Today, I read some old journal entries. I started flipping through a notebook that I had bought on a whim, thinking that just having the thing would encourage me to write. Of course it did not, except when I found that I had to entertain myself for a few minutes, or else when I forced myself to justify the investment by hurriedly writing a few meaningless sentences about what I was doing, or wishing I was doing, or whatever.
Do you recall my tour the summer of 2008? When I was trying to push the odometer as far as I could, but wound up using your house as home-base; leaving to see old friends, but mostly to give the impression that I wasn’t only out there to see you. To convince you that there was some bigger purpose in my mind.
I think I may have fooled you for a while, but that trip did seal things in your mind, or you told me it did later. You told me that it was that summer, or actually, I think this happened over Spring Break; you told me that you really knew how much I liked you when I really came to see you like I said I would.
It’s kind of absurd, in retrospect, because in classic form, I had been overly-blunt from very near the start of all of this. I told you that night, very matter-of-factly, how I felt about you. It was the first night that we had ever spent more than a few idle minutes together, but we kicked ass that day. Anyone who saw us that day had to know we were going to be awesome: Everything we did had some sort of urgent, higher meaning in it’s triviality, and still managed to be light and fun. We were masters of every moment, and when we saw something we wanted, we already owned it, deserved it, were owed.
It’s a strange feeling. I don’t know how thoroughly I have retroactively romanticized the whole scenario, but I do recall the feeling, the coincidences that added up to my positive giddiness, or even the mild fits of depression that served to make the giddiness more real. It was all so terrifying, just thinking about how I would win your heart, whether or not I could. In the moments when it seemed like I was certainly going to fail, it still wasn’t a negative feeling, because my goals were absurd from the start, and shouldn’t I have known better, and what was I even thinking, and isn’t this all just a funny situation? When you let me hold your hand, my heart felt like it was made out of clam chowder, and altogether too warm to be inside of my chest, and I said as much to you, later, when I was sure that I wasn’t imagining the affection in the act.
I wish that I could go back to that feeling, and I wonder if you have ever had that feeling. More specifically, I wonder if you ever had that feeling about me. And I am not sure how you would answer if I asked you, but I am sure that I would not believe you either way, and I would tell myself that you were demonizing me if you said no and just fooling yourself if you said yes. No matter what, that moment is lost for you, and I guess I should accept that it’s lost for me, but I have been fighting so hard to get it back. The whole thing has reframed every experience since then so much that I feel like a junkie, trying to determine if whatever I am doing is going to get me closer to my next fix. Maybe it’s never coming.
There are times when I am certain that I have it all figured out. I am sure that the only reason I still think about it is that you were bad at showing me how you felt about me. Or maybe that you didn’t really feel for me. Or maybe that I am better now at seeing the signs you were sending me when other women send them. But I would hate to think that you were so fundamentally different from everyone else I have met. And I would hate to think that you never loved me. And I would especially hate to think that the change is just in me, because that would guarantee that I will never get there again.