I could feel the sweat forming on my cold, clammy hands.

I was so nervous.  You were my friend, I know.  But I had never danced with a girl before.  I'd only danced with a girl in my imagination, over and over again, holding my pillow in the dim light of my bedroom.  But now, two years after my first love, I found myself dancing with you -- a girl who reminded me a lot of her... except you didn't care what people thought of you and me going around together.  After all, you didn't have any friends either -- not real friends, at least.  Not like you were to me.  Not like I was to you.

Katie.

You were the girl who never quite fit into the upper-middle class gated neighborhood across the freeway from where I lived.  And I was the guy who never quite fit into the projects, where your parents forbade you from going to.  But you would come by anyway -- you got your license before I did, a few months earlier, right when you turned fifteen.  You would come and pick me up, and we'd drive to places the other kids wouldn't go.

There, on our hill by the water storage tank, that night overlooking the city far in the distance, I held your hand.  The first girl's hand I ever held.  And I put my other hand awkwardly around the small of your back.  You laughed, telling me that my hands were sweaty, and that I had sweat on the brow of my lip.  I kept my distance, six inches away from you.  And your pretty eyes, like sapphires reflecting the distant city lights, smiled at me.  You bit the corner of your lip, I remember that.  To this day, I remember that.

I knew we would never be more than friends.  You would never be able to introduce me to your parents, and family was important to me.  After all, you had blond hair and blue eyes and fair skin, you were rich; and I was ethnic, with black hair and brown eyes, and my family was poor.  So we retreated from the world, to hang out with each other on our hill, in a place only we knew about where we could talk and be ourselves.

Where, that night, I danced with you for the first time.

"I love this song."  You told me, sitting side-by-side on the worn asphalt, leaning against the door of your car.  I thought it was funny, a rich girl and a ghetto boy listening to a country-folk ballad overlooking a city.

"It always makes me want to dance."  I told you, swaying back and forth and knocking into your shoulder.  You laughed, pushing me away.  I was drunk.  I'd already blazed through one forty of Old English and was working on the second.

"Let's dance."  I blurted out, my eyes closed, a second later catching myself.  OMG I couldn't believe what I just said. 

I started to open my mouth to say that I was just kidding, but you spoke first.

"Ok."  You laughed.  And you grabbed my hand.

And a thousand sensations rushed through me all at once.







Years of dancing practice in my mind helped.  And it didn't.  You weren't a pillow.  I tried my made-up Viennese Waltz.  That didn't work, I just ended up dragging you around, almost making you trip.  So we just stood there, our feet still, and we swayed back and forth.  I pushed up a little closer to you.  And you nudged up into me.  I couldn't see your face anymore, my chin against your ear.  But I could feel you smiling.

And I started to sing along softly, trying to replicate a country twang.

"Easy there, Nashville."  You smiled.

"Shut up, I know you like it."  I teased, drunkenly.

"Mm-hmm."  You turned into me a little.

The nervousness was gone.  It was just comfortable now.  You and me, good friends sharing a moment together, having a dance together.  Good friends, in a more innocent time, before our lives became a place of wrath and of tears.  We had no idea that night what fate would befall us, and what terrible horrors the hand of life would bring to us in the coming years.  That night may have been the last night of pure, innocent love either of us would have for the rest of our lives. 

That dance, our first dance, may have been the last pure, innocent thing either of would ever do for the rest of our lives.

I kept looking back at the new girl.  She sat there, alone, on her stage, legs folded across each other.


She sat on the side stage, the one that was separated from the other four main stages.

She sat there at the far end of the smoky stage, in her black slip and black lingerie, looking down at the illuminated patch of light near her small feet from one of the focused beams above her.  She had long, straight black hair and pretty, dark eyes.  Her skin was fair and soft to the eyes, like the porcelain skin of a doll.  I watched her exhale a deep sigh, and bite down nervously on the corner of her mouth, her dark lips spreading thin.

You don't belong here, I thought.

Why are you here?








The entire night of my best friend's bachelor party, I'd stayed in the background.  I let the guys have their fun, and I kept passing wads of cash to the night's men of honor for their enjoyment.  I drank my free drink that came as part of the cover, and watched quietly from the shadows.

Seven years ago, I was much too involved.

