Preface: I normally don't put initials in my entries, because I like to keep everything completely anonymous, but this would just be confusing to read without them - not that I should frame this to be digestible to other people. I know that by putting all my thoughts online, there must be a part of me that wants all of this to be read, but most of me doesn't want anyone to see it. I just want it to exist somewhere more permenant than my notebooks and laptop. But without initials, this would be confusing for even future me to read, so I will add them. Just this once.
I must be tired; I keep making mistakes while writing this. It is half ten in the evening and I have pulled the thin sheets over myself in preparation for my final night in this bed. Tomorrow, I will stand in the airport, half-dazed by the 5am start. I thought I would write more this week, and I envisaged this time away being a slow patch I needed to get through, rather than an experience to be enjoyed. Before I went away, I worked on my career obsessively and thought of little else, filling the gaps with needy, clawing thoughts of CK. Left side of my brain was for music, right side for CK, and it had been that way for a long time. Forcibly, I have had to slow down this week. I do not have any of my belongings, other than what I need. I do not have my apartment or my safe foods. I am coaxed into the old towns and tourist spots by the palpable sunshine, so there is just no time for looming over my laptop, working. All of this has really changed my thinking; I can literally feel how my world has expanded. CK’s influence doesn’t seem to be so crushing because he just feels so small put against everything I have experienced in the past week. I know its not like I have done anything crazy, its essentially just a beach holiday, but, as I mentioned in previous entries, this has been a huge deal to me considering I was housebound only a few years ago. I suddenly feel CK’s inhuman grasp on my feelings loosening and although his lack of replies and engagement still stings, it’s now a fleck of salt on a busted lip rather than a pound of salt poured on an open wound.
I don’t know how I will feel when I go back to ---, but right now I feel good. I can see myself melting easily into the shapes of my pre-Portugal habits as soon as the plane lands, but I am certain that at least some coins of this new wealth I gained will stay with me. I hope so.
For the first time in a long time, other men are also beginning to stray my one-way devotion for this man. I am overcome with stomach-sitting guilt even writing this. Despite our lack of any formal relationship, my allegiance to CK makes even the thought of other people feel wrong. It hurts me deeply to say this but I don’t think CK would even really care if he knew I was developing an eye for others, but I know that if he did the same thing, I would be devastated, so I feel obliged to not even think about anyone else. How can I justify my upset at his thinking of other women if I, myself, think it’s not that serious or unjust when I think of other men? I guess, in my head, it feels different. What I feel for CK is love, but what I feel for these other men is not even real attraction – just awareness that they are on the playing field, and the only thing even bringing them to that position is the fact that I am so starved of love right now in my current relationship-but-not-a-relationship. I can’t help but start to move on emotionally when he behaves like we don’t even know each other. How am I supposed to stay devout to a man that I don’t even talk to at the moment? I am only trying to lift some of the guilt from myself by asking, but it isn’t working. The man I am thinking of the most is called BR, which is a distinctly unattractive name that doesn’t suit him at all. I feel silly for feeling any way about him because I haven’t actually ever met him – not knowingly, anyway. He is a film school graduate and part of the --- University pool, where everyone knows everyone.
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His videography work was so cool, with such a defined aesthetic and sustained professionalism in everything on his page. We began talking to a decent extent about nothing of note and I discovered he was in Vietnam, executing a huge months-long trip to Southeast Asia. A postgraduate bucket-list type thing. He has travelled around a few countries over the past few months and we speak every now and then and he gives me vague stories of wild animals you’d never see in the UK and exotic diseases that knocked him out for weeks at a time. I feel so drawn to him because of his travels, I think it's just incredible how he has been living and (to an extent) working in these places that feel completely outside of my world. Southeast Asia might as well be a myth in my world, it's so untouchably far outside the reaches of my comfort. There are also a lot of other beautiful pieces to BR: he has a wonderful music taste that mirrors mine but also branches into niches that I didn’t even know before we started speaking, he’s kinda weird and funny and although I sense that he is putting on a bit of a front when he speaks to me, there is this weird undercurrent to the way he speaks that I really get on with, and he also seems to be artistically inclined and deep-thinking, though I have barely been let into those deep thoughts very much. I didn’t really know how he looked for a while, save some old pictures in his tagged on Instagram, but in light of his return to England this week, he has posted a gallery of pictures created during his time away. He is quite pretty, with coiled brown hair, made lighter by months under the sun’s scrutiny, a reasonable dress-sense and a boyish face that very much looks its age, but it's difficult to get a gauge of how pretty someone is online. Jesus, if you had shown me CK’s Instagram before I had ever seen him in person, I would have been devastated. No posts, no colour-coordination or witty bio, a complete lack of aesthetic intention and the only images of him on there are years-old posts from secondary school that still linger in his tagged, all packaged under a username that I can only describe as “lacking self-awareness”. (And he had the audacity to once tell me that MY Instagram was cringe and embarrassing because I used copy-paste fish icons in my bio to divide my name from my music links.) Despite my interactions with BR being unremarkable, and I guess on paper, the guy himself seems unremarkable, I somehow have some remarkably strong feelings around him. Even writing this now, I am finding myself considering what he would think of my phrasing and choice of topics and my brain is running mental scans to figure out if he would find any admiration in the fact that I devote so much time to something so personal and self-contained. I couldn’t even tell you why, but I think he would think this is cool, and some giggling schoolgirl part of me is very happy to hear that.
I find it silly to get attached to someone who I, ultimately, barely know, but I can’t help it. I am aware that my brain might just be searching for someone new to fill the emptiness that CK is creating in me, or maybe an emptiness that is already a part of me that CK was superficially filling up. But still, I let myself engage and indulge with these feelings. I am not doing anything wrong by flirting with the idea of what I think someone might be. It's all just so vague and abstract, right now. I truly love CK, I do. Deeply, with a desperation I have never known with love before, but I can not fend off my affections for other men without the fortification of his reciprocating my love. That is a long way of saying, to love him exclusively, I must be loved back. Is that so worth feeling guilty over?
God, it's almost midnight. I have to be up in four hours. I haven’t even washed my face or brushed my teeth but I might just sweep my laptop aside and sleep without it. Chewing thoughts of CK and BR and guilt and love while holding my own eye-contact through the bathroom mirror will only drum up more wakefulness in me.