I really understand the term “falling” in love. I’m without ground, my breath constantly being taken away, my body tumbling from a cliff, occasionally smashing into a rocky outcrop, landing momentarily on a soft branch, feeling like I’m going to hit bottom and go splat at any second, Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon.
I’ve fallen in love with this guy on the other side of the planet. If you can call it that, we haven’t even met. Falling, that’s what I’m doing, grasping for anything to hold onto. I watched him sleep last week, via Skype, for 8 hours. I watched him toss and turn, invited Bob to watch the butt-filled screen for a bit while we ate dinner to his cute little snores, wept over his occasionally tented undies, imagined my head on his gently heaving chest, his heartbeat in my ear…
I can’t think of anything else. If I wake and there’s no email from him, I panic.
We’re experiencing some bumps on our road to virtual bliss—inconsistencies that I’ve found hard to overlook and have brought up for discussion. As I’m discovering, he initially presented to me this person that he wanted to be. He’s in advertising. I sensed that there was something behind the façade, that perfection out of sync with something in his character. I pried my way into the cracks, and he has, little by little, opened up, but his desire is for rebranding. It’s not possible to reposition one’s identity, to forget, not possible to put these monsters under the bed without them coming out from time to time. I can’t know him without getting to know these monsters. They’re going to be living under my bed, too.
What can I do? How can I stay calm? How can I give him space? We’re several hemispheres apart already!
A relationship devoid of physical contact means a relationship splayed out in my very fertile imagination, my needs addressed solely through my fingers clicking across a keyboard. Every nerve cell in my body is screaming for attention, aching for stimuli, sending frantic messages nonstop to my brain for relief… Au secours! My brain is trying so hard to work through all these signals, so impossible to evade or to satisfy, or to even consider locating elsewhere. And yet, this is all I have right now, frantic and intense feelings of love and despair and longing and anguish and desire, hunger, all attached to something that I can’t touch.
Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil, her still-beautiful sad sack mask of a face encircled in smoke, she puffs, “You a mess, honey.”