I woke up at 5 this morning thinking about this. You’re like a thunderbolt through my brain sometimes. I hope you know this. Sometimes, everything else of any importance fades away, and all I can think about is you.
It’s been one year this week since the beginning of this part of our relationship, this acknowledgment (at least to ourselves) of the obvious.
I promised you a recap of the on-the-way-home conversation. I’ll get to that. Some other details first.
I had resolved not to see you. The reasons are many. I didn’t want to cause problems for myself at home, I didn’t want to add to the drama of the night for you and the other girls in some damn way, I didn’t want to cause problems for you at home, but the main reason is that I don’t trust myself to behave properly. I fear I’ll say or do something, ever so slight, that someone will recognize as a sign of how I feel, or maybe our interaction will be too loud or too close or too intimate. That scares me for you, and I fear it. In the end, my need to see you was too much. I HAD to see you. (I didn’t watch something important on TV so I wouldn’t be late….)
When we got there, I knew I’d see you before anyone else. I was fighting to get through the door to get to you.
Seeing you like that is like a religious experience. It’s you, magnified and glorified, and I know you’re smirking your best smirk right now, but you probably have no idea what it’s like to be this infatuated and this absolutely whipped.
I kinda sorta lied to you last night. Well, not really, but I was trying to lessen what I was saying in case he saw the conversation or you had to answer questions. Unless he doesn’t know what I look like, he had to have seen me because he looked at me. Well, through me. Twice. Once again, my own fear of consequences for you might have made me paranoid. Maybe it was just my own imagination.
At the end of the night, you came up to us, and I felt so damn unsure of myself. It’s an odd sensation for me, and I’m trying my best to explain it to you. I was afraid people could tell how I feel. You are so lovely, so alluring, and I feel like a slack-jawed yokel sometimes just watching you. Your accent comes out, and I melt inside. All of that’s why I told you I was speechless. It was a love-paranoia-worship combo.
I left you, went into the bathroom, and attacked the towel dispenser.
I walked out, tried to say hi to him, and walked outside into the cold.
We lasted to the outskirts of town before our friend asked me the question.
“So, what are you going to do about her?”
He knows the high stakes. He knows both of our situations, for the most part. His advice was painful at times.
You see, my dear Eris, I even allow myself sometimes that maybe I’m just being a schmuck about all this. Maybe this is some kind of high school bullshit crush, or maybe we both just enjoy the little bit of attention we get from each other, or maybe you’re just playing me like a foolish fiddle of a man. But, you tell me to live in faith, so I do.
For the last year, we’ve put our lives as we know them in jeopardy for “this” or for each other. We can plead what we haven’t done until we’re blue in the face, but what we’ve said and done would be enough to be dire.
So, I told him I didn’t know. I told him how frustrating it is to worry about someone finding out, how it handicaps my interactions with you sometimes and makes me seem even more guilty, how I just have to stop worrying so damn much but when I do I make a stupid mistake like what happened a few weeks ago at the office. I told him I was 100% consumed by you.
He told me I had a couple of options, all of which I knew about. I could continue on and enjoy whatever it is I have with you. I could pursue something more with all the consequences that entails. Or, if this is too painful, I should distance myself from you, no matter how painful that would be.
I told him I just didn’t know what was even possible.
You see, my sweet girl who giggles when I call her sweet, this should be really damn easy, and maybe it is for you. Maybe you’re OK with what we have, and I guess I am, too, as opposed to the other alternatives. Yet, here I am, longing at times for something I can’t define, so I guess I’m not supposed to have it. I guess I’ve always wanted too much in life. Contentment is not my thing.
Still, can I continue like this? Sure. Life has a way of surprising us, no matter how inconvenient it might seem.
It was supposed to snow that week, too.
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