Paging Dante

Once upon a time, I was twenty years old, and fell in love with my housemate. It was torture.

It was the first time I'd ever been in love, though I'd had boyfriends, and even a long-term one, before that.

I used to scoff at the idea of not getting over your first love, but I now think there's something to that. It's not that I didn't get over the person (I did, though it took a very long time indeed).

But I think maybe you never get over what it feels like to fall and break yourself so thoroughly like that.

What's weird, looking at myself in the metaphysical mirror, is that I feel so much like that right now. And even weirder, I think I've felt this way more than once in the last year or two.

I don't even know where it's coming from. The last time, early in the summer, I felt quite crushed by a brief fling that didn't work out. The time before, well, that was somewhat different because there was intense physical chemistry involved, and it completely short-circuited my brain.

But now. Oy.

I'm just miserable. Well and truly miserable, the kind where it feels like my entrails are being raked over hot coals and roasted there, slowly.

Is it simply the lure of what I cannot have? It doesn't feel like that, but again, I don't think I am able to sort out much while I am in it. Heck, I can barely sort out what color the sky is today, and whether my stomach will stop hurting enough for me to bowl this afternoon. (That's cramps, by the way, not love.)

There I was thinking it was worst on the days when I see him and don't get the kind of time alone with him that I want. But yesterday I was hoping to see him and didn't, and that seems to definitely be worse.

It all makes the cat look especially pretty somehow. Maybe because I know for a fact that she loves me.