Nothing’s changed, except I sent an email to the person in question. I am more agitated than depressed, not sad or angry because there’s nothing to be sad or angry about, certainly no one did anything wrong. But.
But I’m filled with a sense of dread knowing that nothing from now on will not be mediated through the Internet. To drop the double negative–everything will happen through our sites and blogs and social networks.
Everything is knowing when they’re online, and why aren’t they writing you or calling you or responding to what you’re doing online.
Everything is, even if you’re not the jealous type and aren’t bothered by straight male-female friendships, or friendships with exes, or them having crushes or flirting a bit, wondering who all those (attractive, single?) friends are. Everything is wondering what everyone “means” to everyone. Everything is needing to know the backstory. Everything is needing to know the future story.
Everything is finding ways to feel inadequate–about your looks, your personality, your wit, your talents–to people you’ve never met. Everything is wondering what they’ve got that you don’t, or if you have it, why other people like it in them more than they like it in you.
Everything is all the women who are sexier than you, either in a conventional way, or the way they work the less conventional sexiness far, far better than you could. Everything is wondering how sexy you can be to attract the right attention and avoid the wrong attention, and knowing that simply isn’t possible.
Everything is watching too closely, reading too much into everything, letting everything wind you up, or wound you, too much. And not seeing any way out, because you need to be online–this is how you meet people. This is how people know who you are. Well, YOU don’t. But elsewhere, they do.
Note: I’m actually not that upset, this is just one of those moments–oh, there have been several of these moments this week, with several different people of past or current interest–that lets the anxieties rush out.
A picture, a picture of something I don’t seem to need and would be somewhat troubled by the idea of anyone wanting to see me in anyway, because I owe you something other than lots of text. And I’m not interested in linking to video clips and whatnot, in borrowing other images right now. It’ll all be by me, and all be things I wouldn’t put anywhere else on the Internet and no one would recognize me by. I would hope.
And: I only had 3 beers in the house so that’s all this is influenced by. And those bite marks on my arm now, those bite marks will be hard to explain, if I had anyone to explain them to. But they’re better than things I used to do.
