I walked into class on the first day of school, and joined some people gathered around chatting, waiting for class to start.
"This book I'm reading, they have gladiatorial fights to the death, and they have holograms, only they're solid!" A young man with a big, bushy beard, whom I later learned was named John, said excitedly.
"How do you make a solid hologram?" a woman asked skeptically.
"Well, how do you make a lightsaber?" I asked, thinking that it must be the same theoretical principle.
A guy near me became visibly excited at the question. "Pure plasma within a magnetic field!" he answered promptly, holding one finger in the air triumphantly.
"Really?!" I was taken aback, surprised and delighted that I had gotten an answer so readily to a rhetorical question. I almost laughed at how his entire face lit up with happiness at the unexpected Star Wars trivia.
Until the teacher arrived, he spent the next few minutes explaining the history of the lightsaber to me, how the first of them required a huge backpack and worked more like heavy artillery (though I don't think this was in the canon universe).
I smiled all the while, not sure if I was laughing with him or at him, but amused to no end that he was so very excited to tell me.
Getting to know this guy, whom I'll call Mark, over the next few weeks made me rethink my feelings towards Ben, the ChrILF (Christian I'd Like to Forget) that I used to know. I have said in my previous posts that I was in love with him, and that "there was no one I wanted to fuck more."
But now...I wasn't in love with Mark, and I wasn't sure I could be said to be in love with Ben, if I could like someone else. I wasn't even sure I would choose Ben, anymore, if I could. I had liked what he was, or what I thought he was, but I didn't want someone trapped within purity and courting doctrines, or who had not "outgrown" the notion of hell (or who would think I was destined for hell, if he knew what I really was).
I felt rather foolish now, wondering if I had mistaken something else for love: physical longing, pity, wanting to "rescue" him from his strict parents and their doctrines. Or even trying to prove myself acceptable to his devout Christian family, and somehow win some kind of victory.
What am I in love with now? I wondered. I still sometimes felt a longing, that I couldn't describe, but it was more generalized now.
We could wear matching Halloween costumes and go to parties together, I thought, that is...if I actually like Mark. I don't know yet. Maybe if he's no good, I could do fun things with someone else...
Eventually I gave him my phone number, and though he sat next to me, seemed to seek my company, and sometimes looked at me in a way I found very interested and affectionate, he did not call. His radio silence started to affect my liking of him, at least in one way. Maybe he is just a friend, I thought. So now I was not in love with anyone. I was almost feeling a bit jaded.
It just so happens that a few weeks ago, in an acting class I was assigned to act out a scene as the character Julia, from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, who alternates between swooning over a letter from her lover, and hating herself for tearing it into pieces to prove a point to her maid, two behaviors that I have spent years actively trying to avoid. I also had to imagine what it was like to lust after someone, which a few years ago I would have considered a sin.
Great, I thought, now I have to fall in love with Proteus too? When I've been so unlucky in love? This should be interesting...
Though it was a shame, it became apparent that I wouldn't be thinking of Mark during my scene (I wondered vaguely if he wondered about that). And though I still occasionally have longings, I am at least free of my longing for Ben, and know more than I ever thought there was to know about lightsabers.
Send me an email at: atheistjourneysblog@gmail.com
Follow or tweet me here: https://twitter.com/atheistjourneys
No comments:
Post a Comment