11:11
And as happens when you're trying to forget someone, suddenly they are everywhere. Their name comes up on tv just as you're thinking about them, then you realise that you are never not thinking of them. You look at the clock and it's a numerical sequence. For someone who's trying so hard not to find meaning in everything at the minute I am certainly doing a fine job of that!
I realised earlier that Bas, the catalyst, his last name means sailor. This fact held so much fascination for me at the time that I can't believe I had forgotten it until now. The lighthouse, my new favourite haunt. Again thanks to the Basalyst. Followed by Turtle Bay actually, now that I think of it. Funny.
And now how do I feel about everything? A strange mix of lost and found. I think I really found myself in the last month. Contrast that to the summer sickness that there me into a state of wondering where 'I' was. I had felt myself split into different faces. It was as though I could sense all of my parallel universes at once and I was between them all, floating like a ghost lost at sea. I remember the visions of boats and the fear of drowning. The sense that I could go under, along with the sun. The steely weather vane with the anchor symbol, spinning and creaking against a taupe sky. The sense that I was in different places at once and I didn't know how to reconnect me to my body. The four days and nights I didn't sleep at all, searching aimlessly for myself in a barren landscape. I think I even wrote it down as 'the long dark night of the soul.'
Such a long way from that, I remember the night in early November where I went to sleep for the first time in such a long time, feeling truly happy I was who I am. Found, at last.
And then on the 11th day of the 11th month, I meet him at the train station. And that night we hold each other like pieces mended. Like the sum of our parts was greater than the whole. It was connection on a level neither of us had ever felt with another human being. It wasn't something we grew, it was there innately, organically. Of course how does something that monumental, with such momentum fit into two previously tandem lives? It doesn't. We weren't prepared for it. And we had all these trysts, trying to work out how we could deal with such intensity of our magnetism in a situation that was out of synch with it, where other people were involved. Our lives hadn't any time to catch up with how we were, who we were, what we meant to each other. And it started to feel like radiation burn. It was the most emotionally draining experience of my life, and when I saw him last, I could see the same exhaustion on his face. We had ripped through each other like a firestorm, leaving our ashen complexions the superficial souvenirs of what was below the surface.
And coming back home for a while was like being bathed in aloe Vera. Not being in contact with him feels like a vacation. But it doesn't mean I don't think about him all the time, it's just that my thoughts are my purely own again in some way that they couldn't be before, because we were in contact all day, all night, sometimes until 4 in the morning. And the struggle to regulate our relationship as something 'normal' was tumultuous. Maybe even impossible right now.
And when I think about seeing him again, which I can't say for certain whether I will or won't, how do I feel?
Really unusual to how I would normally feel about someone who I felt so much for actually. I'm logical about it. Practical even. How would it work? For such similar hearts and minds we are from such different backgrounds and neither of us is steady or stable at the minute. Yet he has his ties to Oxfordshire whereas if he didn't, we could go anywhere, do anything. I could never have that freedom with someone who has a son from a divorce. He's always going to be here. We have limited savings, neither of us home owners, he's still paying off a sofa at his ex wife's goddammit... And then there's child care. But he's leaving the Navy in June. In June, he could be back up here. Even in a few months he could be relocated up to Bicester because his sleepwalking detains him from sea. I was wondering what happened to him when I was close to deaths door that summer and having that mental collapse as a result. And I remembered, July was when he stopped feeling like his relationship was working. I mean, of course you're going to think I'm crazy for thinking its a coincidence that my calling out for myself to come back in July would have any effect on someone I hadn't even met yet. Yeah it does sound crazy, completely. But that's just it. Everything about this whole experience has been deeply, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes gravely supernatural. And it was he who first asked me if I though it were possible we could be the same soul reincarnated at the same time and place, in two separate bodies. It was me who eventually looked up the, what I'd always dismissed as romanticised bullshit term, twin flame phenomenon because that's what people kept suggesting to me. And when I did my draw dropped. And he couldn't believe what