Photographs: September 2009 Archives

I do not like endings. Maybe it's because I'm a natural-born storyteller, and maybe it's because, all my life, when I was reading a good book, I never, ever wanted it to end. Whatever it is, I don't like saying goodbye. I don't like changing seasons, and I don't like crossing borders. I want everyone and everything to keep spinning on its pleasant, familiar little axis. And unfortunately, that sometimes extends to keeping things spinning on their unpleasant familiar little axes, too.

I find, since I began dating again after a long absence, that I get more emotional than I expect to about the breakups of even small relationships - even the ones where you've really only seen the person a few times. Or the longer ones that are casual in name, but feel like they went a little deeper than the other person (and sometimes me) wants to admit.

I had a good day yesterday, and a mostly good day today. And despite that, or just next to it, I am a little sad tonight, on the couch with the knitting and the little pieces of memory from last week.

My head swims with this or that image, and I am unsure what to do with it. Chase it away, or watch it flutter by like falling leaves?

It was cold today, the kind of cold that tells me winter really is coming back, even though it felt all summer like it had only just left. I wanted my legwarmers. I knitted a hat last night, and I am starting another.

I miss him. He hurt my feelings on a number of occasions, and for various reasons I decided I needed Out, but I think about tangling up with him, all awkward limbs on the couch, and I'm sad again. I wish for him and I don't wish for him. I had a really nice series of kisses with the other boy to keep me company yesterday, to leave me feeling like sunshine on my face (he always reminds me of the sun, that one. It's his smile). And those thoughts came to me tonight on the couch, too, and I mechanically swatted them away before I realized he's no longer the one who's vaguely off-limits in my thoughts. It's the other one, the boy I spent all summer with.

Every week, we rode somewhere together - errands or the beach or the ice cream parlor. Someplace that could have been romantic and was never quite allowed to be, because we weren't doing that.

That part was a bit of a lie. At least for me. Despite myself, I knew I was getting a little attached. I tried to explain it not once but a number of times, tried to explain about sex and all its tendrils that tangle you together in ways and places you're half unaware of.

He didn't get it. I think because he's young - younger even than his age. When I mentioned that to Boywich, I could hear him nodding on the phone. Of course, he said. Sex is different. It's different than fooling around. It just IS. It changes things. It changes things and it's hard to come back from and resume where you left off. I don't think it'll ever be the same with this boy. Paradoxically, I think it'll be worse precisely because he doesn't know or won't admit that it made things different.

If he understood, if he were experiencing the same thing, we might, after a time, return to just being friends.

I don't know why I think that's less likely to succeed with someone I un-dated for four months than it was with someone I was in love with for nearly a decade.

I love and adore Boywich and always will, but I was able to become his friend, and not to want anything different. We had this conversation not too long ago, in which I remember telling him that he's my person. He's my guy. He's the one I would call in what Tolkien referred to as the utmost hour of need. And he knew that, already.

I am rambling, I suppose, and I want to watch Harold and Maude again. There's a commercial on lately that uses the Cat Stevens song that fits Harold and Maude so well, and it's completely out of place in the ad, but it keeps prodding me to re-watch the movie.

The movie is like a compass for me; it resets my direction when I start to feel lost. I can't even tell you why. Maybe it's the scene with the daisies. You know, where she asks him what kind of flower he'd like to be, and he points to the daisies, and says because they're all alike. And she says, no, they're not. Look closer, and you'll see that each one is unique (I am paraphrasing). And then she says something like, "I think a lot of the pain in this world comes from people who are this (holding up an individual daisy) but who allow themselves to be treated like that (sweeping her arm across the same-seeming field of daisies)."

My next tattoo will be of flowers, you know.