| now is | once was | came from | heard tell |

9:24 a.m. - 2005-02-11

She hurts, even from here, she hurts.

Shall I tell you about it?

It’s been so long. I’ve already said that, of course. That it continues to astound me that something so awful could drag on so long, that there is no capacity in my emotional evolution to cauterize the mess, grow a callous over it, fossilize it and move on. It’s too early in the morning to be heart-broken, but I’m crying for a girl.

Have I ever told you how beautiful she is? I can’t begin to describe it. The first time I ever saw her I stopped and did a three-point turn to take another look. She traps the breath in my throat from looking at her. Trembles and shakes me. It has been years, not months, since the first time, and looking still does the same thing, only deeper and sadder now.

She makes things. She would hate, I think, to spend a moment not helping someone or creating something. I am in awe of her hands and her mind and the way she can just take an idea and make it real, no matter how extreme or complicated or fanciful. She has an amazing visual imagination. She gifts this part of herself so freely. Small, charitable bits to me. Larger parts to the easy friends who do not demand as much as I do. The most, of course, to her girlfriend.

I am not the first girl who has been so desperately and pointlessly in love with her. I know that. She just inspires such things. She lives, I guess, with the curse of the deeply compelling. She must deal with these unwanted complications because she cannot help but be the sort of person that you fall in love with. None of this is her fault. She does nothing to encourage it- except, of course, her own small mistakes, the crumbs of hope that fuel the flames out of any and all proportion. Which is the nature of unrequited love, and lies entirely in the fault of the hurt, I understand.

Over New Year’s Eve weekend I told her that I was leaving the country to get away from her. She nodded, she already knew that, but she told me it was stupid. Of course it’s stupid (as if I don’t know that). This whole thing is stupid but that hasn’t stopped it happening. I can’t be around her (it is killing me) but I can’t stay away from her, so I force myself with distance. I try to create a life for myself where perhaps I can avoid the sharpest, deepest daggers of the networks we have in common. Her poisonous girlfriend, the other happy, coupled friends who insulate their life together.

It is simply the truth that I will get over it, but I wonder. How long it will take. There has been no hope for over two years. I have had valid, good love with other people since I met her, and I have finished with them because of her. Because they are not her and won’t be her and are too good for me to lie to them. And since I ended the last one I have surrounded myself with people who can’t compare, who don’t exist on the same scale she does, who have looks perhaps but none of that talent, none of that beautiful gentle caring. Or charisma without the analysis to back it up. I have quarantined myself from the possibility of being drawn in by anyone even a little bit like her because I’m scared she will always rate higher without ever trying.

And I’m scared equally of having to feel this for any other human being. It hurts so badly for just this one person. Imagine going through this again. Imagine the even greater pain if there was ever a chance I could have someone like that.

You understand of course that this is why I am so addicted to the smooth, nasty, mean boys. They can hurt me in the paper-cut way. There is already a spear lodged so deep in my gut that these boys, they hardly matter.

- |+

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