The Winter of Our Discontent

The following is an article I have recently written as the first in a twelve-month series for a friend's website, www.kylecollins.com. (Don't let the rather compromising photos of me sporting some terrible tee shirts deter you!) I wanted to post it here as a back-up, and perhaps inspire some commentary regarding the topic of embracing our vulnerability against the increasingly urban trend of emotionally detaching from each other, and from ourselves.

There is a deep solemnity in the winter season; at once it’s characterized by a turning inward and interior dwelling, accompanied by the tranquility evoked in images of embers burning low in brick fireplaces as they chase the chill away, back into a wilderness shrouded in blankets of snow bedecked with moonbeams. It is a still, silent season possessed of profound reflection and introspection, and yet, for all the appreciation of its qualities of quietude, there is, at the same time, a boisterous building of anticipation and celebration: Hanukkah’s remembrance of God’s miracle to the Maccabees, Advent and its heraldric proclamation of the coming of Christ, Christmas and the epiphany of an impossible Love in the Incarnation, or, for all the ways in which we secularize the holiday season, finding a light in the frigid darkness of shorter days, and the reassurance of renewal in the New Year. It’s as though there is a fire in the human spirit that rages against being relegated to the margins of an existence motivated solely by sheer survival.

That primal instinct for survival, however, once recognized in our social and personal consciousness, seems to be the reason for this solemnity in the first place. The implication in our need to survive is our awareness of its opposite as a very real possibility; in spite of our festivity and refusal to relent, all of our drive to seek life, we are ultimately unable to escape completely winter’s more severe and unforgiving dimensions of desolation and death, leaving us with an awe that must be faced with a recognition of these realities inherent in our fragile condition. While religious practices attempt to extend the message of their accompanying theology beyond the singular events of their services, for many secularists—and yet, for perhaps even the most observant—there is a palpable finality to the seasonal celebration that leaves us wondering what’s next. Perhaps this is why there is always a feeling of contraction and retreat once the holidays are at an end, an anti-climax of austerity that marks the remainder of the winter season.

In this austerity, on the other side of the solemnity, winter possesses, too, a dimension of deep solitude. It would seem that, even though there is a kind of tranquility to be found in the aforementioned turning inward, this carries with it a darker understanding of disconnect. The poets are often quick to compare the more desperate aspects of our emotional make up to the bleakness of a bitter winter’s day, drawing pathetic fallacy upon a barren snow-saturated landscape to reflect a physical manifestation of our psychological self. Our loneliness, heartaches, numbed emotions—indeed, anything that drives us into apathy or an absolute paucity of sympathy—are readily defined as cold, icy, frozen; words of singularly harsh consonants or suspended hissing sounds that indicate an impenetrable stasis, or prolonged inertia. The question must be asked: How is it we can readily define the winter season as a time in which we so anxiously seek connection and community, yet carry within us feelings of despondence and detachment? By the very juxtaposition of these ideas we could assert that one is a solution to the other; and yet, if this were absolutely true, why should we return to the seeming emptiness of the season’s second half?

I suppose what I am getting at here in these musings on our cultural connections to the colder months is that the human person is a creature constantly experiencing a divided self, a microcosm of dichotomy that finds its counterpart in the macrocosm of social interaction. With all the ways in which we come into the winter season, imposing our introspective sensibilities upon it, we can’t help but do the opposite and internalize the season as a metaphor for our own interior dissonance. Anyone who has ever read Shakespeare’s Richard III will surely recognize the title of this column as taken from one of the most famous examples of this emotional identification with the environment:

Now is the winter of our discontent /

Made glorious summer by this son of York.

