I wish I knew if you’d read this. Will read this? Have read this? Will have had read this? I don’t know, some tense. My grasp of high-level physics is kind of loose, but I guess sometimes time stops mattering. I just wonder, now, as I’m writing the words (the only point at which they remain mutable, a brush of nothing across my consciousness, now becoming real, encoded into electrical signals distributed… who knows where).
Who am I speaking to? Inevitably, people I haven’t met, never known. But people I will know? What do those people mean to me, I wonder, then and now and perhaps later, again. What am I really saying, in the larger and shifting context of their and my lives?
All this rambling about what is fundamentally self-reference, circular. Meaningful only through reflection, and our reflections change so readily.
Whose faces pass through these words, to be shown again to themselves?
It might not matter. Perhaps I’ll forget in a few hours, go to sleep and wake up and never be reminded. Perhaps it’ll be read, or won’t, and none of it will ever trouble me again. Or perhaps I will, and that’ll make all the difference.
Thinking, as an act, has a lot more weight than I think we give it credit for. We pay so much attention to the things people do, to the concrete and measurable. What we’ve accomplished, what we’re going to * do * today, what we want to do with our lives…
Maybe I just think too much. I’ve certainly heard that a lot. But that’s probably a question for another time.
It’s hard, having people in your life. Wondering if they’ll stay, or if they’ll come back after they’re gone. Wondering if you’ll meet new ones, and what they’ll be like. So I sit here, wondering.
You always hear about how important it is to have people in your life - to have a support structure. And then, more rarely, about people realizing all the people they’ve surrounded with don’t really care, how their friends are really strangers, despite the time they’ve shared.
Sometimes I guess you just don’t meet the right people. There’s so many, but they’re all so different. Maybe they don’t have whatever it is that makes them care about you, or you care about them… not in that abstracted, general “goodwill towards all” way. In that deep, personal way - that feeling of significance, or something like that.
Well, actually I guess that’s not what I’m saying. It’s not necessarily that you don’t ever meet the right people. It’s more that these things happen in time. Have happened, will happen, will have happened…
I have this feeling about life that things do seem to work out, as long as you keep trying. And not necessarily in some cosmic sense, but rather that a lot of the issues we have are matters of growth, of there being answers to our problems but us needing to figure out how to solve them. Like how we need people, but we don’t always have them. So we’ve got to figure out how to find them.
But then, there’s always unavoidable things, like time and distance and circumstance. Whether or not the people are there to be found. Whether or not you can hold out until it’s even possible to find them.
Sigh.
I’ve struggled with all of that, for what feels like a very long time. Trying to find people, and hold on to them when I find them. It’s not good, when you get desperate - you hold on to people too tightly, or make bad decisions about them because you’re afraid to lose them. Most of my really bad choices have started there, now that I think of it.
I’ve made a kind of peace with it, an uneasy truce. Sometimes I panic, start worrying that I need to do this or this or this, but, well. It’s easy to go places to meet people, but why would you expect to meet people you like doing something you hate?
I’ve met a number of interesting people over the years. Plenty of people I’ve liked well enough to talk to, but…
No. Sorry.
I’m stalling, again. Taking time to say things I’ve already thought about, pretending this is a conversation with someone who isn’t me and might not know. But however this is read in the future, now it’s just me.
I don’t want to talk about her. I don’t know what to say, or rather I’m afraid that whatever I’d end up saying if I tried would sound foolish, or wrong. That the whole thing is a fairytale and sooner or later someone or something is going to prove that to me. But those are bad reasons for not talking about something here…
I’ve been thinking about her, a lot. It’s been a really long time since this idea of the literal dream girl, of looking inside myself and finding the things I was looking for as a way to find who I was looking for. So much has changed. I’ve changed. And, I don’t know.
I remember sitting in my dorm, freshman year, enjoying the rare moment of silence one night when my roommate was out and most of the floor was gone somewhere else. Of feeling this thing bound up tightly in my chest, this unanswered longing.
It’s always been there. That night though, I think, was the first time I really paid attention to it, pinpointed it as a specific thing and got to wondering about it.
The words I use, more or less where: it’s like I’m in love with someone I’ve never met.
For a long time before and about a year after, it had always just been a feeling, but then I really started looking. Meditation, introspection, trances in many varieties I was surprised to learn. Lucid dreams, where you’re conscious, regular dreams, and dreams like visions remembered with haunting clarity, pictures in sharp focus with messages spelled out in oblique metaphors that somehow made perfect sense even upon waking.
I remember the first time, I found it and just held it, and it was just peace. The contentment, the calm, of knowing you had what you were looking for, that it was there, and it wasn’t going anywhere. I’d like to say I held on to the feeling, and maybe I should have spent more time trying. The best I could manage is knowing where I left it, but I finding contentment with things as they are has never really been me.
I kept poking and prodding, I’d made progress, I knew it was significant.
And then there was the first real dream. And for a moment inside my head the feeling wasn’t just a feeling, it was a girl. It wasn’t sweepingly romantic, we were strangers and we weren’t alone. But at one point I’m talking to someone else and she holds my hand. How it actually feels, I can’t easily describe.
To try, some context: about a year before this, I had a very serious relationship which ended very badly. Most of what I was doing was motivated by dealing with it ending. I was a battered wreck of a human being. I believed I was in love with this girl utterly, I thought she was the one I’d been waiting for, we’d talked about kids and marriage and all the time it was just like we were so excited to spend the rest of our lives together.
And I say this, because, none of that compared to what went through me in this dream when this figment held my hand. It was new. It isn’t how I would have guessed. I was young, and everything I thought about love was passion and fire and insanity. This was something else entirely. I just felt right. Everything felt right. I woke up from the dream and even though I knew it was a dream, even though I knew nothing had changed outwardly in my life, I felt right. I lost it as time went on, got distracted with the minutae of the day to day and my responsibilities, and it was… a struggle to try and get it back. I think I wanted it too much.
There are other stories, but they aren’t important right now. That’s when the feeling became connected to the idea of a person. In the dream, I can’t see her face, but I remember things about what she was like, and it’s significant. I spent a lot of time trying to pull other things together. Not physical details, or anything like that. Like the texture or flavor of a person’s personality. Abstracted things, qualia.
I guess when you think about it, love can’t be the same thing for everybody. We say we love somebody, and we recognize the significance of the feeling when someone says that. But it’s… the love you feel is specific. It’s things about you responding to things about the other person. It’s an expression of who you are as a person toward this other person, and the way that feels… doesn’t it have to be different?
I don’t know. In so many ways it’s hard to even think about this kind of thing properly, because it’s not physical, it’s metaphysical, and so many of the assumptions we make in our thinking as a consequence of dealing with concrete, physical things just don’t apply. I don’t know, I don’t know.
I feel something. And I want so badly to believe that it connects to a real person, that these things are not just in my head but… that this could all be real, somehow. Because it’s real in my head, no matter what I do. I feel it. I don’t know what that means, but I do. And I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
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