he was reading. It was like we'd found our design manual. And that's when I read the relevance of 11:11. The day we met. My birth month and his birthday. The reason we are so drawn to each other yet despite that we don't fit because it's not a fairytale, it's heaven and hell on earth, it's looking into someone's eyes and seeing all your own fears, mistakes, insecurities and then having do go away and work all that out. That's supposed to be the lesson. It's no work at all when we're together but sustaining that is the hardest work ever. It's crippling. And yet, why should it be? If this were any normal situation we would have let go ten times by now. He tells me I'm the one always running... How could I do any different when he was with someone else. I don't know if he still is. It seems the case, although he ended it once and told me it was just taking a while for that to complete. The thing was he wasn't leaving her for me, he made that clear. Although when he did go to see her he watched vanilla sky because he missed me. And when I told him I couldn't be part of this any more, that's when he told her he didn't feel the same about her, and I stayed on the phone to him in counsel as he drove home in the early hours. But he said he needed me as a friend. That's all he's ever said he'd want since the conversation in my room where I asked him outright and he said that if he had been single, he'd want to see where things went. But he's clearly going through a lot. And I mean I am too I suppose, I think I'm just better at simplifying these things now. I do wonder if the reason ive hardly heard from him in the past couple of days is because I told him he was texting me too much, or because I told him I was going to give things another go with Rich and needed to focus on that. Why did I even tell him that really? I know why. Because I wanted to save face of course, same as any reason I run, because I don't want to be the one pining, unreciprocated. I can't bear to be seen as desperate, when I've already laid my heart on the line. I can't stand that to be the perception of me, because it's not even true. I'd never want someone who didn't want me. It's just that, it's hard to navigate mixed signals.
I actually applied for a job today, a job in Banbury. It wasn't that I was looking for jobs there specifically, it was just because I realised it's time for me to move on and my search for Oxfordshire threw up one that clicked and it happened to be there. I've been there now so I know it's easy to get to. But at the same time being honest with myself, I know that of course, I do have a dream of the future, where we meet again and our lives are simpler and we can be us without interruption.
I realised earlier that Bas, the catalyst, his last name means sailor. This fact held so much fascination for me at the time that I can't believe I had forgotten it until now. The lighthouse, my new favourite haunt. Again thanks to the Basalyst. Followed by Turtle Bay actually, now that I think of it. Funny.
And now how do I feel about everything? A strange mix of lost and found. I think I really found myself in the last month. Contrast that to the summer sickness that there me into a state of wondering where 'I' was. I had felt myself split into different faces. It was as though I could sense all of my parallel universes at once and I was between them all, floating like a ghost lost at sea. I remember the visions of boats and the fear of drowning. The sense that I could go under, along with the sun. The steely weather vane with the anchor symbol, spinning and creaking against a taupe sky. The sense that I was in different places at once and I didn't know how to reconnect me to my body. The four days and nights I didn't sleep at all, searching aimlessly for myself in a barren landscape. I think I even wrote it down as 'the long dark night of the soul.'
Such a long way from that, I remember the night in early November where I went to sleep for the first time in such a long time, feeling truly happy I was who I am. Found, at last.
And then on the 11th day of the 11th month, I meet him at the train station. And that night we hold each other like pieces mended. Like the sum of our parts was greater than the whole. It was connection on a level neither of us had ever felt with another human being. It wasn't something we grew, it was there innately, organically. Of course how does something that monumental, with such momentum fit into two previously tandem lives? It doesn't. We weren't prepared for it. And we had all these trysts, trying to work out how we could deal with such intensity of our magnetism in a situation that was out of synch with it, where other people were involved. Our lives hadn't any time to catch up with how we were, who we were, what we meant to each other. And it started to feel like radiation burn. It was the most emotionally draining experience of my life, and when I saw him last, I could see the same exhaustion on his face. We had ripped through each other like a firestorm, leaving our ashen complexions the superficial souvenirs of what was below the surface.
