Way back when, there was the boy I fell unexpectedly head over heels for. In comparison to how I know him now, I didn't know him very well. Then I had enough of the way that things were working - or more accurately, not working - and put myself back in the magician's hat and disappeared. I convinced myself that he was a terrible person and wasted a lot of energy balancing that house of cards.
Then that house crumbled and we rediscovered each other...but this is all old news. I'm not rehashing merely to rehash, as entertaining as storytelling is. I'm still reconciling. I'm staring at a photograph that has been exposed not just twice but many times.
Having that many images stacked in my head of one single person can be confusing. I don't have too much trouble separating the nasty image I built of him when we were apart from the person that he actually is; that image served a purpose, but it was false, and it exists now only as a distant memory.
But then there are the grey areas. Even in the dark days, I occasionally threw things in the bucket that weren't entirely negative. Now I don't know what to do with them.
I'm powered by music. Aiden described it as having music woven into the fabric of my life, and that feels pretty accurate. I'm a musician and a singer and a dancer, and music has a more direct path to my feelings than any other passion. Every period of my life has at least one associated album. I've got music for seasons, music for activities, music for past events, music for friends and family and enemies. Needless to say, Aiden has quite a lot of music.
What brought all this up was playing an album tonight that I hadn't listened to since more than a year ago. (It's been a year now, as of December 8th...hard to believe, in a lot of ways.) I listened to these songs while drawing and while working, and they have associations with certain pieces of art and a certain school-bus yard in winter...but even more strongly than that, somehow I associated them with Aiden.
My first reflex is to claim that I have no idea why that happened. It was February of 2011; we hadn't spoken in nearly two years. If his name were mentioned to me, I probably would've had something unkind to say.
And yet, I put a passionate image of him into the music...not an outright sexual fantasy, but something that wasn't overwhelmed with stupid hate. The association was strong enough to have lasted this long without losing much intensity. I believe it was because there wasn't much passion in my life at the time, and when the music created a need in me to feel a memory that fiery and intense, I reached for the last one I had, and it was Aiden.
Why is it worth discussing? Because I'm reaching for it still. Fantasizing from that distance had an underlying assumption of truth, that if there was ever again a reality between Aiden and I, at least some of it would look like that. The reality recurred but the fantasy didn't.
I've never struggled so much with explaining the hook of music and its associations in my soul. Sometimes I send Aiden songs that I like, and he listens to them and shares his thoughts. Some of those songs are just things I hear on the radio that amuse me, and his response is sufficient, and life moves on. But some of them mean much more to me than that, and the first time that I was bitterly disappointed by his response of, "I dig it," I was blindsided. The response was positive...and yet I wanted to yell that he didn't get it. I don't care if you 'dig' it. These are not bumpin' beats to jive to. This is me telling you something important...
This has happened enough times now that I've become reluctant to share the songs that mean the most to me, because I don't want to hear the reaction. I know he intends the things he says positively, and yet I hear them as dismissive.
I still want to express it. But I don't know how to share what's there without being able to magically project an image from my brain. I've gotten some satisfaction on that front from dancing with him, to music that I associated with the dark days. It's the closest I've come. I wonder occasionally if sex to music would help, and then I consistently forget to ever make that happen. This isn't a fantasy that can become reality through simple explanation. This is a room in which I desperately want company, but where I cannot figure out how to make a door through which others can enter.