For those who’ve never read Shakespeare, much less one of his histories (brace yourselves for a quick lesson), there is a caustic sarcasm at work here in the way Richard casts his lot with the English populace concerning the Crown’s continuous displacement during the Wars of the Roses (an uncertainty in which Richard takes the most delight as it provides him with the greatest potential to become King). It is not that Richard’s despair over the tumultuously sought-after English throne has been mollified by King Edward’s rule, but rather, the coldest, most avaricious elements of his jealousy have come into full bloom. In a strange way, Richard is a prime example of one who seeks an interpersonal communion, as manifested in the magnitude of his envy, and yet feels excluded from the very thing he believes will gain him the most acceptance. Instead of seeking out a positive resolution to this kind of inner conflict, Richard instead identifies with those forces of nature that more readily accommodate it; while summer may be used as a method of contrast, it is winter in which Richard begins his treachery, and, finding his advantage in an unruly England, rather than a stable one, it is this winter in which he wishes to remain.

Of course, it is an irony that one such as Richard should find the most happiness in a plight he recognizes as a national scourge, believing its more amiable solution to be lamentable, but Richard is the victim of a larger personal problem: by the quote above, one will notice that it is only the seasons that change, or rather the quality of discontentment, but not the discontentment itself. Why should this melancholy be a constant? By the very nature of his character, Richard is bound by a set of unfortunate circumstances and therefore destined to be a tragic anti-hero, but when conceptualized as a person, his discontent could be said to stem from his intense focus on his own inward turning, using those same circumstances as a scapegoat for his inability to connect with other beings like unto himself. In short, this neglect of those personality traits we would normally define as qualitatively good—compassion, forgiveness, selflessness—has left him with little more than his own self-interest, nurturing an ambition that ultimately can only deny a longing to be loved, and render his perception of other human beings as either expedients or hindrances to his cause. In finding himself bereft of all those noble qualities he has chosen to forsake, however, he soon realizes that, finally attaining what he believed would bring him peace, there is little more than abject misery. Truly, within Richard lies not only a winter of discontent, but of the soul.

At any rate, it is not my intention here to conduct an esoteric discussion of English literature, but the example given above is simply one of many to show that our tendency to fixate on our personal flaws and failures leaves us neglecting those parts of our lives that exist beyond ourselves––namely, our relationships. Something inside us begins to harden with self-hate, which takes on many unfortunate expressions of dislike and disconnect—for and with others—and we soon find ourselves to be trapped in the asylum of our minds making a heaven of our personal hell. And yet, we seem to seek out this kind of disconnect in others. It is too often the case today that we are culturally caught up in a bizarre romanticism of emotional detachment, idolizing individuals who behave as though they’ve sublimated their internal dialogue in a lifestyle akin to existential nihilism. There are the more harmless examples of our beloved Samantha Jones from Sex and the City, who, at the end of the day, simply used her self-empowered sense of sexual liberation as a pretense for avoiding heartache, or Dr. House of, namely, House, whose sarcastic quips and condescension are transparent defense mechanisms that stave off any serious probe of what lies beneath, and the countless other characters who have been drawn this way for comedic affect that stand atop a pillar in the popular consciousness. But where are we left when the laughter stops?

Moving away from characters that merely exist to illuminate certain archetypes of human behavior, there are the darker, more psychologically fractured figures in reality we seem to love to hate, yet secretly envy: any of the second-rate starlets who seem to be more renowned for their addictions than their acting, needing genuine help as human beings yet constantly being objectified and consumed by a dissociated public, any person of vast wealth and substantial status known for his or her success (or inheritance) in building a vast empire at the expense of simple human decency. Why should we look to these kinds of people in envy of their lives while believing our own to be lacking in some way? Or how often do we feel the reverse, passing a morally superior judgment without any deference to pity? Worse, do we crave our sneak peaks through the windows of these people’s lives because there is something in them we happen to be finding in ourselves? All questions with answers beyond the scope of this column, but it is instantly obvious that there is a jagged schism between our self-perception and that of those around us, yielding a kind of craving for community with the impossibly unattainable.

