back from europe, dreams, etc.
22.07.22 | 8:13 am
it's amazing to me how calm seth is. he's such a lovely foil to the stress that bubbles in my veins, to the nervousness that comes out of me in the form of irritability or silence. he lets me know in so many ways that everything will be okay. and then it is.
my parents enjoyed themselves, but were homesick after a week. i think now that we're home, they'll appreciate the trip overall even more. i hope i did enough. i really hope i did.
--
the best moments of the trip were the nights that seth and i escaped when my parents retired to bed and we aimlessly walked the streets of whatever city we were in, stopping for glasses of wine or to take pictures of the landscape or each other.
on our last night in pontone, the last real night of the trip, we took each other on a date to the restaurant right next to our hotel, split a bottle of wine, split an appetizer of codfish gnocchi and an entree of the fresh, pink fish in a tomato sauce, split the traditional amalfi dessert of chocolate and eggplant. and things just felt right.
--
and yet, the past few nights, i've dreamt about james. i suppose now it's been a year since we "met", ten months since we stopped talking. i genuinely hope he is well, and i genuinely don't want to dream about him anymore.
he is more in my head when i read romance novels. the way he talked to me, the things he said -- it was as though they were lifted from books, the kind of thing i only dreamed that i would ever receive. everything he said made me feel so impossibly good about myself.
but of course, i forget the anxiety, the fear that i held onto so strongly during the whole thing. i forget how codependent we really were on each other, how unhealthy that must have been. talking constantly is a gift until it becomes a curse.
i am still so glad to have experienced it. and i think it is okay, natural, understandable that my mind still reaches for that sometimes -- being spoken to in that way, being respected in a way i legitimately was not used to from a possible romantic partner, being trusted and feeling as though i could one-hundred-percent trust him, as well.
you don't get that all of the time. sometimes you don't ever get it at all.
i consider myself lucky in that sense.
(all this, even though i still know it wasn't "real," not in the way i wanted it to be real.)