I’ve seen the boy twice in two days. The first time he walked by my work just as I was telling my manager: “I don’t want to be out in public and alone at midnight on New Year’s Eve.” (What are you trying to tell me Universe?) The second time was the next afternoon as I was walking home from making the appointment for my new tattoo. I was in a good mood, despite feeling more crazy and invisible than normal. I saw him a couple of blocks ahead and could have forced a meeting, but I didn’t feel up to it so I turned the corner and continued home.
He was in my dream last night. It was dark and hazy and confusing. All I can really remember is that we were in the same room with a bunch of other people and he got up and left. On his table were a bunch of newspapers and a piece of notebook paper on which he had written the dictionary definition for the word true. After the definition he wrote something else. And it seemed important and urgent that I read it. But it was dark. And people kept interrupting me. And I never did get to read it.
This is twice he’s shown up in my dreams asking me to think about important things. Love the first time, and truth the second. Love and truth. But what is love? And what is truth?
Nothing seems true to me right now, in many senses of the word. Nothing seems factual. Nothing seems in its place. Nothing really seems real.
Particularly where he is concerned.
My general ideas about love and what is true are skewed at best. I know this about myself. And it makes me wonder about the reality of my feelings for him. Did I make up the connection? Did I imagine the way he looked at me? Did I fabricate our seeming attraction to each other?
Does it even matter at this point?
Maybe he really was just a lesson. A gentle reminder of what I attract and what I need to avoid. Nothing traumatic enough to actually scar me. Just a little disappointment and a bit of feeling stupid. So what if I did make it up? Maybe it was worth it. Maybe I finally learned my lesson this time.
But what really did I learn?
I learned that I fall in love with people’s potential. I immediately focus on the person I see them capable of becoming based on what little I know about them when we meet. I do think I see who they are at that moment, but I very quickly transfer that knowledge onto some imaginary version of them.
And I also learned that I cannot resist the trifecta of intelligence, creativity, and overwhelming arrogant self absorption. On the plus side, this means that my seeming inability to be loved probably has more to do with the people I fall for rather than any real inability to be loved on my part. Not to say that things falling apart is ever entirely their fault. I do my fair share of destruction. Mostly in the form of self sabotage. I have always had a hard time dealing with happiness and tend to look for things to go wrong. And if I can’t find anything wrong, I will inevitably do something that creates a situation that causes things to go wrong. Horribly and irreversibly wrong.
This last time is more on me than him I think. I knew from the beginning that he was immature but I decided to pursue the connection anyway. I remember the moment clearly, sitting on my friend’s front porch. A defining decision. And when I found out that while he had been separated for five months he was still technically married, I continued on the path I had chosen. Not my smartest move. But it’s not the obvious things like that that nagged at me.
I never liked his hands.
There was something about them that seemed insubstantial to me. He was always waving them around when he talked, like he was trying to distract me from what he was saying. Or from what he wasn’t saying. I kept telling myself that not liking his hands was a stupid reason to not like him.
Now I’m not so sure.
We are all attracted to different things for different reasons. Maybe my interest in hands has more to do with some sort of intuition and less to do with vanity. Or maybe not. Maybe I just didn’t like his hands. But looking back I see it as something I should have paid more attention to.
There are many things in my life that I should have paid more attention to but didn’t. Not until after the fact did certain things rise to the surface of my mind. It’s enough to drown a person, thinking of all the things that might have been if only I had paid better attention. But the trick right now is to not get lost in all those might-have-beens.
The trick right now is to start paying attention.