Our fascination with despondence has profound ramifications on our relationships with others, and in turn speaks volumes about ourselves, but where does it come from? What is it about our nature that causes us to focus so intently on characters and people who are deeply disturbed, or fixate on our own flaws to the point of self-defeat? In many ways, I tend to believe the answer lies somewhere in that self-same struggle for survival; to avoid being hurt—being vulnerable. What seems at first blush to be self-preserving, however, soon becomes destructive to all of the inherent communal needs of the human heart. When we spend our days watching the ridiculousness of reality stars, perusing the tabloids or logging into Perez to feed our need for the salaciousness of celebrities and their lives, it all begins to smack of trying to escape from our own. This is all accomplished, however, through avenues of anonymity—computers and television screens that provide a safely reinforced, bullet-proofed plexiglass designed for our firmly detached viewing pleasure. It is no great leap to suggest that perhaps we seek out this “impossibly unattainable” element because we know that, in the end, we can be comfortable with a facsimile of community without the risk of our own personal pain. But this is a growing symptom of a highly urbanized, media-saturated society in which global communication with these invisible boundaries is ever increasing, leaving us with the illusion of community without the substance of interaction. In fact, how much of our daily lives are spent with our computers instead of with each other, staring at screens, or worse, the ubiquitous and socially toxic Blackberry? In spite of the ease with which this technology provides us, a part of me can’t help but think that it’s facilitating an epidemic of emotional detachment.

At the core of what I’m sure has been enthralling social theory, though, is the human person simply attempting to make up for all of his or her—all of our—vulnerabilities and weaknesses, as though they are deficiencies from which we must hide, escape, or steer in a direction of victimization (often times, all three). How many heartaches have we endured at the loss of something we once let come close to us? How often have we lost a job, a friend, or so suddenly suffered the never-quite-healing wound of unreciprocated love? How many times have we gone on dates with some silly boy or girl, beginning to open up and experience the insanity of infatuation, only for them to disappear without a word or warning? How many of those same silly boys and girls have simply been afraid to get too close? Who among us hasn’t suffered the atomic explosion of some kind of real commitment coming to an end, abandoning us to the nuclear winter of our hearts’ own Armageddon? How often have we turned all of this in on ourselves, believing the whole of it to be our own fault and becoming our own worst enemies? Or have we turned on others? And who is simply too tired of wanting to endure all of that again?

What I ultimately wish to express in this column, and those that are to come, is our intrinsic need for one another, realized in an emotional honesty about all of our faults, our flaws, and our failures. In the coming months, I will try, with the utmost sincerity, to explore the ways in which we cut ourselves off from each other, as well as all the ways in which we seek to annihilate our own conscious minds to provide an escape from ourselves, so that we can come together with a deeper focus on true interpersonal communion. With Kyle’s brilliant theme this year of “Best Year Yet!”, this is the perfect opportunity to add deep spiritual and emotional dimensions to our interior lives in addition to all of the wonderfully creative, fashionable, and frivolous things that simply help us to be happy.

So here we are in a winter of discontent, each with our own personal reflection of the season and focus on the solemnity, the survival, or the solitude. As the months go by, using the course of the seasons to map our own interior journey, I shall attempt to challenge you (and myself) with exploring all of the things that keep us from denying our weaknesses, and being honest with all the ways in which we fear, falter, and retreat from true connection (and please feel free to share these stories with me). It is my ultimate hope that we can come out of this winter shaking off the chill as we embrace a warmth of community—of love; coming out of our internal dwelling and into the open reality of each other. How wonderful would it be if we could be honest with one another about our vulnerabilities, finding a compassion for them that builds them up as our true strengths, rather than fear their being taken advantage of and abused? I can only hope this is a journey you will share with me; a trajectory through the seasons that we can make not by ourselves, but together.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

C. S. Lewis

Michael Fancher
© 2008

Honey Do

It's finally happening. On Monday, July 16th, I'm forever moving away from the city of Richmond, Virginia, a veritable fortress of solitude that Kal-El really didn't have to travel to the North Pole to find, (and I think myself to be quite the superhero for having had endured this place for this long), to start a new life, with old friends, and a new job that just reeks with personal fulfillment.