I spent much of my youth in the smoky darkness of a handful of clubs scattered throughout the urban night.  As the years passed, I descended deeper and deeper.  With a thick stack of bills in my pocket, direct access to certain commodities, a reputation for being a bad motherfucker, and a foreign sports car parked outside, I quickly became the surrogate man for a couple of the girls.  I'd take them for late-night dinner afterwards, and then back home.  I was that guy.

I'd lived that empty life seven years ago.  These places held no more intrigue for me.

Until this night.

While the guys had their fun, I stayed hidden.  I like to watch from afar.  And every so often, whenever I handed out a fresh stack of bills, the girls would make eye contact with me and smile or nod.  And I'd nod back.  Other than that, there was no interaction between a dancer and myself; not by my body, not by my mind, nor by any other part of me.  In my mind, the dancers were doing business providing entertainment for men seeking entertainment.  Nothing more.

And I'd take another sip of 151.  And another drag off of my cigarette.

And I'd watch.

Erin's life path changed after we parted.

She quit the job that I got her when we first got together.  The allure of hundreds and possibly even thousands of dollars a night struck her.  She knew she had what it took to make men do what she wanted.  She demonstrated that by manipulating me, and the two other men that became interlopers in our relationship.

Some time later, when I found out that Erin had become a stripper, our relationship resumed again.  Although this time, it was no longer in the capacity of boyfriend-girlfriend.  We were now in a client-server relationship.  I hung out at her club, kept her company when she wasn't on stage, or trying to seduce some poor guy into forking over his paycheck -- and she hooked me up with her co-workers and friends... who ultimately hooked me up with their friends who danced at other clubs.

It never struck me that our relationship had become so unconventional.  It also never struck me that somehow, all the love I had for her just evaporated once I put her away.  I could watch her wrapping her legs around a stranger's head, while I sat just feet away smoking a cigarette and having a conversation about where to have dinner after work with another dancer I eventually ended up with.

Her name was Skye.

And she too didn't belong in that world.

I watched the new girl sitting there on her half of the stage, staring down at her feet.

I felt so bad for her.  For the first time in years, I actually felt something for one of the girls.  It was the same feeling I had when I first found out about the mess Erin's life was.  The same feeling that I felt when I met Skye.  Erin proved my feeling wrong, because in the end she really did belong on stage.  Skye, though... never did.  And once I got her off of the stage, her life got so much better.

Skye wasn't the first I helped pull from the darkness.  She wasn't the last either.

I didn't know her stage name -- the new girl.  I never found it out that night.  The guys wanted to leave.  All I could do, as I walked down the hallway and out of sight, was look in her direction and try and beam a telepathic message to her to tell her to quit.  The guys didn't know how to get back to our suite.  I wanted to stay.  I didn't want to be in any of the clubs that night; until then -- one minute before leaving the last club, all of a sudden I found a girl that actually interested me.

Scenarios played through my head.

I wanted to walk up to her as she sat and hand her a twenty dollar bill and tell her to cheer up and have some fun.  I wanted to tell her how to get into her clients' minds.  I wanted to tell her how to make money doing this.  I wanted to tell her the worst thing she could do was what she was doing at the moment -- just sitting there doing nothing and looking sad.  But I also wanted to tell her to quit.  I wanted to tell her that she didn't belong here, and that she'd be better off not being in this place.

I could tell she was a new girl.

I wanted to walk up to her and sit down at her stage.  And let her dance for me.  And I'd talk to her.  And try and cheer her up.  Try and make her night a little bit better than it'd been going.  I wondered what was going through her head.  I wanted to know.

I wanted to ask her what was wrong with her life -- what had gone wrong?  I could tell that she wasn't there because she wanted to be there.  She wasn't there for the same reason Erin was.  I could tell that she was there because she was grasping for the last end of the last rope in desperation.

I had a little over five thousand dollars still left on me.

I wanted to tell her that I'd give her all of it if she quit tonight.
















Seven years ago, I would have stayed.

I stood outside of the club, staring down the dark driveway in the neon-lit alleyway leading to the six-lane boulevard beyond.  The groom-to-be and the rest of the crew that decided to return to our suite was making their way down the shadowy asphalt toward the street.  I stood there for a few moments longer, contemplating my duties as Best Man -- having to escort the groom-to-be everywhere on the night of his bachelor party; against the calling that gripped my chest.

