The Raindancer performs these lines of mine: "You want me to sell you some comfort. But in my life, love has always been a bribe. I pretend to feel things, so I am given love. But what happens when my pretensions end up confusing me, and I don't know how I feel? Should I still accept your bribes? Should I trade you a tiny comfort for all the oceans and oceans and oceans of your love? I am not your trophy. You haven't won anything."

Women have always trusted me to watch them with care and affection. I've been very lucky in this sense, since I desire proximity to women so fiercely. Not as a boyfriend or even as a lover, but as a mirror she can check to tell herself how she feels. You're a mirror that touches, said the Raindancer several years ago. That's a good tagline. But I think, also, touching is useless unless you give at the same time, and that's what women recognize in me, gifts of confidence and nourishment, a very female way of being. I always ask if she's comfortable wth me peering into her life, and the Raindancer always says, What do you think?

If a man was all alone in a world of women, how would he talk to the person he loved? Because men fall in love without reserves, they jump without parachutes into volcanoes of boiling possibility, and on their way into the flames they write poetry about heartbreak and longing. But they live in a man's world, and part of being tough is not showing how you feel when you are surrounded by other men. I tell this to Willow, and she asks me if I could ever hide the way I felt. All I can do is look at her in reply. She looks away, stung by sudden concern. I have brought wounds, but she no longer has any cures. She looks away, stung, and the shoot, meant to be an essay of how I look at women and how much I hope they give birth to their dreams as well as the babies expected from them, instead becomes an essay about how I look at myself. Perhaps with a mother's eyes. Why does he risk so much? Isn't there comfort in property and progress, Seanie? She knows I'm paralyzed with fear, so she looks away, stung. And I want this moment to last forever.

Why is sex such a joke in pop culture? There are people fucking everywhere, climaxing with their eyes closed, thinking about what, exactly? And why is it so magnetic and desirable when love or desire is involved, and the act is not simply a piece of sport between two people who've drunk too much on a Saturday night? Can she help me tell a story about sex and its powers to heal and liberate? I'm all yours, says the Raindancer.

She loves this line: They call us lonely when we're really just alone. She knows how often I am alone, and she knows how many people would hang onto me for the laughs and unexpected thinking. So she knows I like being alone, and she is amazed at her girlfriends, holding onto the wrist of one guy until they have the wrist of another in hand before letting go, stepping through romances like crossing a chasm on a bridge made of ropes. "Why is a woman so afraid of being alone?" asks the Raindancer. "It's not because of how she feels, but because of what she thinks people will say, that they will see her value drooping." Yeah, until she turns 32, and then she'll wish for solitude and a chance to read in the bathtub and walk alone in the forest. We laugh at this, our little game, two people alone, complete strangers to loneliness.

We've known each other for five years, and she's learned to sleep soundly as soon as I walk in the room. It's uncanny. She just says, "Hang on a moment," lies down, and starts dreaming. You're like a cat, she says to me, always awake even when you doze, so if something happens I know I'm safe with you keeping watch over me.

She reads the decription I gave above about how I love the proximity and intimacy of women, of being able to touch their rhythms and sense their frustrations and hopes, that I am a mirror for their own expressions, and how lucky I've been that women have always given me access to their lives without wondering what I'm after, and she calls me to add to this: "Remember that I am also studying you, and this is the exchange I allow. I don't care if you want to make a survey of my bikini line, as long as you are willing to tell me what you are thinking, Blue, when you start one of your schemes out loud, because you roll into an idea like somebody gets out of bed in the morning, second nature, and I want to create something, right now, with you on the phone, and if I shut up and listen I know you can tell me how, so . . . speak."

She does jazz classes, belly dance classes, meditation classes, body balance classes, studies the air and takes pollution readings out near the airport, warns the officials when particulates get heavy and cloggy, but she cannot bring rain to places in drought. She's not that kind of raindancer.

She bears an uncanny resemblance in some poses to the brilliant actress Catalina Sandino Moreno of "Maria, Full of Grace." To my immense satisfaction, the Raindancer has seen the movie. She says she usually gets a Salma Hayek comparison, but that she, too, had identified with the young woman fleeing Colombia by any means necessary to have a better future. "I was there, ready to do anything to get out, even if it meant serving coffee at Starbucks, because at some point what you imagine for yourself is so much better than the reality you are in, but if you don't act on the clues in your imagination then reality has you like quicksand, where the more you fight it the deeper you sink."

Willow pays attention to every detail. She challenges my memory by recalling a glance or a breath, caught, in that flicker of an instant when I tell myself to remember this. She knows the most essential fact about what I do with a camera, that I want to talk as much as I want to shoot. And she knows this is also my sexual language: confidence might as well be a kiss, a growl is a wound. She looks at me often like this, posed in challenge, a chiseled muse, always ready to give me back my own inspirations. Is her calm the Cherokee? No. Her calm is just her feeling her confidence.

We all have our shadows, Willow. Some we cast ourselves, and others we choose to live under. But we have to remember that our perceptions change in different light. Comfort is a tyranny, man. It's the worst thing that can happen to anyone. Almost as bad as success. She laughs and asks, Did you write that down?

Yes, this photo has been run through Lightroom, but that's not how it got its stark effect. The picture was taken in dim conditions with as low a speed as I could manage and still preserve detail: 1/60th of a second, at 52mm (on an okay Nikoormat 24-85, 2.8-4 D), with ISO quite low at 320 and the aperture maxed out to 3.5. I wanted to get the fleeting feel of an affair's intimate moments, the way my memory would catch them, and these memories are often dim and blurry; a sharp, well-lit image just wouldn't fit the story I hope the Raindancer helps me tell.

A blemish on her skin is something to celebrate. A scar is something to study and touch for memories of its pain. You live, you hurt, you hope, because these cuts I inflict upon myself, of bad choices and missed opportunities, these cuts will never really heal, even if all my dreams come true. Is she saying this, or is it me imagining it?

She is constant motion, rehearsing the lines, a poet, starving. And what price gets perfection? Fifteen attempts, twenty? She is trained, an actor, anchored to the meanings hidden in the syllables, to the rhythms connecting the syntax. She will get the scene right, wounded, heated.

Inevitably, talk turns towards the making of a movie. She interrupts me. "If you let me be me instead of playing a character, so I can spill some secrets about what happens to nice girls when they have bad thoughts in the big city and about how my mistakes have taught me who I want to be, I will bust my ass on your movie, Blue, and help chuck it like a spear into the prudish heart of television and magazines. But let me be me." How long have I waited for somebody to say this?

The potographers who shoot her often ask for heavy mascara and eye-liner, to make her eyes look blacker, to make her look more exotic. But you have that chocolate hazel in your gaze, and that puts sugar in my blood, challenges on my tongue, says me, trying to be snappy and cool. She sneers at me: Who do you think you're talking to, Seanie, a model or a mankiller? Yeah, yeah.