In many ways, there's a lot that I want to say about this chapter of my life; how living here has shaped me, changed me, how I barely remember the boy I was four years ago, how I fell in love for the first time (idiot), had my heart trampled with indifference, and subsequently approved misery's application to be my roommate. Now that I'm leaving, however, contentedly shaking the dust of this city from the sandals of my feet, none of it seems to matter.

Except for one thing: Patrick. Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote him several weeks ago, as I believe it already captures the sum total of my feelings, rather than having to write them all out again:

...In light of that, I have to tell you how much I love you, and how much you mean to me Patrick. I never knew I could look back upon the life I've lived, that has so tumultuously led up to this here and now, with a retrospect that can at best describe even my most joyous of circumstances, before having met you, as empty. To this day I can't seem to wrap my mind around why it is you love me, or what Grace has moved the universe to mercy and made you a gift given unto me.

In so many ways, I'm happy to move back home, and be with my family and the wonderful friends I've left behind. I've yearned for it, prayed incessantly for it, having had my heart broken by cruel circumstance here in what I've thought to be little more than a reflection of what hell must be like, hoping against hope that God would rescue me from this affliction of unshakeable sadness. And I never thought, when I should be rejoicing the most at having this opportunity to move, that because of you, the one surprise I never expected, it would break my heart to leave...

And so I soldier on into the territory of the long-distance relationship, a thick wilderness teeming with unknown dangers that I can already feel savoring the olfactory sensation of my fear, waiting to strike with savage rapidity and devour the fragile husk of my relationship.

To take my mind off things, I have devised a to-do list of things to accomplish before I leave:

1) Have car inspected and repaired. Be prepared to rob a bank in order to pay for it.

2) Irony: Secure a more reliable get-away car.

3) Cancel gym membership (!)

4) Caveat: Don't get fat.

5) Pack! My God, you're lazy. You majored in reading, for Christ's sake. For the love of God, PACK!

6) Buy bubble-wrap for fragile items. Try not to have popped it all by the time you get home.

7) Give notice that you won't be renewing your lease. Try to look at least a little sad about it.

8) Stay engaged during your last week of work, and try not to stab that new girl in the face.

9) Throw out perishables, paper, and anything that reminds you of Ed.

10) Caveat: Quit thinking about how terrible Ed was to you.

11) Disassemble and dump that desk you thought matched your furniture. In case any part of you is still unsure, it didn't.

12) Burn Patrick a CD. Avoid any songs by Mika, the Scissor Sisters, or from the Footloose Soundtrack (the Broadway show, not the movie. ...Jesus).

13) Caveat: Quit thinking about how terrible you think this is for Patrick. Arrogant prick.

14) Get shit-faced at your going-away party. It'll make waiting for the movers seem like they aren't really five hours late.

15) Never look back.

Later, Bitches!

I have only this to say to the past four years of my life:

Dear Richmond,

Good riddance.

Much love -- or whatever it is you call it when you want to stab somebody in the eye --

Michael

Back in Atlanta! Happy Birthday to me! :D

de Profundis

I'm not usually one to discuss personal relationships when they're going well, possibly because I either don't like to "gush," which is probably just a subconscious psycho-emotional response to wondering how long I must wait for the inevitability of it going all wrong to come to pass, or because I'm aware of how strangely uncomfortable I become when others "gush" at me; a sudden panic sweat induced by my own assessment of how well I think I'm stradling the line between infatuation and stonewalled cynicism, and trying not to let such Maslownian gibberish get in the way of being happy for them. It is a terrible and tiresome thing to be perpetually conscious of one's own potential for connecting with others like unto himself, and worrying, for no good reason at all, over how well he does it. Sometimes I wish I weren't such a thinker.

That said, I received this in my e-mail the other day. Brace yourselves:

Michael,


The exhaustion of a full week is catching up with me today. Hopefully, it will be a smooth Friday at work. I hope you are having an easy one as well.

I find it really interesting to listen to Running With Scissors as I go to and leave work. It incites me to think about anecdotes from my life and about writing them down. I just wonder sometimes if anyone would really find that interesting. I had a somewhat sedate childhood, but I am sure that I could connect with a few people or at least shock them. :-) Do you have a book of memoirs in the creative cranny of your brain?