I cupped my hands and lit another cigarette.

I glanced over at the three girls taking a break at the vending machine in the rest area outside the main door.  One ultra-tall Russian girl with hair down to the top of her boyshorts.  A petite Vietnamese girl with the bob who I remembered from years before.  And a Filipino-Chinese girl with a full-back tattoo.  They all had the look.  They all had the feel.  They all belonged there.

You didn't.  You had the little tattoos here and there.  You had the piercings.  You had all the markings of somebody who desperately sought attention... of somebody who suffered from years of neglect.

You were a flower, thirsty and starving.

You were a girl who'd lost all her dolls...

...and I knew the first thing you needed was somebody to remind you that you were still beautiful, and that you were still worth every bit as much as you were on the day you were born.

She sat there, through the doorway, just thirty feet away from me.

She sat there, with men passing her by in a blur, ignoring her.

Seven years ago, I would have been serving her breakfast in bed the next morning.  But I'm not that guy anymore.  No, I'm not that guy anymore.  I don't go around saving people anymore.  Now I'm just a burned-out shell of who I used to be.  That man died years ago.

I threw my cigarette into the puddle of water at my feet, and walked away.

As I held the white pinstriped shirt in my hands, I stared down at its stained collar and sighed.


Erin's lipstick smear was still there, dark and seductive as the girl who had put it there, still as fresh as if her lips had brushed against its fabric this night before.

I lifted the stained Turnbull & Asser shirt out of its box, and felt a chill run over my skin.  I hadn't worn this shirt since that cold February night, years ago.  I hadn't worn this shirt since Erin unbuttoned it and removed it from my body with her thin fingers... pressing me against the windshield of the Porsche, lying face-to-face on the third turn of that dark mountain pass overlooking the city lights.  I could still smell her perfume on it.

Gucci.  Envy.

I ran my thumb against the smeared print of her lips, across the starched spread collar down to the points where my custom brass collar stays stood stiff, and down the front of the shirt, feeling the fine bespoke hand-stitching against the rough ridges of my fingertips.  It had been so long ago that I'd almost forgotten about her -- but touching that fabric, brushing my skin against the essence of her kiss... smelling her perfume again -- it brought me back to that last night on the mountain.

I took a deep breath, and let myself remember.








Two months had passed since I walked out of Erin's life, that stormy Christmas Eve.

In that baptism of rain that night, I realized that no amount of love could stop our relationship from falling to pieces and sinking.  I had to abandon our relationship.

I lay my head in Chieko's lap that night, on the steps of the East Wing of her grandparents' house, looking out at the rain falling in the garden and courtyard beyond.  She became my girlfriend for the next three months, until we finally realized that we were much better as partners than we were as a couple.  Not more than a few days after Chieko and I ended our formal relationship, Erin just so happened to pull up beside me on the road on my way to work.

That morning, as I got dressed in my favorite bepoke-tailored white pinstriped Turnbull & Asser shirt, going to work as usual, I had no idea of the whirlwind of events that would happen over the next twenty-four hours of my life.

She waited for me in the parking lot outside of my building that night, like she did that first night we met.  She told me that she had the abortion.  She told me that Jeremy was nowhere to be found, and that her new boyfriend just didn't compare to me.  She told me that she was sad that she didn't have me in her life anymore.  She told me that she knew it was hopeless to think that I'd ever want to be with her again after cheating on me and getting pregnant by another man -- but that she was hoping that we could try and be friends.

Lies.  Well crafted lies.

Erin knew me too well.  She knew I would never turn down somebody's hand genuinely offered in friendship, no matter what they had done to me in the past -- especially if they were repentant.  She knew my ability to forgive, and to offer Tabula Rasa to begin things anew again.  She knew all she needed to do was convince me to have a cup of coffee with her, share a pack of cigarettes, and spend some time together -- and I would fall all over again.

Two hours later, I found myself back in her arms, above the city lights.

Darkside.

The mountain above the towering city skyline.  The mountain where I was one of the Four Kings.  Where my nights were once spent at full boost, turbochargers screaming, tires screeching against rubber-stained asphalt, defeating opponent after opponent both foolish and worthy.  Where I passed into manhood.  Where I found my honor. Where I found my strength.
    
And where I now found myself helpless in the hands of a woman who knew what brand of poison suited my tongue best.

