Monday, February 08, 2010

confessions on a dark night

I'm sitting at home in the utter quiet. It is different. In Cincinnati I fell asleep to the sounds of airplanes and traffic and sirens. Here it is absolute silence. We don't really live "in the country" but we're not in the suburbs, either. I could stand out on the front porch for ten minutes and see not a single car drive by. I really do like it here. Cincinnati has its perks, that's for sure, but it's nice here, too.

Seeing all my great friends last night was fantastic. Rob, Mandy, Jessie, Tony, Amos. We watched the Superbowl and ate delicious (albeit fattening) food and drank soda and played Goldeneye 007 on the outdated but nonetheless exciting N64. I saw Sarah for about twenty minutes. I went by the house and we sat at the dining room table and we talked for a while. It was good. I really do care for her. But it was hard at the same time, because I still like her. It will take some time--who knows how long?--for my feelings for her to fade. I haven't thought about her much over the past week "in that way", but I've dreamed about her almost every night. Not sensual, sexual dreams. Just dreams with her in them. And then seeing her today made my feelings resurface, buried as they were. I must execute them. Behead them, crucify them, poison them. But it's difficult to do that, because the most logical step isn't to distance oneself from the situation but to color up the person in a light that you don't find appealing. And I can't do that very well with Sarah. Firstly, because there's not much NOT to like. And secondly, because doing that would almost be like doing a seek-and-find for all her faults. And that's not a very loving thing to do. But I have made a list that I read every day of reasons we wouldn't work well together. Not bad things, just differences of opinions and lifestyle that would bring an element of conflict into a relationship. But it doesn't help that much, because I know that there's conflict in every relationship, and the reasons we WOULD work--minus the fact that she doesn't feel the same way, which is a pretty hefty requirement--far outweigh the reasons we WOULDN'T work. But, in the end, I need to do something. I hate liking a girl who doesn't like me back. I've been here so many times and I've interpreted it in so many ways that I don't know anymore, I just want it to end.

A blog shouldn't be about "oh, pity me." And I'm not asking for that. I only know of two or three people who read this thing, and they know all this already. I guess I'm just writing it because while this blog began as a sort of online post-it-note of my beliefs and convictions, it's evolved into a telescopic lens that penetrates past my outer shell and into the core of who I am. And these are things that are really going on in my life. Oh, I could write about all the outside stuff: how I'm writing a book and revising another, how I'm doing a Bible study with Dylan, how I'm searching for jobs, how I go to Starbucks every morning to sit and write and think, how I'm a beast at Mario Kart on the Wii, etc. But no one cares. And, really, neither do I. Some people say that if they have it all, life will be great. But life without love is empty. Meaningless. Hopeless. (And, in fact, the primary theme of a book I'm writing, "The Boy Who Hoped.") And even if I were rich and handsome and popular and famous, I would give it all up just for love. Just to hold a woman's hand and see her not repel. To look into her eyes with passion and desire and to see that passion and desire returned. To be vulnerable and shaking and to have her accept that. In the end, being vulnerable and being loved is what I truly want.

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