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Zanna ran at us, thrilled in much the same way a stereotypically gay guy would.
So -- funny story -- Wren (who I will not misgender in my responses, even though you unwittingly have in your entries) is a distinct sort of gay man. Something of a mystical Oscar Wilde.
He was unconsciously clear enough on this point, even if neither of you had quite figured out his gender at that point. (Maybe he had, but he didn't tell you.)
Both Conor and I were impressed with the lass, Siri, playing Ganymede/Rosalind. Conor and I wanted to bite her.
I am social media friends with dear Siri and, unlike many, look forward to seeing her posts. She is a fine, elegant woman who has confronted struggles external and internal, the latter not helped by the former.
It is odd that you and your best friend want to bite her, though I know you mean this in a quasi-erotic sense.
So, after rehearsal, Siri invited me to come see the play this weekend (Zanna did not invite me). We had spoken briefly about "As You Like It" and I guess she found me personable.
I hope you went. I expect that you must have, though I do not recall having done so.
By the way, not that this will remotely come into play, but your wife is there. Oh, don't bother looking for that girl with long dark hair and bright blue eyes! You are already professing to want to masticate a high junior or senior. Finding your future wife would be far more unseemly, as she would be about 12 at this point.
I know this is probably going to come out wrong, but the Marquis reminded me of Kate. [...] So... Kate and I are both sadists.
Though you are coyly explaining how you and Kate are obsessive writers like the movie Quills featured, you both are sadists in a less flattering sense.
Zanna was having some emotional issues because she felt neglected and inadequate in comparison to us. This is why I decided that we needed to get out of the car and look at the moon.
I remember this (the whole night, really, with clarity that I cannot give much of what you write). To this day, I am not clear why Wren struggled so much being around you (plural you, not singular). You all liked him well. You (singular you) admired his art endlessly and found him fascinating as a person. Yet, the two of you do not persist in friendship. This will, in three or four months, be attributable to a girl in his class with whom you have a brief and decidedly ill-advised romantic entanglement -- did he want her, or was he frustrated that she wanted you? -- but there was always stress there whose true origin was a mystery to you.
And do you know how I felt when he was questioning me? Alive. I felt vibrant and great. It was such a new and wonderful sensation for me.
It is an oddly good moment, walking in the moonlight to soothe Wren, standing confidently before a police officer who was more concerned with your potential trespassing than your car possibly having broken down. It is adolescent thinking, but that is not an insult. You are, in essence, still an adolescent.
I am feeling very important things, but I don't want to write them down. It seems too permanent and nothing else in my life feels very concrete, you know?
I wish you had concerned yourself a bit less in your writing on mundanity to avoid detailing your internal state. On the other hand, your Big Important Feelings are undoubtedly about Kate. I would instead remember a night that you spent with three friends, none of whom you have in your life any longer, than endure more kvetching about the ex-girlfriend from whom you will not part.
I was waiting for my life to begin, and birth is painful.
When do you think your life will begin? It isn't in the big moments. Yes, you have crises and mark different beginnings from these, but you can't draw a line to the moment when your life formally begins.
I know that it has well begun by this point in my life. I've never hiked European mountains -- I've never set foot off this continent -- but there are enough moments that are indicative of a life in progress. I have spoken to a packed auditorium at a geek convention. I have had four books traditionally published, then saw them go out of print. I endured a broken engagement three months before the wedding. I taught brilliant children things that they didn't need and failed to instill souls into future murderers. I have married that former 12-year-old. I have a life. It may not be the one you mean here, but it's a life, and it continues.
You are twenty and a young twenty. Your life will not be handed to you but gained through attrition and decisions, some of which will be bad. The worst decision you could make would be to wait for life to begin as though you are not the one who must initiate it.
Kate is having a wonderfully formative experience. ... But I feel left behind here. Not necessarily by her.
Kate chose to have a formative experience in England. You decided to fear stepping out of your comfort zone and instead saw a movie with three friends, regarding it as an adventure. It was a decision.
If you want to have formative experiences, you must start forming them in return.
Just to see what life is like outside my womb.
So, let yourself be born and reborn. It's easier than you are making it out to be.
And there are things I need to say to you, but not here. THIS ISN'T ABOUT KATE. It isn't about anyone but me.
It kind of sounds like this might be, more than a little, about Kate.
But I am social, you see? So it IS about other people. I both love and hate people. Both equally as passionately.
Who do you hate? At this point in your life, I think it is only the abusive sociopath who somehow convinced a faction of your acquaintances to follow her like some theatrical prophet. She physically attacked you, tried to gaslight you, lied to people about you, sexually harassed you when you were sixteen, and got away with it. She took surreptitious photographs of an underage girl getting sexual with an underage boy and tried to use them for blackmail. How anyone managed to like her is a mystery.
You hate her. I cannot imagine who else would fit the bill. Even your hatred for that woman is more revulsion and bafflement that anyone bought into her lies.
And there are people that I would be happy to never see or hear for again.
Yet you will spend energy trying to keep in touch with people -- notably Conor, Alison, and Wren -- who are done with you. This is to say nothing of passing associates. Social media makes this more of a problem, as one can put a little energy into 400 relationships and feel that one has lost little individually. Collectively, cosseting those 400 weeds drains more from your soul and time than nurturing flowers you love.
If you don't want to see people again, don't. It is an act of bravery, one that you lack because it isn't something definite.
Humanity is like my teacher and toy, an anathema and revelation, a pain and pleasure.
Clunky, Younger Thomm. You are trying too hard at profundity.
I do not want to be alone ever. For a little while at a time, a walk in the desert, a vision quest, but never truly lonely.
You have abandonment issues, which harm you and restrict your movement more than anything else in your life. Your mental illnesses don't help but dealing with your fear that everyone will leave you behind would be a huge step toward feeling that you have begun your life.
People leave. It is their nature. You cannot fight nature long.
I need to know Kate most of all, because I love her most of all, even if she does not love me.
I don't know if she loves you. Or I suspect that she does, but it will never be the love you want from her.
You cannot stop loving her like turning off a light switch, but it would help to lower that dimmer a few notches.
I cannot even be disconnected from society. It is not a bad thing, merely how my programming is. It is part of what makes me so uniquely me.
Pathologies are not programming. You can, with effort, change your programming into something that better suits you.
I can go for several months without Sarah or Conor. But if they said, "I am never, ever going to contact you ever again. You are not a good person." I would break.
They do (not in those words, but I suspect that I will never again speak to Conor). You don't break. You wonder what happened, as though it were one great moment rather than countless little ones, but you don't break. You hardly notice it until you reach out a few times and no one reaches back.
I'm rambling and my blood is pretty filtered. I hope you appreciate that I share this act of biology with you, it is very intimate to me. Less intimate than when I made love with her, more intimate than when I cry.
You may share your fluids too liberally. People often do not ask for this sharing and do not welcome it.
In just as many days as I have already spent not seeing the most important person in my life
Kate is not the most important person in your life. You are. Spare some of the love you throw at her and apply it to yourself.
I know that I am important to her. I hope I always will be and only am truly sad when I think I someday may not be.
She fades from your life. She moves to the city, then to Philadelphia. She marries, has an adorable daughter, and divorces. Since her brother's funeral, I have not seen her in years and only briefly then (and in far from ideal circumstances). You are friends of a sort. You respect one another. You are not sad that her life took her where it did.
I spend this much of my life with her not because I was her boyfriend but because I entirely love her and will never cease one iota.
You do cease more than a few iotas, though. By loving Kate less, you care for her more, as your love is burdensome right now.