I held Erin again that night, her thin, frail body pressed up against mine.  Her face pressed against my neck, her lips brushing against my skin and the collar of my shirt.  Her fingers undoing the mother-of-pearl buttons.  Her chest pressing against the sweaty, bare skin of mine, trapping me against the cold windshield.

She fucked me again.  Under the stars.  Above the city lights.  Just the two of us beneath the sky, under the cruel judgment of the heavens above us.








I held her thin waist, my large hands wrapping almost completely around her, my fingers stretching down to her hips, gripping her flesh, thumbs on her hip bones as she straddled me.

She lay collapsed onto my chest, the heat of our bodies steaming against the glass.

There are women who are like poison.  Then there are women who are like Heroin.  A man would never take poison willingly; but often he is fooled by a woman who looks safe but is in fact nothing but poison. 

A man who has had a taste of Heroin, however, can not help but lust for another taste of the sweet release that heroin fills him with -- even if he knows full well that the heroin will consume him and destroy him.

All he wants is more.

She wanted to be with me again, as my girl.  I told her I would take her back.  But thankfully, after an excruciating next eight hours during which she flip-flopped on her decision to be with me or stay with her boyfriend, she told me she wouldn't leave the boyfriend she took up after I left her the first time.  And it was then when I finally, really, had enough of her shit.

That cold February night, I folded my favorite shirt, stained with Erin's poison, and placed it into a box and sealed it.









In the closet of my old bedroom in my parents' house, I found the boxes.

I left them there, along with a lot of my stuff when I moved to San Francisco.  Years ago, I took down all the photos of all the girls that had been a part of my life, and I put them into their individual boxes and put those boxes into storage.  Each one, labeled with a name, marked with a sealing date, and set aside.

I thought I'd let Erin go a long time ago.

There would be no practical harm now in taking the bespoke Turnbull & Asser shirt out of its box, cleaning the lipstick stain, and having the shirt laundered and pressed for return to my wardrobe... but the shirt still gave me a feeling of ill.  Seeing her lipstick stain on my collar still made my stomach sicken.

It was almost as if her poison still infected the shirt, and if I had kept it, I would somehow still be affected by the radioactive half-life of Erin's presence on the fabric.

I sighed, shook my head, and tossed the shirt into the trash.

I opened my eyes, looking out into the night across the expansive lawn...


... that surrounded the East wing of Chieko's house, toward the northeast corner of the grounds of her grandparents' estate in the hills above the city.

I watched the rain blowing down over the hazy green, over the rustling trees scattered here and there, and through the wind that blew over the city that night of Christmas Eve.  I closed my eyes, and felt the wet mist on my face, blowing in and under the port cochere onto the stairs and onto our bodies as I lay with my head in Chieko's lap.

I felt Chieko's hand on my shoulder, brushing down my arm and back again.  The single red rose I brought to her and placed on her car earlier that afternoon lay beside me, out of sight.  But I could smell it... its scent mixing with the smell of the storm, the smell of my wet clothes, and the warm scent of Chieko's perfume.

I closed my eyes, and tried to forget the events of the last six months.








Erin shifted positions, and lifted her head closer to my face.

She didn't say anything.  She just put her lips on mine, and opened them wide, digging her tongue into my mouth.  I felt her hands unbuttoning my jeans.  One hand reached down into them and under the elastic strap of my boxers.  We lay in the folded-down backseat of her Civic, parked in her old elementary school parking lot.  It was two o'clock in the morning.  I had met her less than twelve hours ago. 

She was gorgeous.

Tall and thin, with eyes of dark mocha and black hair that seemed to float against her shoulders and back as if every movement she made was magical.  She walked into my life, in a sun dress and a white merino cardigan, coming through the door and walking straight up to me.

I fell easily.  At that point, she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen in my life.  She was an Import racing model.  I'd seen her working the shows and in photos in magazines before.  I used to look at her picture and think to myself, staring at her picture, "someday I'm going to have a girl like her."  That night, in the folded-down backseat of her Civic, in a dark parking lot at the edge of town, I got my wish.

Wishes do come true, but sometimes you have to be careful of what you wish for.

No foreplay.

