I've been trying to put words to this for weeks and I'm torn now between finally doing it and giving up trying. On the heels of my last visit here, I dreamt us the playful electricity. It works - the flirting - because we're not serious about the implications. Or I don't think she takes me seriously and she knows I'll never push. And so we hold the tension without strain, without risk.
I'm realizing as I try to write it why it's been so difficult - I'm trying to say it and not say it at the same time. I'm embarrassed, I guess. Ashamed. We were there, together, and I did something. Faced her. I opened in some new way. I dared. But when I did, she faded just a little. Receded, almost imperceptibly. Still talking, laughing, still seeming to draw near to be but yet at the same time drawing ever so slightly away.
It came as a surprise, somehow. A moment of painful, embarrassing clarity. It felt like she somehow wants what we have to continue, but doesn't want me. And as with some dreams, it lingered and grew murky and I cannot now tell if it was me, or her, or my subconscious. If it's right on the nose or completely off the wall. For weeks I've been trying to figure it out.
In the meantime, I've become taciturn. I think it's the embarrassment which is of course ridiculous since it was just a dream. But also I have lost my voice - if we're not the us we've been, I don't quite know how to be, how to frame what to say. I'm not great with facades. I get mute when I cannot be authentic.
For me we will always be that couple dancing, she throws her head back to laugh and puts her forehead on my collarbone with a smile still on her lips. Or that version of us is always out there, in the universe somewhere, anyway. Even now, as I come to glean that she maybe would want that with someone - or maybe not - she doesn't want that with me.
Without that common language and all the understandings and assumptions that came with it, I don't seem to know what to say. Paradoxically, clarity around what isn't wanted has given rise to shyness around what is wanted, because I cannot fathom what that is.
“Listen to the silence. It has so much to say.” - Rumi
