(06/05/2022)

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So here’s what’s going on right now. It’s been a while that we’ve been seeing each other, about five weeks now, and lots has changed. I’ve gone on without my writing for that amount of time, unchecked really, descending or ascending into this feeling. At first I didn’t know. At first I just trusted. Nothing was at stake at first, and now I’m writing this as if I’ll show it to him, which somehow impedes on the truth. I don’t know how to be truthful. To tell the truth, it’s a feeling: I follow it, I navigate, I misstep, I take a couple steps back and continue forward, but mostly just go in circles until I say enough to feel like I’ve told the truth. Lately I’ve been frightened. I’ve said I love you. We’ve made plans together. I’ve found it hard to be alone. I feel frightened that I’m putting too much pressure on him. Scared that my fear is pushing him away—the way I turn when my fear touches me. When I need to reach out to him for reassurance—or someone else—but someone else can’t do the trick, only him, face-to-face. But even then, what if he needs distance for a moment, what if he doesn’t want to have sex. There have been times where he’s just wanted to sit there and read together. How do I take this? Well, to tell the truth, almost any sign of distance eats at me. I don’t want it to be this way. How could it be sustainable if every time he’s thinking a thought of his own—I feel like he’s feeling like leaving me for someone who can handle themselves better? This morning I cried on his bed. This morning he asked me what he could do to make me more secure in our relationship. I wasn’t sure what the answer was, but maybe it’s only patience. Patience while time passes without him hurting me. Because that’s what I’m expecting in those moments of silence when he’s not sharing his thought. That’s what I’m trying to push out of the realm of possibility when I talk endlessly. I don’t want to lose him. I do so much to convince him I’m not as unstable as I am, but truthfully I’m just learning how to walk, and there’s so much more in my life than him. I want to share my life with him, not put him at the centre of it. Or if he has to be at the centre of it, to be standing there with me in wonder as we look at this globe shaped thing which extends around us. A friend once told me that lovers look at each other and friends look in the same direction. And it’s true that when we fuck we look at each other, but what do we do when we’re not fucking? While when we’re facing, each of us, our own lives, side by side on his bed or mine, reading two separate books, we’re both facing the words on the page; or he, somewhere, as he is now, while I pace my bedroom, both of us facing something which is not each other. However, standing where I stand now, holding his hand across that distance, not needing to reach out but trusting that he’s there and that this thing is solid, I suppose my lesson so far in life, the one that I’ve been taught, the big one, is that things aren’t solid, that things slip away, that things change—that accepting the moment is accepting the loss of what was as well as the wonder of what is, again and again, this thing that we both face, whether it’s each other or our own lives, it is the meeting point of what is and what isn’t, and then it isn’t that. My heart swells as I speak, I know this now. This is away from that thing I felt this morning, shaking scared on his bed, feeling that a person shaking, scared, is not one worthy of love. Which is so… so unfortunate a belief. It’s then I need love most, it’s then I’m most doubting of it. To need it and to doubt it at the same time, I think this is the problem I’m facing, at this moment, in our love. But something tells me that the strongest of believers also face the strongest doubts—like Jesus saying get thee behind me Satan. I’ve known all my life that if I put my mind to something, that if I say here it comes, here it comes. And here’s what’s coming: the strength to take those doubts and dose them in love, for they are from a part—a child part of me touched by some demon. I know now, after this morning when he asked me what can I do to make you feel secure in this relationship, that I have someone with me who is worth fighting for. And what is this fight? This combat with love against the part of myself which doubts, an exorcism? I can feel that dark spirit leaving me as I speak. I walk slowly and carefully as I speak, and I feel more and more that here, this boy, whose name is Raymond, is giving love to me, such that the demons I have to fight on my own with love, cannot outwit me again. Though they’ll try and I know it. It’s funny, sometimes I speak this way but a moment ago I wasn’t and I thought to myself, wow I can’t do anything. I spend so much time emotionally drained—all I can do is be with him and then come home and nap. Hear my words, free from reliance, I give them out to you—you who seeks them, who is maybe me on the other side of this finding them, maybe only me, and maybe that’s why I do it—to step toward the person who’s me who’s facing me, as in facing my own life, the words on my own page, knowing he’s strong, wherever he is, next to me, and I cannot control his heart, but it’s with me now, and the demon in my mind cannot outwit these words, I can feel it between my temples now trying to. Don’t, I tell it. Where do you want to go with this anyway? There’s nothing here for you either.