Forgetful Lover,

"Abandonment complex" isn't quite the right term, but I'm always waiting for you to get bored. Not with me, perhaps, but with whatever we're doing. I'm waiting for you to leave the old and start something new. I'm content to stay in the same spot, doing the same things, recreating the same projects indefinitely. But you, you're always starting new lives, finding new niches. I can't keep up.

My perception of time is all fucked up. It's as though my current state of mind has been my state of mind for a long time, but I'm just now, at this very moment, realizing how it is different from the state of mind I was in just before it became what it is...

It's like that guy... Clive Waring? Or Wearing? Or something? The guy who had really severe short-term memory loss--as in, it often didn't last more than a few seconds. He kept a journal, and every time he started a new entry, he always said that this moment, this one happening right now, at this very second, was the first time he'd been awake in a very long time. All the hundreds of entries before this one had been fakes or something close. But this one, this was the genuine article. This moment defined a profound change in his life--in fact, the beginning of his life.

I feel like we're all Clive, really. The present moment always seems to outshine and overshadow the past ones. Even those of us who keep journals look back on past entries, and we see that they express the same sentiments that we're feeling now, but we discount them. "Surely, I couldn't have understood that statement as I do now. I couldn't have meant the same thing by that as I mean now."

(Maybe that's just me; maybe I shouldn't speak for everyone.)

But what if we did mean the same thing? What if we are continually waking into a single moment, stunned each time by the profundity of it? Though the really stunning thing is the monotony of life. The real profundity lies in the fact that we can find any joy along this flatish line on this 2D graph.

--Debbie Downer

MY FACELESS SADIST:

I get the feeling that this was your plan all along: To sit behind the screen with your whip and mask, making my anticipation grow until it felt like it would rip me in two. And then, a calculated number of days later, you let me feel it all in a rush, releasing me from its treacherous bonds. If it was anyone except you, I might retaliate,

(because how dare they turn the tables)

but because it’s you, lover, I must admit that I have pleasure—thank you.

I like the baby picture kick that you’re on. Some personality theorists in the first half of the twentieth century speculated about the significance of the childhood memories that we choose to retrieve and rehearse and revive. So in order to get a glimpse into the current state of someone’s psyche, they would ask: “Tell me about your earliest childhood memory.”

And some might say: “I remember being in my crib. I don’t know how old I was, but I was in a crib. I remember lying there in the semi-dark, and studying the cobwebs on the ceiling being gently blown by the air conditioning.”

Or, “I remember being on my back under a Christmas tree, and looking up at the lights twinkling through the plastic branches. There was a distinct feeling associated with it—so tangible that it was almost a smell: the scent of anticipation.”

Or even, “I remember riding a go-cart with my oldest brother. I was too small to drive, so he put me in his lap as we rode around our field. I felt safe, and so proud to be included in this activity with him.”

Ostensibly, each of these memories would give some crucial insight into the current state of mind of the speaker: “The speaker is infatuated with isolation; is infatuated with sensation-seeking; is infatuated with those perceived as superior.” Though I can’t endorse this method scientifically, or claim that it is diagnostically useful, I do like the implication that memories are at once the product of what has passed, and also what is present. They are not snapshots of our lives as they were, but instead paintings of our past selves, the subject and brushstrokes guided by our present selves. (Paintings that made it worth it to leave the garden.)

It’s only slightly different from the magic of looking at baby pictures. Though the photos are in one sense objective, aren’t your careful evaluations of the image, the details you deem significant, in some sense more revealing about your current self than your 1 or 2 or 3 year old self? “There,” you say, “Look how happy I was.” “I was a chubby-assed little baby.” “I really loved that shirt (and of course the implications of that are obvious).” “I was still me—even then, I was me.”

Of course, you weren’t really. You haven’t been that particular you for a long time—both psychologically and biologically, you have sloughed off many selves since that picture. But it’s reassuring, the comparison. It’s reassuring to know that you existed then, and that you were so similar to your current conception of yourself. Reassuring to see hints of this emerging identity, or that emerging preference. We need those photos, those reassurances that certain things remain constant. Just as we need holidays: it’s comforting to know that at least one day a year, we know that we will, eternally, be doing the same, pleasurable things with (hopefully) the same pleasurable people. That is one aspect of our lives that we will always have, no matter how ridiculously, rapidly, relentlessly our lives change.

~ The Masochist Who Cares (For The Face Behind The Mask)

My darling confidant,

I apologize for my expected tardiness in responding. Just imagine the usual path of the Pony Express was delayed a bit longer because of the recent hoopla of the holidays. Norman was perhaps a bit too far off the beaten, snow-shoveled path; they just decided to wait an extra week or so. They figured it would do the inhabitants good to wait a while, for once. Think of it that way, and it seems rather sweet. Perhaps you needed a reminder of how good it felt to be surprised, just when you thought things were beginning to fizzle. This one’s too good to go flat, though I’m pleased to report.

