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morning prayer: “Please, God, let this day be good.”
    Lately, the days had been long, the nights even longer. This Monday my mind was on the man responsible for my current, downward, dating spiral, and for every loser I had seemed condemned to meet since.
    No, not Hemingway. I’d left him in the … well, the past. Had our days together been real? I couldn’t be sure. Since then, some new twists and encounters had come up, enough to occupy my heart and mind.
    Today my mind was fixed on Jake, AKA: Mr. Sociopath.
    Jake was a loser, although that is not all he was. It took me longer than it should have to figure out he was a bona fide sociopath. If one could make a living by telling lies, he would be a billionaire. And I’d spent about a billion myself on therapy, undoing the damage he had wrought.
    Yes, I take responsibility. I allowed him to do those things, before realizing that becoming a stark raving mad bitch did not become me—though, in the infamous words of Stephen King’s Delores Claiborne, “ Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to.”
    These thoughts should have been secondary this morning, since I was facing a deadline on an article. I do not write for women’s magazines because I love it, but because it pays the rent. What I really wanted to do was spend my hours seeking a publisher for my first novel. For today, however, I would be that much closer to getting nowhere with that plan. It was frustrating. I had been turned down more times than I cared to admit, and in the words of the late Sylvia Plath, “Nothing stinks more than a pile of unpublished writing.”
    Quoting other writers made me think it was time to write something myself worth quoting.
    I got out of bed, threw on a robe, and trudged into the kitchen. I had set the timer on the machine and fresh coffee was brewing. It was almost eight, and my deadline was 5:00 p.m.
    I dressed in a pair of sweats and a t-shirt and headed to my writing loft, which was accessed by a ladder. It was small, but homey. An Oriental rug lay across the walnut floors, and a small window looked out on the street below. I rented this apartment because of that space. My pine desk was crammed with so many papers I could barely see the computer. Pinned with thumbtacks to the walls were all the damn rejection letters received—so far—for my new book. I had scribbled my own snide rebuttals on each one, which nullified their sting just a bit.
    I started working on my piece. It was about, of all things, dating. I was supposed to give young women hope, writing about not giving up on the dating scene. Talk about a stretch for my writing abilities
    After several false starts, with great effort, I pulled forth the hopeful, less-cynical, optimistic me buried under all this crap, and wrote the stupid piece. At four-forty-five, I hit the Send button and it was off to the editor.
    I sat back in my chair, poured a glass of wine, and flipped on the CD I listen to when I need to relax: Beethoven’s “Leopold Cantata,” which coincidently represents “victory and joyful conclusion.”
    Hmm. Clearly, that did not describe my dating life. These days it was hardly worth the effort of going out with one more bozo, which, of course, I hadn’t mentioned in my article. But, oh, I had wanted to.
    Beethoven’s music seeped into my being. I’d taken a lot of piano lessons as a kid, played a lot of his music. It seemed incomprehensible he could write so many brilliant compositions while partially—and, in the end, completely—deaf. What kind of man was he?
    The glint of my cut-crystal heart caught my eye. I slipped it from the shelf and put it back on. I thought about that psychic Serenity’s words and my experience in Key West. No way could that have been real, or could it? Was it only some crazy dream I had concocted out of loneliness? Too many questions and not near enough answers.
    My mind drifted back to Beethoven.
    I could almost see him, touch him, feel him.
    Oh,