It’s nothing but time and a face that you lose – I chose to feel it and you couldn’t choose

I cannot live without you Shit, turns out I can. So much for my previous assumption that I can have James Blunt on ALL my goodbye playlists regardless of who the subject is. Either I’ve outgrown James Blunt or alas, my love is too frail for the absolute demands of soppy lyrics.

I’m genuinely concerned about what this whole “getting older” thing is doing to my perceptions of my ability to love, though. The last time I believed myself to be genuinely, desperately, hopelessly in love, only to be tragically torn from my dear love through the demands of those old enemies of the heart, time and space, my mental situation was rather different. I have about one million diary entries written in progressively more wine-sodden handwriting, quoting song lyrics and passionately avowing never, never to forsake the beloved and that I was dead I tell you dead to the things of this life. I believe there may have been occasions when my high-flown yearnings collided bizarrely with trivialities of life, as when I made mostly-vodka white russians one saturday and, in between writing incoherent love into my journal, watched a Roseanne marathon and got a little sniffly every time John Goodman did something charming. Also I napped a lot, and didn’t read contracts, and generally was miserable. (It should be noted that during this exact same period I also carried on a long relationship with someone I didn’t give a damn about, who I never wrote about or cried over. So maybe I’ve actually always been kind of weirdly faithless and this entry is irrelevant. However, since all internal musings are ultimately rather irrelevant, I believe I’ll push on with my main point regardless).

I did live, though, and maybe that was the part where I started to grow up a bit. Maybe Time ultimately proved that it could make all my feelings seem absurd in the end, because between one boozy journal entry and the next, things sort of changed abruptly and suddenly, there was Adam. And now, Adam has been turned into a hypothetically existing entity in my mind and I am having to deal with questions both of absence and of the lengths to which I will go to regain presence, but I am not really in agony about it. I mean, I sort of am, as I try to figure out whether certain paths will be corridors of irrevocable fuck-up-ery. But mostly, I’ve made my decision (or rather, the economy has made my decision) to go back to Phoenix, meaning that my future with this man who I supposedly (and I think really) adore is wholly uncertain. Yet I am really very confident in my ability to keep on living, even living very happily; paradoxically, my confidence in the continuation of my life is severely undercutting my confidence in the continuation of my love.

I visited for the first time last weekend, and I was very happy to see him, and I was tremendously morose as I left. But I did not feel as though my very existence as myself was going to be somehow depleted or even terminated, and I guess I am afraid that I am turning into the reasonable person that I have mostly pretended to be. But I don’t know how to love in a reasonable way, because the essence of what I have always understood to be love is so wholly unreasonable. The  very definitions that appeal to me, after all, are from old crazy Slavoj with his “you choose THIS ONE and let the rest of the world go to hell; thus in the very basic sense love is evil” and his comparisons of the fetishization of the beloved with the fetishization of Christ. (I was in agony for months because I was not sure that I would choose Adam and let everyone in the world die. I finally put aside the question and tried to change that definition in my mind. Obviously to great success).

If he isn’t my life, my air, my soul, and all these other ultra hokey definitions, what am I to do? How do I gauge if it’s even worth changing the pattern of my life for, when I secretly don’t believe that the question would arise ever if it were for real?

And yet, and yet, in the honest parts of my soul I have to admit the following devastating truths: first, in this alleged experience of utter love, I was derailed by questions like “would it be weird to talk about it?;” second, I had this whole paralell relationship apparently without problem, so maybe I’m just one of those sketchy people who likes to have one physical thing and one mental thing because I get off on the unreachability which is wholly unfair to everyone and kind of gross; third, Adam is the first person where all the elements have been in place for a proper relationship (physical presence, acknowleged and reciprocated interest, sex, lack of external opposition) so possibly all my other experiences were generally invalid because of the heavy fantasy element.

Ithink that I just need to find some sort of emotional thesis that helps me navigate these two conflicting statements of my feelings: I totally need to move to California because I dearly love Adam and to lose him would be quite a blow; or, I am mostly rather enjoying the possibilities and mysteries of my life ahead and can feel almost as indifferent to the existence of Adam as if I never had met him. Hopefully, though, as I get to this, whatever truth I face as I sort through things doesn’t involve some sort of depressing statement like “you have never and will never properly love someone.”