Monday, Sept. 08, 2003 | 9:12 AM

Yesterday he went to New Hampshire and I spent a much needed day alone. Went for a long walk all around L.A. and wound up eventually right where I used to live. Went to the Hardware store and then home again to read.

He got home late at night, opened the door, and said,

I need to talk to you.

The phrase that always inspires fear.

However, I shouldn't have been afraid. It was one of the most incredible discussions I have ever had with another human being. We seem to keep peeling layers off of each other. Just when I think I can't get more honest with someone, we go deeper.

I am so fucking impressed with how much he has grown. It's really wonderful. We decided that for right now, we are going to be very very great friends and put off any romantic involvement. Both of us being experts in dismally failed relationships and seeing the pitfalls in front of us, he said to me

I cannot be with you or with anyone until I am a whole person. I have this pattern of going from one relationship to the next--serial monogamy, and if we did that now, anything good we have would be choked by my own need to fill this hole in myself. I want to be proud of who I am and of my own choices brefore I become involved in that way. I've used you in the past--not that it didn't mean I didn't love you, that I don't want you romantically, but there were some unsavory motivations there as well. I love you too much to put you in that position again, and I'm sorry that I.

And I said,

I have built some very significant relationships (including ours) on illusions, choosing not to recognize some fundamentally relevant things about myself and the people I was involved with, and of course those problems never fully went away and it turned out to be a disaster. If you and I have something, I want it to be real. I want to wake up every morning and know for a fact that it's real. You mean too much to me for it to be anything else.

And we talked about how much our friendship meant to the both of us, how much we love each other. How much we want things to work. And if we jumped headlong into the direction we'd been moving towards, it would get so cloudy.

I know I keep saying this again and again, but the intensity of my love for him is just so amazing, and I am so proud of us and of how far we've come. If there is such a thing as a soul mate, he is definitely one of mine, and in whatever way this all plays out--whether we stay best friends with no romantic involvement for the rest of our lives, or if whatever romantic potential we have is actualized, I can't believe my good fortune that I get to feel this way about another human being. And that we aren't going to start anything off on murky unsolid ground, which is always eventually the recipe for major heartbreak.