While things are finally beginning to settle from all the festive goings-on, I’m less ready than ever for this break to end. The colorful bulbs of Christmas are finally being strung up and tucked away into a cold, dark storage unit and I’ve never been more ready to see them go. It was the best winter I can remember in recent memory and it couldn’t possibly last long enough. The icy chill was easy enough to shrug off, but more joints and muscles are sore from sitting awkwardly hunched over in front of the monitor, waiting for my life to start happening.

This year’s winter was perhaps even better than those innocent childhood mornings when Santa was even more mysterious and mythical than my current sex life. However, it feels damn good to know the truth after the fall, even if we were kicked out of the garden...  God’s ain’t got nothin’ on what’s growin’ in our minds.

 

Typing like a madman, my thoughts are in a frenzy when I really get going: something that doesn’t happen enough. It’s all fits and starts and constantly referring back to your comments and feeling ultimately like there’s nothing I can add to what you’ve already said, so flawlessly. You say everything just as I’d love to be able to, with a voice so familiar and steady, it’s hard to believe it’s not my own. Your words always edify and intoxicate me.

I’m very much relieved you’ve decided to break out of your impersonal shell.                     

It distracted me from the real point of these coded correspondences: essentially just for us, individually and together, to make sense of our uncannily poignant and indisputably stirring mutual perception of the world. I can’t imagine our secret sessions ever being any less than wholly soul-fulfilling.

 

Inevitably, I doubt you will ever realize the wonders you work that never cease to humble me.  

You constantly remind me of who I am and who I most aspire to be. 

You know I have more reverence for you than any living person I’ve ever known.

And if you didn’t, you certainly should.

I long for your diction like babies long to be held.

You know, we never got those promise rings we talked about.

In an equally random and distracted end-note, keeping with my current and oft utilized stream-of-consciousness approach: I so love the exciting prospect of a new relationship that blossoms out of meeting new and interesting people. It serves to renew my faith in the ability of other people to be unexpectedly and pleasantly engrossing. It reminds me that I cannot consistently expect the worst from people, even though perhaps I should. Instead, I’m always thinking that this time, things will be different. I see new people in my life as the ideals of what I would hope they could be... and as we both know too well, that is almost always grounds for disappointment. I need to fine-tune my ability to be pleased with what is concretely there in others, without any of that other pointless waiting, hoping and wishing.  What else is the internet for but to maximize our longing?

 

-Your envious admirer,

consistently ed·i·fied (ěd'ə-fī'd)

1. to build up, establish, or strengthen a person, institution, etc.; to uplift

2. to instruct or benefit; to inform or enlighten intellectually or spiritually

Etymology:

Latin aedes 'building' + -ficare 'to make'

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

My White Warrior,

Paradox [par-uh-doks]:

1. The Internet is the information super-highway, and yet it limits sociality in so many ways. We are connected to our friends (from school, from work) more closely than we ever have been in the past: with a click of a button, we can peer, like voyeurs, into their lives, and they, the exhibitionists, display all for us to see. Communication has been expedited in a hundred big and small ways. And yet, don't you ever feel that you are more isolated from them than you once were?

When the only means of communication was the Pony Express, people went months without hearing from the loved ones they'd left on the other side of the country. Now, if we go a few days without anyone sending us an email, and IM, commenting on our blog, texting us, writing on our "wall," we feel forgotten and utterly alone.

2. And then there are the sites dedicated to connecting strangers via their mutual interests, desires, needs. This should expand our sense of social connectedness to the breaking point, make us feel more belonging and satisfaction than we can handle. Instead, connecting with these people makes us feel more like deviants, like outcasts: we shouldn't be using these channels to find acceptance and love.


---

What entrances me about our dialogues is that they feel less like dialogues and more like thought. Not in a jumbled, or nonsensical, or stream-of-consciousness way (although sometimes that may be so). More in the way that they are so absorbing, and so subtle, and so comfortable, that it's easy to slip into them without realizing it, easy to forget that we ever began them, and likewise that they will ever end.

You recognize this, no? You know the kind of conversations with self that I mean--we introverts thrive on them. One moment, you're diligently pounding away on whatever task you've been told to do, changing the format on a thousand references, double-checking APA sites on unusual sources, inserting missing periods and commas between and after authors when suddenly you're musing about how cliche your thought-spoken experience of depression seems to be: "Sinking into despair," standing in the midst of "Waves of sadness," "Drowning in the waters of self-loathing." You're trying now to come up with an expression of your experience that isn't quite so trite, so overused by would-be poets and adolescent bloggers. The best you can come up with is "the icy grip of rumination, clutching tenaciously at your throat until your lungs have forgotten the sweet sensation of unburdened breath." It seems a little convoluted to you, and not quite the sentiment you were going for. Your failure is disappointing, and you wonder if there will ever be a time when you will be able to use your melancholy as a creative catalyst--it seems to you that you did at one time. You recall the folder of a thousand creative endeavors, started and forgotten, and think that maybe you should return to them at some future date, perhaps when your life isn't so squandered on menial tasks, and that thought

wakes you up. You hadn't even realized that you'd slipped into yourself. You look at the screen, and see that your fingers had continued on without you, looking up style tips, adding periods and commas.