And coming back home for a while was like being bathed in aloe Vera. Not being in contact with him feels like a vacation. But it doesn't mean I don't think about him all the time, it's just that my thoughts are my purely own again in some way that they couldn't be before, because we were in contact all day, all night, sometimes until 4 in the morning. And the struggle to regulate our relationship as something 'normal' was tumultuous. Maybe even impossible right now.
And when I think about seeing him again, which I can't say for certain whether I will or won't, how do I feel?
Really unusual to how I would normally feel about someone who I felt so much for actually. I'm logical about it. Practical even. How would it work? For such similar hearts and minds we are from such different backgrounds and neither of us is steady or stable at the minute. Yet he has his ties to Oxfordshire whereas if he didn't, we could go anywhere, do anything. I could never have that freedom with someone who has a son from a divorce. He's always going to be here. We have limited savings, neither of us home owners, he's still paying off a sofa at his ex wife's goddammit... And then there's child care. But he's leaving the Navy in June. In June, he could be back up here. Even in a few months he could be relocated up to Bicester because his sleepwalking detains him from sea. I was wondering what happened to him when I was close to deaths door that summer and having that mental collapse as a result. And I remembered, July was when he stopped feeling like his relationship was working. I mean, of course you're going to think I'm crazy for thinking its a coincidence that my calling out for myself to come back in July would have any effect on someone I hadn't even met yet. Yeah it does sound crazy, completely. But that's just it. Everything about this whole experience has been deeply, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes gravely supernatural. And it was he who first asked me if I though it were possible we could be the same soul reincarnated at the same time and place, in two separate bodies. It was me who eventually looked up the, what I'd always dismissed as romanticised bullshit term, twin flame phenomenon because that's what people kept suggesting to me. And when I did my draw dropped. And he couldn't believe what he was reading. It was like we'd found our design manual. And that's when I read the relevance of 11:11. The day we met. My birth month and his birthday. The reason we are so drawn to each other yet despite that we don't fit because it's not a fairytale, it's heaven and hell on earth, it's looking into someone's eyes and seeing all your own fears, mistakes, insecurities and then having do go away and work all that out. That's supposed to be the lesson. It's no work at all when we're together but sustaining that is the hardest work ever. It's crippling. And yet, why should it be? If this were any normal situation we would have let go ten times by now. He tells me I'm the one always running... How could I do any different when he was with someone else. I don't know if he still is. It seems the case, although he ended it once and told me it was just taking a while for that to complete. The thing was he wasn't leaving her for me, he made that clear. Although when he did go to see her he watched vanilla sky because he missed me. And when I told him I couldn't be part of this any more, that's when he told her he didn't feel the same about her, and I stayed on the phone to him in counsel as he drove home in the early hours. But he said he needed me as a friend. That's all he's ever said he'd want since the conversation in my room where I asked him outright and he said that if he had been single, he'd want to see where things went. But he's clearly going through a lot. And I mean I am too I suppose, I think I'm just better at simplifying these things now. I do wonder if the reason ive hardly heard from him in the past couple of days is because I told him he was texting me too much, or because I told him I was going to give things another go with Rich and needed to focus on that. Why did I even tell him that really? I know why. Because I wanted to save face of course, same as any reason I run, because I don't want to be the one pining, unreciprocated. I can't bear to be seen as desperate, when I've already laid my heart on the line. I can't stand that to be the perception of me, because it's not even true. I'd never want someone who didn't want me. It's just that, it's hard to navigate mixed signals.
I actually applied for a job today, a job in Banbury. It wasn't that I was looking for jobs there specifically, it was just because I realised it's time for me to move on and my search for Oxfordshire threw up one that clicked and it happened to be there. I've been there now so I know it's easy to get to. But at the same time being honest with myself, I know that of course, I do have a dream of the future, where we meet again and our lives are simpler and we can be us without interruption.