Wednesday, Jul. 30, 2003 - 11:35 p.m.
Bale Posting

He's out on bail.

I should have been prepared for this possibility. But I'm not.

I'm not freaking out, but I'm not too terribly serene at this news—which arrived in the mail today from Crown Counsel—either.

Diego's had to agree to five limitations on his bail:

(1) he cannot contact me, directly or indirectly;

(2) he cannot come downtown (where I live) for any reason other than to attend at court;

(3) he has to surrender his passport to police within 48 hours of being granted bail;

(4) he must not move to a new residence without the permission of the court; and

(5) he must not possess, carry or in any way brandish a weapon, especially and including a knife (other than to eat a meal).

Do these limitations comfort me? Perhaps a bit. (There are other reasons why Diego is more or less incapable of doing me further harm, which I'm not ready to divulge here.) But receiving this in the mail today has me all upset.

Why did they give him two days to surrender his passport? Methinks they were actually giving him a chance to skip back to his home country. A part of me hopes he has or will, to be honest.

For a few days there, I'd been able to more or less pretend none of this had happened. I knew the respite wouldn't last long.

Rationally, little has changed. I'm probably quite safe. I'll probably wake up in the morning, alive and well. He probably won't—nor will anyone else—break into my apartment and kill me overnight.

It's convincing the cringing terrified whimpering broken and completely irrational part of me of that, the part of me that freaks, frozen, at the slightest noise in my apartment: this is my challenge.

Wish me luck.