I hate that I feel that I can be more articulate in writing than in speech. I really want to be able to tell you to your face how much you mean to me---how I grow to love each one of your idiosyncrasies that I discover. So know that, next time I start staring at you, I am trying desperately to find the words to describe what an amazing person you are.

:-)

I made you a CD. I hope that you like it.

See you tonight.

~Patrick

It's amazing how another person's own willingness to share his vulnerability with you, especially when it's about you, changes everything; one single ray of light breaking through the overcast that shrouds the frozen wastes of all that came before, the nuclear winter of my heart's own armageddon, and causing it all to melt away. Is this how it was, oh Lord, when so suddenly the Father rushed upon You in the Jordan, and shook the world asunder with the revelation of His love? Is it odd that I should speak so freely of homosexuality, and yet have my relationship with you as my only basis of comparison? I'm sure I could do worse.

So suddenly, nothing else matters: Ryan's vain treachery and betrayal, his inexplicable removal of my person from what I can only guess is his own emotionally-broken perspective, without a word or warning; the sheer poverty of Ed's own interest in investing in the farce of our friendship (a dramedy no longer in production due to lack of funding); the thousand times a day their memories would mock and stab at whatever resolve I had made for myself that morning, to forgive, to forget, no longer sitting in the solitude of my suburban second-floor apartment laying waste to the wild hours of my youth wondering why it is he doesn't want me. Vanity.

Perhaps what I love most, however, is the way in which he doesn't punish me for wanting to spend time with him, if that makes sense. He's happy to hear from me, in an ear-to-ear-grin-that-illuminates-his-face-when-my-name-lights-up-his-cell-phone sort of way. He doesn't make excuses to avoid me in favor of himself. He wants to see me. I can't seem to find it within myself to say why the notion of other people showing me that they want my company has become of such importance to the way I perceive relationships, but those who know me personally can attest to the fact that letting them know I love them is what defines my very humanity. I suppose it's nice to have that reciprocated, especially romantically.

Anyway, I'm rambling, but I had to write down how wonderful you are to me, Patrick. Even if it should be only for a moment, snuffed out by the cruelty of unseen circumstance, I have you rendered immortal in the Word because you are nothing less than a hero -- everything the ones that came before should have been, and none of the terrible things that they are. I love you, too.

Incidentally, the CD rocks.

Also:

Well do you?

For Mary

I haven't written here in forever, it seems. Lately I'm finding myself to be without the patience for writing these long and emotionally-explorational essays in an attempt to become a better person. That, and I'm lazy.

I thought I would post a poem I wrote for Mary, which, as beautiful a creature as she is, deserves more than a posting as a comment on her MySpace. Here's for hoping that art has come remotely close to the imitation of my very best friend.


From the moment I first laid eyes on you, I have loved you.
Since that one October afternoon,
Merely ordinary in the course of its season,
With no seeming signs or wonders in the sky
To herald the passing of its predestined place in history
As the beginning of my destiny,
There has been no span of time in which you were not the occupation of my mind;
No string of seconds wherein my consciousness was not connected
To the very thought of you.
And you, a shining substance in my soul,
Have made me more than I could have ever hoped to be
As but a man left alone to wander
In a world that would not have him.
So it must be that I should think
That for just a moment,
For the loss of such a magnificent creation,
God himself must have hesitated,
And all of heaven and earth stood still,
Before he rendered you --
This greatest of gifts --
Unto my heart.

A Work in Progress

This is a poem I've started, but I can't seem to bring myself to work on it as often as I'd like. I've constrained the sonnet form to alternate between iambic and trochaic pentameter, which makes it difficult to craft image into linguistic imitation. More to come!