Those are our dialogues--though usually less depressing than stimulating, less dark than illuminating, and less trite than novel, and endlessly valuable.

~Fair Maiden

My voice of cryptic reason,

Your infinitely inexhaustible insight is indubitably interesting. You keep my mind tethered to the center of a centrifugal force that is the world. 

I'm realizing all my best friends, my most loyal confidants are the voices in the music that fills the space between overpowering silences that threaten to consume me. I look for a lover, a friend, a purpose, an impetus, a mantra for my life; Music has it all if you're listening carefully to the right things. It has held me more consistently when I break than any individual I've ever known ever could. The lull of the melody and the soothing rapture of the singer's voice hold me tighter than any arms I've ever known. A rather dejected glam-rock Brian Warner once assured me: "We love the abuse because it makes us feel like we are needed." 

While this is true on many levels, the music in this case could be the abuse I so love because I KNOW I am needed to hear it; otherwise, what would be the point in making music?

I torture or rejuvenate myself depending on what I listen to.

I think that in many ways, on many levels: we are products of our big, impersonally interconnected world. I am simultaneously at odds and in love with the status quo of technology and her potential. While it enables us to be available and connected to anyone, anything, anywhere, it cuts off other potential outlets of communication that may or may not be later deemed necessary. Though I cannot put my finger on it and google search results are  inconclusive, something absolutely necessary feels missing.

While it can be very informing and oftentimes therapeutic, the internet still leaves me feeling altogether unfulfilled and even more isolated. Wasn't it enough that I was born to think and behave in this way; that circumstances beyond my control left me a broken, trembling shell of humanity? Now I've only to retreat to the vast impossible expanse of my own mind or the equally vast isolation of the internet, which does in fact, contain the universe and all variations thereof; the latter of the two being my more recent preference, by far. In addition to anything I could ever want to see or hear, it is also where I find you, my dear. 

 

The cold sterile gaze of the monitor illuminates only me, in the places I retreat to so often to worship the universe with her. She shows me things I never could have imagined to be possible; beautiful tortured and broken things. That mad mad world I see all around me is reflected and magnified inside of me. The world I inhabit has left me feeling like a tortured genius, crouching in the darkest corners of a tall lonely tower that looms so high and impressive over the rest of the world. My perceptions of the world and perception of my own perceptions have not changed much over the years. I can see further from my lonely tower and more clearly than ever before, but all the other lonely people I see look the same. They still look so lonely.

It makes me feel less lonely, to see them without being seen. Like God, who I trust to be there: inside of me. 

My faith is like a diamond the size of a refrigerator, buried in your backyard, love.

Trust that it will always be there safe within you.

All of my love to you and our .8-th of a child,

~be⋅wil⋅dered

-adjective

1. To confuse or befuddle, especially with numerous conflicting situations, objects, or statements. 

2. To cause to lose one's bearings; disorient.

Etymology:  be- "thoroughly" + archaic wilder "lead astray, lure into the wilds."

My Skeptical Lover,

For your edification:

in⋅ter⋅est⋅ing

-adjective

1. engaging or exciting and hold the attention or curisoty

2. arousing a feeling of interest

Etymology: "to be between," from inter- "between" + esse "to be."

---

Every tragedy has the potential to throw you into a different state of being. And for that reason, tragedy inspires a certain amount of excitement within us. There’s a sense of possibility that accompanies it, a feeling that we are no longer, and can no longer, be who and where we were before, and therefore are forced to occupy a new space.

When we witness a tragedy befall someone we know, we wait anxiously for updates: what new space will they be forced to fill? And what imprints can we leave with them in this wet, new, unformed world?

To be denied a role in defining that new state is heartbreaking. It’s infatuation all over again: they’re a new person that you have to ponder and ruminate on. You sit in the periphery, crouching in the hedges around their new dwelling space, windows aflame with light, reminding you only of the fact that you are out in the darkness, and cannot come inside and help them arrange the new furniture, and decide what flavors of ice cream should be stocked in the freezer, and cannot be there with them to christen the hearth, and tend to their now-healing wounds by firelight.

Before you know it, they’ve settled into their new space, and it’s further away from yours than it used to be. You long for a tragedy to bring you back together with them, but you realize how anticlimactic that would be, and how transparent. They’re married now, with 1.8 kids, and that’s the world they’ve decided to occupy. They’re strangling, you’re just sure of it, and every day is now a tragedy, but they refuse to acknowledge it, they refuse the possibility of changing, of occupying a space a little closer to you, of brushing your hand without an apology, of speaking to you without that strange affected tone, of acknowledging your double entendres for more than their surface meaning.

Tell me, lover, that the next time I find myself on the brink of giving birth to .8 kids that you’ll be there to illuminate the tragedy in that occurrence.

~Befallen