Within thirty seconds, Erin had pushed me onto my back and pulled my jeans down around my thighs.  Her clothes beside my head, next to her emergency roadside kit.  She lay on top of me, her knees bent at my hips.  Her hands pinned me down at my shoulders, exerting a strange power over me.  I couldn't move.  But I didn't want to.

All I could do was lie there, with my hands at my sides, as I felt her black lace bra rubbing against my chest as she slid back and forth... as I felt her thighs moving against my hips... as I felt her tongue and her teeth against my throat...

...as she fucked me.

She bit me.  I felt the sharp points of her teeth raking against my adam's apple.  She bit me.  I felt the sharp points of her teeth digging into the side of my neck.  She bit me.  I felt the sharp points of her teeth pierce my skin.  I arched my back, and tried to bite back at her.  She dodged me, and forced her hands back down on my shoulders, pinning me to the ground.  I could benchpress almost two hundred and fifty pounds, and a girl who wasn't even one-hundred pounds was holding me down with a strength that I couldn't overcome...

...that I didn't want to overcome.








I thought I would never see her again after that night.

But when daylight came the next morning, she called to see what I was doing.  I took the day off of work, and we spent the day together.  The seductress that held me captive the night before returned to being a creature of light again, bouncing around like the cheerful girl I thought she was when I had met her twenty-four hours earlier.

She became my girlfriend.

I learned, in the first week she was my girlfriend, that her life was in shambles.  She had gotten fired from her job, had been evicted from her apartment, and was broke.  I took her in.  I let her move in with me while she looked for a new place to live.  I got her a job at a sushi bar I frequented.

Life began looking up for her.

I discovered that she was the ex-girlfriend of one of my high school boys, a kid named Jeremy.

We'd been pretty close back then, but lost touch as so often happens after high school.  He and Erin had been together for about a year a couple of years ago.  Because I'd lost touch with my boy from high school and they'd been an item in between that time, she was exempt from the no-dating-friend's-exes rule.

When I found out that she was Jeremy's ex, and they still hung out, I was actually happy because it got me back in touch with a good old friend I was eager to hang out with again.  We hung out together, me and Erin with Jeremy and his girl Alice.  It was cool, we could do couple-things -- and I became friends with Jeremy again.

In a short period of time, I went from simply being infatuated with Erin to falling completely in love with her.

I give my all -- everything --  to a woman I love, including my absolute trust.  I knew about her past, in full disclosure, and I chose to forgive and forget.  Though her past shaped the person she was now, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, and show her that regardless of her past I was still willing to love her as if she were truly a Tabula Rasa -- a blank slate.

One night, she called me as I was closing up at work.  She was crying, and I asked her what was wrong.  She said she couldn't tell me.  I asked her why, and she told me that I would be mad at her if she told me.  I told her that there was nothing I wouldn't get over, and that she should tell me so I could begin to comfort her.  I told her that I was coming up to her place to see her.

When I got to her, I found her sitting on the porch, her head folded in her lap, sobbing.  I took her in my arms, and held her and asked her what was wrong.  She resisted for a while, but she finally spoke.

She told me that all this time that she'd been hanging out with Jeremy, supposedly under platonic conditions, they'd been having sex.  She told me that when she realized she was pregnant, she tried to figure it out, and came to the realization that there was no chance it was mine.  She told me that I was the best thing to have ever happened to her, and that she blew it and that the saddest thing of this all was that she was going to lose me.

I told her no.








I stayed with her another month after that night.

Through that month, I continued to give her my love -- unchanged from the love that I gave her before she told me.  I continued to treat her as my girl, and I did everything I could to help her.

Jeremy completely abandoned her.  He didn't want to have anything to do with her, or the baby of his that she was carrying.  Maybe he disappeared because he knew that I wouldn't have hesitated putting a bullet in his head if I ever saw him.

Erin, however, slowly lost her mind.

I thought it was simple guilt.  I thought she couldn't comprehend why I was still giving her the same love I gave her, every day, even though she'd carried on an affair with my friend behind my back and even though she was carrying his child in her.  Through that last month, that December, regardless of the love I was pouring into the relationship, and onto her, our relationship deteriorated.  She began to become hostile.  Violent, even.

It was Christmas Eve.