I will not write love poetry for you.
From the day you said you would not have me --
          Such simple words; mere sounds that crushed my soul.
          How is it but vibrations of the air
          Can bear a weight to shatter hearts once whole?
-- How I swore I'd never craft a couplet,
          Nor waste a verse, nor iamb in its part.
          I'll neither scheme nor strain for thoughts of you,
          And render unrequited love as art.
I forsake the Muses on their mountain!
          For how Parnassus my own heart betrayed
          When in one breath they've chosen to reveal --
                                        and steal
          --the sole sublime for which this poet prayed.

I Guess "How To Be An Asshole" Wasn't a Course Requirement for My Major...

...and yet so many people seem to be schooled on the subject.

Maybe it's what I get for trying to meet people on-line and foolishly thinking that real friendships can develop via a medium that sustains itself on the paradox of fostering human connection through social detachment and cybertronic anonymity. When your friends-list on MySpace is larger than the group of people you actually know and with whom you interact, I'd say there's a problem with the way that we perceive people; as if they're little more than summations of a few photographs and a profile neatly condensed into a clickable icon that comes complete with a handy deletion option, just in case. (Incidentally, when it comes to the creation of an internet profile, it's amazing how concepts such as "character," "honesty," and "trust" can become lost in translation. No one's going to write "I love meeting new people, though because I'm a schizophrenic sociopath, I suppose you could say I am other people" in a description of themselves.) In a commodification culture that thrives on the ease of instant gratification, the internet has made it all too simple to equate meeting people to shopping, or ordering from a menu. When did we get the idea that it's ok to take people out for a test-drive? It's so...convenient, providing the illusion of speed and facility. Even the word "photograph" has been condensed into the monosyllabic singularity of "Pic."

And there's the rub: Convenience. Is it truly possible to build a mutually genuine friendship upon the base of a medium whose primary concern is merely convenience?

I have to wonder if we classify people in our minds according to the ways we meet them. If we meet a person through MySpace or Friendster, do we tag that person in our personal conscience as "My MySpace Friend" or "My Friendster Friend," and if so, do we allow that to affect the way we treat him? Do we let ourselves remain detached just enough because we met someone through a computer, believing the things we do won't have any personal or emotional consequences because we filter our perceptions of that person through the myopic lens of the profile that captured our caprice to begin with? Is there a default in our minds to which we refrain that tells us no matter how many personal interactions or meaningful conversations we have with people we meet on-line, these people are simply "our on-line friends," thusly placating our consciences when we don't actively make time for them in our lives? It sometimes seems as if we think that no matter how thoughtless or unmindful we are of people we meet on-line (oh, say, telling someone you'd be glad to get together with him over the weekend and just happen to forget to call him to make it happen), so long as they remain on the friends-list, everything's alright.

The concept of the "friends-list" itself is still strange to me, as I've never felt the need to systematize the people I know according to the genus and the species of their friendship. Perhaps it taps into some adolescent need for popularity and acceptance that never goes away, as if we plan to show our friends-list to the world from which we disconnect and say "Look at all the people I know! And look at all the people who know me!" It's as if we're trying to be popular in the privacy of our own homes.

While there's no all-encompassing diagnosis, or general rule that applies to everyone who has ever met anyone on-line, my personal experience has left me disdainful of this particular communicative mode. It's no great revelation that more often than not people can pretend to be anyone and anything they wish while hidden behind the mask of a monitor, and, when coupled with the pathology of detachment mentioned above, it would seem to me that these are the people about whom we should worry the most: the ones who spend their days, and go to great lengths, to pretend to be one thing while ultimately being another. They appear normal (or at least, not abnormal), and interested in getting to know you, and for a while, you seem to be developing a friendship. Then it happens. They dissappear, without so much as a warning, or if there is one, it's merely a subtle nuance that can only be found in retrospect. No more IMs, in spite of the fact that for weeks beforehand you would talk to each other on a daily basis, no more phone calls, no more plans to get together, and any communication that is had before they Houdini on you is but a distant and stilted memory of its former infatuation.

