Sometimes, when you are introduced to someone for the first time, or perhaps you simply read their words or hear their voice, you can sense an air of
mutual understanding. It's as if a certain alarm goes off in your brain, one that you set a long time ago in the hopes of capturing
like-minded individuals before they run away. And you're drawn to this person for what might appear to be selfish reasons--you want someone who can
empathize completely with you, someone to share the pain and the joy with, someone sitting there next to you, always. There's a voice inside of you, begging you not to let them escape because you know that as you grow older and your personality becomes more complex there will be fewer and fewer people that you'll be able to conect with so perfectly. So you enjoy the special bond you have, confident that
there is nothing better than this.
I saw you before I met you and I allowed my imagination to fill in the holes that your silence provided. They were nothing more than silly presumptions, but I was immature and innocent and therefore I didn't know any better. I fell in love with the little plastic you I had constructed in my brain. I took you out of my brain one day and entombed you in a glass jar, perfectly understanding, perfectly preserved. And so you stayed, removed from both reality and my thoughts, frozen in the impossible circumstances and chaotic fantasies I had created to be your atmosphere, for nearly six months.
You'd like to know how I believed you to be in my depraved mentality, I'm sure. You were me, except without the imperfections. It was as though you were my evolved form; complete and perfect, yet fully aware of the flaws you had possesed and overcome. In that way, you could both understand me like no other and instruct me correctly. You were my true savior because you turned such an evil and broken thing as myself into something so infinitely good and flawless as yourself. I loved you because I knew no better than to love what I couldn't become.
You become a real little boy when I quit looking for something to compensate for my low self-esteem. I allowed you to speak and fill the holes in your personality with the most beautiful manifestion of reality I had ever encountered. You were not me; I was not you. Neither of us knew each other completely or understood each other pefectly but we had something much more than that. I could look back on the wish of perfect understanding and laugh because this was immensely greater. When I looked into your eyes I could see all my life and all of yours and I couldn't really understand a single moment in either one, but it was comforting, and my life seemed to continue through yours and yours through mine. Maybe we were just waiting for each other as an extension to ourselves, not an explanation.
Our love wouldn't be perfect. And I don't know what to do right now with this odd connection we have but to dissect it in every way possible in the hopes of finding some option that would allow us to live happily together. I don't know if I can do it. I know I can't do it alone, but I'm so afraid to ask...afraid it might ruin this imperfect understanding we share.
I don't want to grow up and think back on this, on all these missed chances, and feel like I've made a horrible mistake. Right now I'm not certain which type of understanding is better: perfect or imperfect. I've only experienced the latter, only dreamed of the former.
I should really do something about this indecisiveness...