The periodic resurfacings were painful because they got my hopes up and then dashed them yet again.
Yeah, there’s a volume of women here. Yeah, I’m a slut — and not just a physical one but an emotional one. Yeah, there have been lots of women over the years about whom I genuinely care. And yeah, she inhabits a unique space at the highest stratum of my enthusiasms over the years, a stratum the constituent members of which I won’t enumerate but longtime readers of the blog know well.
I suppose it says something about P and about her departure and about our relationship that all the other members of that stratum are or could be well known to consistent readers of this blog, whereas P exists a bit more in the shadows. I think on some level this boils down to the fact that my feelings about P haven’t been particularly conflicted other than my longing for something that isn’t available. Maybe there’s more — I’m not sure. In any event, I haven’t written much about P over the years. She hasn’t resurfaced in these pages. Maybe it has more to do with the pain and vulnerability of being ghosted repeatedly. Who knows?
Anyway, when she sent me that email last week, once again my heart leapt. And as each time before, I didn’t even for a minute contemplate the possibility that she might ghost again, or disappoint me again, or be unavailable again. This is some early wound, no doubt — but when a woman returns to me, even if she has demonstrated repeatedly that her return is not real or is not likely to be, I’m incapable of knowing that. All I know is she’s back. I’m a gleeful infant whose mother has reentered the room. After a short hiatus, not a despondent, crushed infant, unable or unwilling to connect after abandonment. Perhaps the latter would be more self-protective.
I am what I am, just like Popeye.
Featured image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, interior, late afternoon. A cluttered apartment desk seen from across the room: a laptop open to an unread email, its screen casting cold blue-white light against warm amber from a window behind it where the sun is almost gone. On the desk beside the laptop, a glass of water with a single melting ice cube. The chair is empty — pulled out slightly, as though someone just stood up fast. The room around it is lived-in, a little dim, the email’s glow too bright for the hour, a color that has no business being there.
Bottom image prompt (gemini): Dim hotel-corridor light, late evening, a wide empty hallway stretching toward a vanishing point, a single door slightly ajar at the far end with warm amber lamplight spilling through the gap onto pale carpet, the rest of the corridor cool and blue-grey, no person visible, a room-service tray abandoned on the floor beside the door, a woman’s low heel tipped on its side next to it suggesting recent arrival or recent departure, the quality of the light suggesting someone is just beyond the frame but not coming back, shot on a 35mm lens at mid-corridor height, cinematic and still, the longing and the absence doing all the work, the open door neither invitation nor farewell but both at once.