I got a text this morning from Milica. She’s been radio silent for a couple of weeks, as she’s been going through some health stuff. I’ve pinged her, periodically: “Thinking of you.” “Hoping you’re feeling ok.” “Missing your pretty ass.” You know, stuff like that. And, I’ve been low-key fearing that, counter to everything I (think I) know about her, she’s taking this opportunity to ghost on me. I haven’t been terrified. Haven’t been panicked. Just been feeling a little… anxious… that I might not hear from her again. You know, that old standby – fear and uncertainty in dating.
Similarly, after Serena and I had a smoking hot, super-fun date last weekend at Chemistry, we were in touch the next day, and then she went radio silent. Again – counter to everything I (think I) know about her – I’ve been low-key fearing she’s taking this opportunity to ghost on me. Peppering her with the occasional, “Thinking of you.” “Hope everything’s ok!” “Hope it wasn’t something I said, and that you’re just busy!” Again: I haven’t been panicked exactly (though I’ll confess – the intensity of my fear in the case of Serena is a bit ratcheted up, given the greater intensity of our relationship: we’ve seen each other as often as once a week or more for a few months now. Were I to lose Serena (and of course, one day, I will), it would be quite a loss for me.
And then… Leyla. Leyla went AWOL months ago. She’s done that a few times in the few years I’ve stretched with her – just… disappeared… for a stretch of time. She does that when she’s feeling down. Or when she’s super busy. Or when her relationship with her then-current boyfriend shifts a bit. With her, I’ve had less fear, and more – well, just more low-key sadness. I miss her. I miss her pretty body. I miss our fun conversations. I miss hearing what’s up in her life, sharing what’s up in mine. We weren’t “good friends,” or anything of the sort. But I enjoyed having her in the rhythm of my life, and I miss that. Recently, I surprised myself by sending her $50 as a sort of “deposit” against a future stretching session – and to encourage her to return. Kinda… desperate… almost. Which, even as I did it, felt really strange – as in, “Why the fuck do I seem to care so much about this?”
There are others I could write about, and I hope and plan to. But for now, I’m going to hold off and just talk, briefly, about what these three women, these three situations, have in common.
First, foremost, they have loss – they have me not hearing from, being abandoned by (or imagining I’ve been abandoned by) women. Close readers of the blog know that my mom left my family when I was young, and died when I was a little older, but still young.
And second – and this one is, I think, in some ways, the more interesting commonality: all three situations have me somehow not knowing where I stand with the women. At least, not conclusively so. I mean – Milica and Serena each have been perfectly clear about where I stand, about how they relate to me, but I very quickly (am able to) imagine, based on their non-communication, that somehow something might have changed. I think I fear this not knowing, on some level, even more than I fear the loss itself. [One day, soon, I’ll write about Marina, with whom I recently had a bit of back-and-forth that resolved a lingering, painful anxiety I had about where, how, I sit in her mind.]
In all these cases, while it’s true that I fear loss, it’s also true that, more than that, I am capable of a panicked sense of terror about the whole “not knowing” part of it.
Seems to me all this has to do with a set of thoughts/feelings about my earliest relationships with my parents, and with my mom, in particular. Namely: I wonder if I didn’t somehow imagine I had done something – I couldn’t possibly know what – that made my mom leave….
To come: reflections on feelings and actions with a whole bunch of other women, including Persephone, Shakira, Nika, several unnamed young women, Luna, Anya, Sarah. Not to mention those old stand-bys, Sofia, Veronique, and Charlotte….