Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Really curious headspace. Confused. Confusing. con+fused.

The past week has included some very intense, relationship-establishing letter-writing (well, email). Scary-because-I-overanalyze conversations. Struggling to get the important ideas out so that she'll understand what I'm thinking and feeling, and reading her similar messages. Fear and excitement and attraction and not being sure exactly where this is going or what I want, though that's slowly becoming more clear. Tingly stuff. (Tingly but also confusing because other relationships or almost-relationships have been up in the air for a while, unresolved.)

The week has also included getting in touch with a couple of people I'd been out of touch with for far too long -- one from high school, who was in that soccer dream I wrote about recently, and one of my college roommates. The roommate called me on the phone a couple of hours ago, and we spent an hour trying to catch up on the past five years of news about each other. We kept running into the "where do I start" / "gee, what did happen that's worth mentioning" problem -- the one where there's lots of stuff to mention, but none of it comes to mind until something else serves as a reminder. He's in a band now. I actually caught myself feeling jealous because he's in a band that I'm not in. We were supposed to play together again someday (he was another member of the band I mentioned in my "100 Things" entry, Jason And The Breakfast Sandwiches Without Ham), and now he's gotten past the obstacles that were in the way of his music and he's playing drums with a bunch of people who aren't me. (Not that I could hack the commute from MD to TX for rehearsals anyhow, of course.) I didn't tell him that because I felt silly about it, and because the "Wow, that's so cool!" feeling was a couple orders of magnitude larger than the feeling of jealousy. (Oh, dmk, I mentioned that you and I are in touch. I forgot to tell him you have a LiveJournal, but I'll send him the URL.)

In the past thirty six hours, I've had four very strong reminders of one of my ex-lovers -- had reasons to refer to my relationship with her in conversations with two different people to explain where I'm coming from on certain matters, and saw a reference to a web site (set up by another friend) which she probably ought to be made aware of. So I tried a Google search to find her. I found a quote in three different compilations of quotes, an archived mailing list or newsgroup post that I hoped was recent enough to have come from a still-valid address (I tried it; it bounced -- it turns out to be the one I've got in my .mailrc from 1994), and an essay and two erotic stories by her.

I read the essay. I read the stories. I read the quote. The taste of her mind is not sprinkled on her writings like a spice; it permeates her text so that each line calls up more memories, not only of the time I spent with her, but of all the people and events in her life that she ever told me about. As I read, I kept seeing her face, hearing her voice, seeing her back and shoulders, seeing rooms we'd walked through or talked in or other things.

I'm feeling very ... well gosh, I don't know a word for what I'm feeling, but I'm feeling it overwhelmingly. The word "flattened" comes to mind, but damned if I can explain exactly what I mean by it. All I want is to say hello and find out whether she still has any smiles for me -- not to re-start things or spend forever rehashing old times, just to find out about the smiles -- but I want that very, very badly.

(No, "nostalgic" isn't the word. There's some of that mixed in, but that's not the concept I'm reaching for.)

I'm obviously not going to get another useful thing done tonight. So I'm going to go to bed. Maybe I'll pull out the length of chain I kept as a souvenir first, just to feel the weight -- the tangible solidness of it -- in my hands first. Or maybe I'll just look at the holes in my earlobes and my collection of earrings. She gave me the holes.

When I open my paper journal and pick up my pen, I wonder whether I'll be able to write anything, or whether I should just put a pointer to this entry there.

I am so jumbled-up inside right now. I want to be held but I'm not sure I want to be touched (and the second half of that is unusual for me).