For the first time in my life, I didn't go to my church's Christmas service.  I agreed to accompany her to her family's Christmas party with the understanding that she'd accompany me to my family's Christmas service afterward.  That entire night, she pretended as if I didn't exist.  At one point, she locked herself in a room with her sister and some of her friends, and I didn't see her for a couple of hours while I sat alone.  When I finally was able to get in touch with her to tell her that we were already late, she told me that she'd changed her mind and that she wasn't coming with me to my family's Christmas service.

She'd been fucking with me.  She'd been fucking behind me, even.  And now she was fucking with my God and my family.

I'd had enough.

I grabbed the bouquet of the dozen red roses I'd hand-picked from my garden and made for her, and walked out the door.  I stood on the front steps for a moment, looking out at the rainstorm and at the lightning that crashed through the rain-filled, hazy sky.

I stepped out into the rain and stood there, in my three-piece Gieves and Hawkes suit, feeling the rain on my face, on my shoulders, and on my chest.  I dropped the roses into the stream of rainwater running down the side of the street and fell to my knees, crying up to the sky.

On that rainy night of Christmas Eve, I walked out of her life.

It wouldn't be the last time.








I turned onto my back, lying on the wide steps leading into the East Wing of Chieko's house.

I looked up at her, into her big, warm eyes.  I felt the back of my head resting in the nook between her thighs.  Every time the wind blew into the port cochere and onto the steps, her short, chin-length hair would blow up and across her cheeks.




Whispering to me in her soft, deep, comforting voice.
 
I nodded, saying nothing and reaching my hand up from the ground to rest it against her forearm as she brushed my wet hair backwards from my forehead, again and again, until I fell asleep with my head in her lap.

She called me, as I sat in my 996, half-crazed and doing a hundred and fifty miles an hour in the rain, doing circles around the grid of urban freeways that night.  I told her right away what happened, and she simply told me to stop trying to kill myself, to come over and that she'd be waiting for me.

She comforted me.  She took me in out of the rain, dried me off, and made me a cup of hot tea.

I spent the night with Chieko.

I spent the night of Christmas Eve with Chieko, who would become my best friend in the years to come.

But it was not this night that saw the last of Erin.

Is a person's past really ever in the past?


When a relationship crosses the line and is no longer a casual relationship of acquaintance, ideally we make a conscious decision to accept our lover as they are now, in a state of tabula rasa, their past exposed in full disclosure -- but also erased and forgiven.  If not, the seeds of relationship failure are sown from the very beginning if we cannot forgive and forget the issues of our new lover's past.

tab·u·la ra·sa     (tby-l räs, -z)   NOUN: pl. tab·u·lae ra·sae   (tby-l räs, -z)          The mind before it receives the impressions gained from experience.         The unformed, featureless mind in the philosophy of John Locke. A need or an opportunity to start from the beginning. ETYMOLOGY: Medieval Latin tabula rsa : Latin tabula, tablet + Latin rsa, feminine of rsus, erased

The need or an opportunity to start from the beginning.

In the world of philosophy, of ideals, this concept is valid.  Yet we live in an imperfect world.  We live in a world of reality, where we must weigh the consequences of not taking into account a person's past when determining what they are likely to do in the future.  Yet, it would be unfair to not accept a person as they are now, as a blank slate --  not as they were years ago. 

Where do we draw that line?  How do we make that decision?

Many cases come to mind, some more extreme than others, but for the sake of our discussion, let's take a case that most people can identify with:  A lover whose sexual past includes questionable behavior.  The parameters of this scenario define that everything else about this lover meets or exceeds your requirements and needs, and that they have done nothing to demonstrate that they have -not- truly changed.

Would you take on a former player as an exclusive lover?  Knowing that in their past, he/she had a notoriety of maintaining more than one sexual relationship at a time without the knowledge or consent of the other parties involved?  Would you, if you were reasonably confident that they'd reformed within the last few years and was no longer like that?

Would you still take that risk, knowing that they'd done it before?  Do you believe in the old adage, "once a cheater, always a cheater?"  Or do you believe that people make mistakes and can change or become reformed?  Can you forgive them of their past and accept them as they are, or would you always have the lingering thought that because they so easily cheated in the past, that they could do the same thing to you?

Is a person's past really ever in the past?

Can a person truly forgive and forget?  Or is it only possible to forgive somebody for their past -- but never forget about it?  Even when we have not been personally wronged by them; like millstones around their necks, do these people continue to carry with them the weight of our judgement?