For Whom The Bell Tolls

still fond. still not in love. kinda in love a lot.

working full-time. yep, i’m a stiff now. not for long as i hopelessly meander back to academia. or try.

saw t-pain a while back. she didn’t receive me quite as she did before. t.k. and i are going to friend-zone it forever. and amelie is, well, still the only person to whom i lack any demonstrable will to ignore. we in the relationship world call it, “moving on.” i can’t move on. something is ringing and bringing me home to her, and it’s not much to my liking in that it is my own struggle.

i’m being dragged kicking and screaming only because i’m too dispassionate and not enough naive to believe that a simple admission of feelings will darn our winnowed sock. and i’m too romantic to move on. someone told me to just put my nose to the grindstone and stop wasting my time. but what if ‘moving on’ turns out to be the greatest trifle of all? i’m not afraid that i will miss out or be alone–okay, yes i am–but those are tertiary fears. my greatest fear is that i will not be at the end end of the road to hand it off to the next in line. the next to carry water. to not fulfill that life mission.

too romantic. story of my life.

taste for love

about a week ago, i had a dream about Amelie. It went something like this:

I was violently angry at her, jut very done with the back and forth of everything and I was just pushing her over and over again, and i was rushing down this long wall of doors. It was merely a wall in the middle of nowhere with doors going on forever and every time I got to the next door, I had to push her out. Shove her.

I woke up the next morning having this really vivid memory of the dream. I told Jay about the dream. A few days later, he was having dinner with Amelie who tells him she had this dream about me–that my dad died and I was very upset that she didn’t go to the funeral, let alone call me.

The day before I realized that she never called me anymore–that it was always me, and she only txted or facebooked me. Now, for the past week I’ve been going back and forth about confronting her and saying, “Look, this is really no coincidence.”

And then, yesterday happened.

At a Speech Tournament I was judging at, I was assigned to judge the final round of Novice Poetry Interpretation. Three poets had poems dealing with love, and I started thinking about her. I started crying. And this girl who was reading these poems was speaking directly to me. It was bone-shilling and upsetting.

For now, I’m just going to bottle it up. But it won’t be long before I fizz out.

HomePlus

Thanks, TNC:

One of the consequences of feminism is not simply redefining roles for women–an unquestioned good–but redefining roles for men. I think that will be a good in the long-term too, but right now a lot of us are in this space of trying to figure out who we are and what we should be. Bill Hendrickson is a guy inventing manhood in this new world–all of his wives want to work, for instance. He comes from a community where the existing definitions were untenable and repulsive. And yet even as he constructs new definitions, he can’t escape the root of the old, of the ancient and all its questions and conundrums.