My Inexplicable Attraction:

sub⋅jec⋅tiv⋅ism/səbˈdʒɛktəˌvɪzəm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [suhb-jek-tuh-viz-uhm]

–noun 1. Epistemology. the doctrine that all knowledge is limited to experiences by the self, and that transcendent knowledge is impossible.

2. The fact that all our external experiences are, to an extent, internal. For example, my mother is wounded by a close friend, and doggedly maintains, based on that experience, that all people are, at heart, untrustworthy. My college roommate is wounded by a close friend, and now maintains that relationships are never perfect, but require forgiveness and understanding. Both would say that their experience gave them crucial insight into the actual state of the world, but despite the objective similarity between their experiences, their subjective interpretation of those experiences is radically different, and their revised world views after the fact are likewise radically disparate.

Similarly, in the life of one person, the same repeated experience changes so much in terms of its interpretive meaning. My first year of graduate school, my waking and sleeping hours both were consumed with thoughts of home, and the people I'd left there, and every three-day weekend was an opportunity to reconnect with those that I had, in a sense, lost. If I had an opportunity to forge a new relationship with someone beloved Hattiesburg, I took it without hesitation, and let it consume me unabashedly, hoping (somewhere in my subconscious depths), that in this way, I would not lose the places and people that had made me lovable and loving. My visits were frenzied, manic synopses of the endless pleasurable days of college. I needed desperately to see everyone I'd ever seen, to do everything I'd ever done, and to go everywhere I'd ever gone. And during the hours of the trip home itself (and there were many, many hours), I would revel in fantasies of my reception: excitement, finally realized longing, and always pleasure.

These days, lover, though I am always anxious to see you, of course, the meaning of the experience of "home" has changed. It's no longer about reconnecting, but about maintaining obligatory connections. And I do not expect excited receptions, nor do I receive them. I do not mean the same thing to these people that I once did--and they do not mean the same thing to me. Once, that would have devastated me (the realization of my greatest fear: to be forgotten), but now, it is, to an extent, a great relief. I revel in the experience of being an outsider once again, of not being needed.

Objectively, the experience looks the same: I go to Javawerks, I spend time with you and others, I see my parents, I eat at my old haunts. But it feels more like reading a paperback that I haven't picked up in a while, and remembering, vaguely, how much pleasure I used to get from it, reading under the covers by flashlight. It doesn't bring the same pleasure now, but it's nice to remember that it once did, nice to know that I once felt longing and connection--that I actually once desired those things. And also nice to know that I can exist comfortably without them.

You, lover, will never fade, but you're not really part of the old paperback: you're part of the new one.

Merry Christmas.

~Specter of Christmas Past