I promised to myself and I didn’t break up with her. I see a mirror of myself in her, the way I acted last year towards so many. With no regard to their feelings, to what they need or want, blind to what they could give me, and what they were giving me. Yet, just like them, I can’t muster the courage to say goodbye, I secretly hope she’ll soon miraculously realise what I could bring to her. It’s tormenting yet beautiful. Feels like trying to reach a mirage, a figment of my imagination that I project and strive towards. There is no end to the road yet it’s always in sight. It’s good to see the end and I don’t want to let go, like those in the desert who know full well what they see is not real, yet lie themselves into thinking that it is, and with new strength strive towards it. I just hope not share their fate.

I feel like another failure is here. Trailing behind me like a shadow, barely catching up with me, then letting go, like a ghost of my consciousness. She doesn’t care about me, I can feel it, and that makes it uninteresting to spend time with her. She ignored me for so long that I’m starting to feel indifferent. It’s a weird feeling — I haven’t felt like this for some while. It’s a mixture of freedom and inconvenience, when you have nobody to direct your attention to, but you know you are capable of deeply caring. It’s more of a feeling of frustration than anything else. I don’t even know what I want, but I want it, and I want it badly, mostly now, but I couldn’t even appreciate it if it was now. So probably later, much later. Maybe a couple of months, maybe half a year would allow me to breathe, settle down, and see what I want. Until then, I think I’ll have to say goodbye to everyone, let them know I need space, and just cut myself out from the world. I need the old self of mine, alone in the wilderness, wandering. Like a in a quote I saw: not all who wander are lost.

I don’t understand S at all. She’s happy when I’m around, but rarely wants to meet me, and rarely writes. Am I too fast? Am I too slow? She seemed to have answered that question once, “You need to cool down” — it still rings in my head. This reminds me of someone else, at another time, at the same place, saying something similar. I’m starting to think: K really did love me. I didn’t understand it at the time, but all the time she spent with me and all the energy she put into being with me, including when she was angry at me, was because she really cared. I now think back and wish I had known. Yes, it’s burdensome, to be loved, and it’s hard to accept. It puts us in the uncomfortable situation that we know we can hurt the other. Maybe that’s what S fears, and hopes to control by not meeting me. Maybe she just doesn’t think of me, and it simply goes over her head. What a shame. Every time I don’t see her for a week, I start to think that it was nothing special, the way we met, and then, once I see her, I know what it’s al about, it comes back in a flash of light and I’m back to thinking: I want her to feel the same way. But she doesn’t.

S has got a ticket to ski with her friends. So there she goes, for a week. This will mean we will have seen each other twice in a span of 3 weeks. I think she doesn’t care about me at all, in fact. I feel sad and relieved, kind of like the closing of a book: it’s good that it’s over, but now I have think through it and it will get to me. I’ll re-live it again and again, thinking about what it all means.

I feel tired and disappointed in my own self. I unconsciously set my expectations too high, and I’m surprised when they are not met. But I don’t like to consciously set any kind of expectations — high, or low. Interesting relationships are unbound by space or time, go through us like a ray of light and make us surprise ourselves with our own actions. I have surprised myself: for a year I haven’t improved anything in the apartment, but since I have been expecting her to come, I have put a lot of effort into fixing everything. The apartment looks much more beautiful now. Beautiful, and empty.

She’s having a hard time with cold and fever, and I feel for her. I wanted to meet her for my birthday, but she can’t come, and I’ll be alone. This reminds me of almost all my birthdays, how typical. I’ve been meaning to meet her at my place, to be together with her, sleep with her, but I haven’t done that for 2 weeks now, and it’s beginning to get to me. How sad and how real.

I went to a conference and got a gift that I didn’t expect. She is wonderfully intelligent, fiercely independent, and enjoys what I have to say, while I enjoy the time I spend with her and miss her when she’s not there. It’s hard to talk about her, she’s so different. I got her at a point in life when I was down, and she made me happy with such ease it was hard to grasp. I remember a moment when we were ordering drinks, I put my hand around her and told her how happy I was to have met her, and she said the same. Although this seems trivial, it felt good at the time, somehow meaningful.

She is gone now, hasn’t written in a few days and I’m sad that I might have done something wrong. I think I did and it aches me, but I can’t undo it now and I feel lost. I think I should regain my balance again. Probably I should write her, or I should just remain silent, I don’t know and I feel lost. It’s something that used to happen to me when I was 16, being completely in the dark, without anything to hang on to, no rails, just floating, gravity seems to be absent, I don’t even know where up or down is. The roller coaster is rolling and I don’t even have the privilege to the view.

It was beautiful and adventurous. Thank you, L, K, M. I owe you so much.

I’ve found L again on Facebook and I saw the pictures I once felt lost. Looking at them felt like a ride back in time, to a place of beauty and warmth, light-headed and magical. She hasn’t got any picture where her face can be seen, which makes her even more mythical. But there is this one photo where she is wearing a beautiful dress, in high heels, with the back to the camera, so elegant, slender, beautiful, just her long brown hair down her shoulders. The contrast is so apparent between her normally relaxed and easy-going clothing and the elegant one she is wearing, it makes me wonder how many personas do we all have, which ones do we show to whom, and why. I wonder if I’ve been showing the one I like, or the ones others like, and whether I should be more open, more daring, take on more risks in terms of emotional openness, or close up and let others guess or think I’m empty.

A couple of days ago she came to to my dreams. We met and she came with me, we went through some hills through desolate, empty but newly built industrial complexes. They were shiny, new, cold and void of people. It was just her and me. Once we arrived, she wouldn’t go into anything intimate, it was a conversation where we didn’t even touch the surface, and I was terribly disappointed and unhappy, but kept on playing my part. I kept lying in the bed, and she, talking to me, was sitting on the edge. It was good to meet her in my dream, but it was hard to see us being so cold.

Days have been long lately. It’s weird. I don’ think of her, yet whenever I try to explore why am I so incapable of doing anything meaningful, I arrive at her. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. She catches up to me in the evenings as I ling in the emptiness, seemingly alive but in fact only swimming in the void. I look around and see nothing, yet her presence permeates me. It seems as if I’m waiting for a coin to drop, a meaningful moment I can listen on to, but there is nothing, just the noise of regular days that fail to drown out my hope of hearing that one sound.

I’m starting to think there is such a thing as winning someone back, something I never thought possible. Yet I know it’s only a mirage, a ghost of my own sanity that projects these images to some form of TV in my head. I start to see why many are so drawn to the TV where their hopes and dreams are projected day by day, making them semi-real, blowing away all their real dreams and nightmares. My dreams stay with me, live with me. I care for them, carry them, weave them longer and longer, until they fade away to be replaced by other, more elaborate ones. I remember the scarf I gave her and the woman that was weaving one just like hers next to where I stayed. I can see her movements, just weaving, reminding me of all those moments of sincere happiness I felt. Yet she didn’t much care for the scarf, even though I rarely give presents to anyone.