it to!
Who is an accomplice in my sexuality, now that Bear is no longer there, but also, now that there are no other men either?
Who is an accomplice, a friend, to the deepest most intimate part of me, when the part is not expressed?
When I feel as virgin as I did when I really still was that, then who is the male counterpart?
Who is the man who is the yang to my yin, as well as the yin to my yang?
Where is the male body that holds the memories of having sex with me? 

It is such a strange phase I am in, and I’ll get back to the Bear part and his role in this, but it feels strange to feel sexual, but not having someone to actually have sex with.
And with the memory of sex having faded to where you no longer know if it was all but a dream.
If you are still in a phase where you only know sex because you saw it in movies, and because you masturbate and fantasize, but your body, mind and heart really are the way we all start out;
Blank sheets.
Unmarked.
Crisp.

And your erotic thoughts are like an immaculate conception; They do not stain you. They are of the flesh, but not in the flesh. Yet.

So, Bear.
We have not officially broken up, but I have not seen him and I can feel he doesn’t want to be with me. Not at this point, not sexually. I’m positive that we’ll reunite as friends, and with our lives ahead of us I am a hundred percent certain we will one day have sex again.
How could we not, with the chemistry we have!

But the weeks or by now months without him, have also made me realize it really is time to take matters into my own hands.
That regardless of how amazing our time together has been, that this was never meant to be an exclusive arrangement.
He has found his real relationship, the real woman he wants to spend his life with. And if he would part with her, he would eventually get a new relationship and go with her.
He has a need, a desire, to play house as I usually unceremoniously call it!

And I have a desire to be a lover, and a desire to be a friend.
To me playing house has the shape of being roommates, not spouses.
And he knows this. We both do.

I will never give up my freedom, and he will never give up his dream to have a real relationship and a family.

But while he has found what he was looking for, I have not. I have not dated since I started seeing Bear.
Something that is about to change!

Because here I am, my darling Nikki.
Standing before you, having refound the sexuality of being in an auditorium on canteen chairs row after row, on a floor that was also used for dancing.
It was a pit, the floor was a few steps down, and during school hours the curtains surrounding the pit were open.
But when there was a dance, or now that we were watching a movie, the curtains were shut and a few hundred high school students ranging in ages 12 to 18, were watching Purple Rain.

And at least one of them, a twelve year old Lauren, came out a changed.

The castle started spinning
Or maybe it was my brain
I can’t tell you what it did to me
But my body will never be the same

I will write you, with the best words I can find.
I will write you, until I see little Nikki grind.

.
~Lauren98

Darling, Nikki | 1998 diary
is the third chapter of book 4, diary 1997-1998