Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

(I've written a lot here... sorry for that. I've probably not written it well either. I'd reallyreally like to know if anyone's reading this at all, though - if you do, I'd appreciate it if you left a comment just to say you read it or something.)


I've thought about writing more here before a fair few times, but I've never actually done it. Eh, well now I shall. Because I think I can be honest here and maybe someone will read this and maybe they'll get it more than most people I know would.

I fell asleep curled up with my Matthew on Friday night, just like I had every night for a month now. Now he's 4500 miles away and the world around me seems dead and I'm lost inside my head somewhere. I can't explain this to the people around me, somehow - it's not a place in my head, in my life, that I think I want to expose to the people I care about just like that. They'd worry, they'd wonder, they'd want a way inside, when there's really nothing inside for them, just for me. I don't want to have to explain that part of myself, so I put a veil over it.

I first met him just over two years ago, on the internet, but I don't tend to tell people (I should clarify, I moved to a different region just after that time and so it was before I met most of the people I care about now) that because it was far more of an experience than those words suggest, and besides, the story behind it is one I really don't like to tell to those who know me. It involved a mutual enemy. I think the real the reason I don't like to tell that story is because it'd be telling them that I was victimised. I'm a strong person, and I don't think they'd understand how I managed to let myself get hurt that way. It's not like it matters to me now in the least, other than that it was how I became close to Matthew.

So there was one of those small, factional internet dramas, and it ended up creating this surprisingly close-knit group of a few dozen people. And then the one of them who was perhaps the most charming, and whose actions within the group had been perhaps the most admirable, faked his death on the internet. (He's now a Gaia member - I originally came to Gaia to mildly harass him - and his username is Sarpedon. I don't care who knows this or who tells him I wrote this. He will dispute this, probably by saying I have him mixed up with someone else, but I still have proof of it if anyone's that concerned.) It was a very strange collective experience and whilst it led to a lot of pain and madness, it also led to a lot of understanding and to some deep, deep bonds being cast between a smaller number of that group of people, perhaps a dozen of us. Most of those bonds have since been severed by time, movement, squabbling and, really, the fact that none of that matters any more, but I guess some of them were forged too deep to ever break. If I was to talk to that man now, I think I might simply thank him for leading me to Matthew like that - god knows, Matthew's a million times more significant than that anything that psycho b*****d could ever be or do.

So yeah, it was 'on the internet' that we met, but I think that most of my RL-friends - hell, even many of my online friends - would assume it was more frivolous than it was. It all led to five very emotional months with that situation and those people, months where it felt like every second of my life was vital to my future. We fell for each other then but it looked hopeless so we didn't try to make it into anything - we decided to remain friends and 'comrades in arms', and to hopefully meet up some time in a year or so. And then autumn came and I moved to a new place and built a life there and the man I so absolutely fell for stepped back a bit (he had his own problems then and didn't feel he could tell me about them, and for a while we were both seeing other people and that made things distant and touchy), and then decided to quit internet chat totally for eight months. He popped back to speak to me and our other old friends (it was disintegrating - I totally stopped caring when he left, for one thing) once or twice, but there was no rhythm to it and it wasn't like it used to be. Sometime in this time the idea of a few of us old friends meeting up at new year comes up, and we both say we're up for it.

Then, middle of last august, he hops on long past my bedtime and I tell him I'm not going to sleep til he's gone off again because I know that if I do he won't be there in the morning. He promises that just this once, he will be. (I didn't know at the time that he'd been hardcore missing me for a while by then, or that for all those months he'd not been chatting with me, he'd checked my weblog every single day). And he was, and we get back into it, and we decide we're so doing the new year thing, and two days later we're planning to spend half of 2005 together just because we want to, and I remember what an amazing team we are when we set our wills together, and the way I can trust him to the ends of the earth. Seven days after that, in a manner so muppetlike that we both believed the other one started it, we decided to try the whole couple thing.

It's been a good eight months. That new year trip - no one else decided to come along, in the end - was beautiful and the one I just got back from was better; we travelled around Europe for a month, taking the rough and the smooth together and rarely being out of arm's reach. And then it ended as all sweet things must end.

I've changed a lot in the last eight months - I don't really know how much, I've got no way to gauge it, especially not when I feel I don't wish to write much about the new things on my main weblog. I feel a lot more whole in myself now - a kind partner can help you deal with a lot of problems you don't realise you have, and whilst it's nothing I'd want to score points for, I've not had the nicest life thus far so a lot of things piled up back there. It's hard to let the people who you thought knew you know that a lot of problems they didn't know you had either are gone now...gah, I need to not type at 4am >< I think you'll understand me, though. The other thing is that having another person's life so very much linked to mine changes my identity, my ideas about who and what I am, where I'm going, and so on, and that's something I'd like to explore in peace, without too many of the old assumptions, and so I feel awkward about mentioning it to my friends. It's even difficult talking to Matthew about that sometime, because he's part of it and that means it's not always a good place to ask difficult questions.


So where am I now? In a town I don't especially want to be in - I'm here to finish my degree, I've met some people here I love and that I think I'll be friends with forever but that doesn't make me want to stick around. I don't know where I'm going - I just know who I want to go with and hope we can make it add up.

I'm wondering at how this all sounds now. Not as confident or tough as I normally try to take things. I think I grew up too fast, and that makes it hard to backtrack and say 'wait, no, I missed a turn back here' sometimes. Later, I suppose. I'll write more about all the pieces I'm trying to fit together here sometime soon.