It never fails to amaze me, this jarring when someone you have known as something infinite becomes real; you have to fit them into finite packages. Nearly two years of words, of shadows, and suddenly here is a voice in your ear, here are arms around you, here is a warm hello -- and it is a familiar thing, and strange. And every time I know how it will feel (and every time I am surprised). He is, of course, nothing like I imagined -- and nobody ever is, not really -- and that is not a good thing or a not-good thing, but simply how things are. I wonder, now that we have both become realities, if we will be able to continue crossing the lines we do, occasionally (catch me in the right mood and I will cross every line that can be drawn, with everyone there is); I suspect we will, if only because I am so good at separating things like this (and so very, very good at crossing lines -- or perhaps so very, very bad at leaving them uncrossed).
The next morning, the air is heavy with whispered threats of rain; the paths in the cemetery cling to my shoes. Everything sinking to the side, crumbling -- the outer walls covered in scaffolding, being repaired or rebuilt. The rain comes, and I am alone in a washed-out graveyard under a bright conspicuous umbrella, listening to nothing. (The people who like to visit cemeteries understand the pull; everyone else makes confused and crunched up faces at the thought.) I go to meet him at the station, and we walk across the bridge, vast shining hotel lobby, and sit down for proper afternoon tea, everything in miniature and richer than wishes. I'm unsure what we've found to link us for this past year-and-a-half, slightly more. (He says I am the exception -- he never maintains this sort of contact with anyone he doesn't see on any kind of regular basis. And I add, Especially if you aren't fucking them, don't even wish you were, and he smiles and makes a face at me across the table.)
Later, someone else -- the oldest stranger I know, perhaps (but also the youngest, in terms of that). Two years of deliberate not-meeting, and now we've said to hell with it, and I wait on the street by the entrance to a crowded station, and the taste is both familiar and strange when we are suddenly beside each other. Hours later -- after coffee and walking and getting lost and getting found and having dinner, late -- when we say goodbye, we are both unsure if any of this actually happened; perhaps we are both excellently solid fictions, still. (I have this photo of you, though -- that's proof that we were here, tonight! And he laughs and says that anyone can be proved anywhere with some judicious photoshopping -- I might still be imaginary.) He talks the way he types -- his accent carries through his text -- and stutters when he gets tired.
Back at the station, getting off the train, I stop in at the little grocery before heading back down the street to my hotel -- for water, juice, a bit of something sweet. As I approach the entrance, the night security guard smiles widely at me, tells me that he loves the way I walk, how I carry myself; I want to kiss him on the mouth.
When you sent me a message this morning, to cancel our dinner plans this evening, it was unsurprising (though still bitterly disappointing). I didn't tell you that I had a dream about you, the other night, as real as anything we ever lived between us. Like any addiction, you overwhelm and pull me in compelling and helpless directions inside myself; you are a sweet and irresistible and utterly unhealthy craving (and knowing that, I still do not know how to give you up).
