Sometimes I want to write not to express meaning to others, but to attempt to gain a clearer grasp of my emotions. Reading over some previous posts, many are difficult to understand because through the course of writing them I failed to do this, while others suffer from only beginning to understand what I want to say by the end of the post. Sometimes I'm hiding from troubling thoughts by obscuring my meaning . If this post lacks coherency or style it is because I am dealing with painful and difficult emotions might struggle to tie their chaos into something intelligible. I will not attempt to make my situation abstract or personal, I only attempt to write about my life. Here goes.
I met a girl at a sci fi convention and soon after, or perhaps during, we started dating. I adored her. Before I met her my life was manic. Since about February, when my blood was thining out for the spring I became desperate to figure out a part of my life which always seemed important to me, but only in the abstract. Sex, I had always thought, was wonderful, but sacrificing personal time and friendships for an erotic relationship was a waste. No longer. I awoke my womanizing side and headed out to the places where I could meet single people. Karoeke bars I found were often the best, but I learned to excel nearly everywhere. I became a slut. Short term dating and hopping from bed to bed is thrilling, and convincing myself that I could like a girl that I couldn't sometimes works. After the booze wore off, and I left another bed, the high was gone and only a feeling of guilt and sadness stayed.
The guilt isn't one over sexual relationships, but because I was misleading and manipulating girls who were not as intelligent as me. The sadness was lonliness and fear. To quote High Fidelity, "We were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at the age of 26, and we were of that disposition." I am too.
This, however, is not what I want to write about, and even now I am dancing around the subject.
By April I knew I was tired of sleeping around, but not as tired as I was of being single. It so happened that in April was the greatest singles convention I've ever seen. It was called Starfest. Laugh if you must but it's true. We met and talked all night and then one thing lead to another and we were making out outside of the hotel. Then we went to a Klingon/BSG party and ended up making out for an hour or so next to the vending machines on the fourth floor.
Sometime strange happened the next day. I woke up without the feeling of disgust. I was happy. We spent the next week texting and talking to each other and we went on a first date. She said she wanted to sing karaoke and we did. She was amazing. She was a senior studying physics at the Scool of Mines. She wanted to use that degree to teach physics. It shouldn't now surprise any reader who knows me that I would like her. Unfortunately what I also found was that she was going to Spain for the summer to begin work on her masters in physics. From late May to early August she would be studying electron disperal patterns with a Spanish physicist.
So we passed the one month we had getting to know each other. Sometimes we were good together. Sometimes we struggled with the pangs of getting to know someone with all of the unnatural expectations surrounding 'dating.' There were also moments of sheer greatness. Moments when the awkward pauses and sometimes jilted rythyms of a conversation with a near stranger, were forgotten and what showed was the underlying emotional state of our souls. The feeling that she could satisfy me like no one before her. The last night came and we stayed up all night whispering to each other. Then she left.
We could break up, we could stay together, or we could see other people while she was away. The third option is the same as the first in reality. I couldn't see myself finding anyone better, and I didn't want to forever wonder if I made a mistake.
I am unsure about things, jealous all the time, convinced in so many ways that by the end of summer I'll have just wasted three months pining away. I barely remember the way she looks. I fall asleep every night thinking about her. I wonder if we're actually a good pair or not. A month is such a short time to get to know someone and it's impossible to understand who she is in any profound way. She tends to keep her distance more than myself, but when she expresses herself it's passionate.
In the first week she sent me a song with one of her emails, and ever since we've been sending songs back and forth. Some about ourselves and some about us. These songs serve as the emotional nourishment of our relationship. They dictate how I feel about her, and I use them to prolong those emotions. I wonder if my perceptions about her are any longer tied to her true self. Since I never knew her well, and since she's been gone so long, I've become uncertain about whether she's the person I think she is, or whether she's something else and I've forced a desired set of perceptions on her.
So I pine and wait for summer to end. My desperation to figure out my lovelife has led me to limbo. I can't search for love while she hangs over my head, and I can't move forward with my relationship to her. I wait and it wears on me. The advancement of my life seems to depend on her, and she's not here. Perhaps she isn't even real, and perhaps I'm an overdramatic drama queen. I can't tell, and the story won't continue till August.
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