What? What kind of emotionally broken, awkwardly Freudian, "my-daddy-didn't-hug-me" issues does a person have to have to be like this? It certainly raises a host of questions, all of which are in vain. Do they do it on purpose? Do these people really make a conscious effort to secure the invested interest of another person for the sake of getting off on the validation it gives them when they pull their disappearing act? Was their supposedly existent interest in you ever real? You don't just wake up one day and stop being interested in another person, unless all that came before was simply empty rhetoric and fabricated feelings used in the construction of a ruse that masks a person's incapability to handle the awkward situation of telling a person you simply aren't interested. Is it me? Did I do something wrong? Was it too much too soon? Are they simply afraid to get too close?

Am I even describing this breed of bastardry adequately enough to convey the anxiety on which they feed? The most nefarious ploy in their game of guile is that they simply don't care -- or if they do, their actions convey the antithesis -- and because of this, whenever you try and broach the subject of their absence, you wind up looking like the crazy one because you can't help but have an emotional reaction to their apparent apathy.

Or maybe my lonliness in this city has made me desperate, and I attach too quickly to similar personalities. (Something I've never seen in myself before, so I'm going to put it in the "maybe" pile).

But the truth is, I liked the guy. I met him through Friendster, and our personalities clicked. Since the beginning of April we would talk, quite literally, every day. He'd IM me often, and we'd talk for hours. We met at Cafe Guttenberg, and what was supposed to be a brief meeting for coffee turned into a four-hour dinner of talking and getting to know one another. I brought him cookies on my day off simply because we had joked about it the night before. We'd bond over shoe shopping for God's sake.

He invited me out with his friends on several occassions, and other times simply to keep him company while he packed up his things to move to a new apartment downtown. After deciding that I was really coming to care for this person, I went in search of a housewarming gift, ultimately deciding on a signed copy of a book published by his favorite architect. (Mad props to me and how awesomely thoughtful I am). He said he loved it, and made with the hugs.

So why did he lie to me? After the gift-giving, he said he'd call me to see what was going on later in the week, which never happened. He talked to me briefly on AIM, and spoke as though we'd hang out over the weekend, and when I casually asked him to let me know what was going on, he replied with "You know I most certainly will."

Which he most certainly didn't. That sunday afternoon, I sent him an IM, to which his responses seemed distracted at best, and inquired as to what he had done over the weekend. While his response was that he hadn't done much of anything and just relaxed on saturday night, the comments on his MySpace told quite the different story of a group get-together, exclusive of yours truly.

So why lie? It's not that I'm bothered by not seeing him over the weekend (or maybe I am because I won't admit to myself I've come to have feelings for him that transcend the platonic boundaries of friendship), and I'm not so needy as to be the kind of person to keep tabs on him or monopolize his time. I just can't wrap my mind around why a person so seemingly invested in getting to know me would talk to me as though we were meeting up over the weekend, not make good on the assumption it implies, and then lie to me about his excursions. Why act avoidant when there's been no prior indication of emotional problems? Was he talking all the while to other people online, treating me as simply a serving from a buffet? Why has this been followed by days of zero communication, and how in God's name do you approach the subject in the first place? "Hi, so, why'd you lie? You said you'd call me, but you didn't, then lied to me, but I read your MySpace and this is what it said." I'm not a 14 year old with a vagina.

I'm telling myself that it's all in my head, and that it's certainly not all about me, but my over-analytic intuition can't help but wonder about this sudden subtle nuance and the changes it implies. Was my gift too much, or too soon? Did it convey some sense of desperation or desire contrary to what I had intended? Does he simply like me and he just can't process it? Futile questions, with answers only found in an awkward situation that requires a leap of faith in broaching the subject, which can't be done without seeming accusative and crazy.

And yet, I know that that's the right thing to do; to be honest with my emotions, and myself, regardless of his reactions and the consequences they'd entail. I suppose if he isn't emotionally developed enough and incapable of responding without condemning the potential of our friendship altogether, then he's nobody I need to know. It's simply difficult finding the words and the wisdom to approach the matter after an awkward period of not speaking, which I know must take a conscious effort to do. I'm simply afraid of losing yet another friend to the illusion of the internet.

And even more of having fallen for it.