����Have you ever been on a long bus trip at night, knowing that you're going to be hours on that bus, knowing that you won't sleep?

����I've done that, sat there in the dark beside a stranger, and begun a casual conversation to pass the time. Sometimes it evolves into something else and an incredibly personal story is told.

����The bus becomes a cocoon for a soft voice murmuring in the dark, features illuminated for a split second by the odd flash of light from passing traffic, a sliver of a spirit in transit.

����When the trip is done you part ways, each to slip back into a life the other will never know, again a stranger without a name.

����That's how Diaryland feels to me.

����Almost all of the diaries I visit belong to people I will never meet in real life, people for whom I will never have a name or a face. It's as if I walk down a darkened bus aisle, slip into a seat beside someone, and listen to their story.

����Except ... I find myself going back to some seats time and again. There are some story tellers who are Sheherazades for me. I have to hear what comes next.

����It was oddly disconcerting when CF188 disappeared on me this morning, when I went to his site and found nothing but a white screen with the Diaryland logo.

����Later, he put up an explanation. It appears that someone who knows CF well chose to read his diary and did not take kindly to CF's musings about him. So now all that's left of the original diary is the story of why CF is gone and an earlier reflection about diary privacy.

����I hope this is just a pause in the story, not a permanent silence.

����I want to know what happens next.