To Feel Him

Yesterday I was driving home from the Musical City, traveling alone up the Big Interstate -- a straight shot that is almost a three hour drive. I have found that this is a small price to pay for getting to see Gamer Guy the relatively little that we have seen each other in the last couple of months.

As the asphalt dragged on and around and up and down, I became painfully aware of something that I had perhaps not really noticed so much before now. And it has to do with Gamer Guy. I don't know how to articulate this without sounding crazy or -- worse -- sappy. But I noticed coming back from the Musical City that GG had left a trace of himself behind. And it was on me. And before anyone gets any ideas or wants to give me a lecture, I'm not talking about physical traces. No, in some ways this essence is much more permanent.

Now I know people are going to think I'm crazy, because it was almost as if I could still feel him while I was driving down the road, like something out of that parting hug and kiss goodbye hadn't pulled away with him, and I had rolled out of the driveway not realizing I needed to give it back to him. Or maybe the point was that I didn't need to give it back to him. But I rode with it all the way home. I ate dinner with it. I went to bed with it. And I woke up with it this morning and was startled to find it still there.

Part of me is, well, elated on some levels. But there is another part of me that couldn't be more terrified if I was staring down a Sith Lord with nothing but a fuzzy bunny rabbit to fend him off with. Would it be cheesy to say that I've never felt something like that before? Never ever. And I don't really know what to do with it.

It's not easy sometimes being a couple around GG's immediate family and close friends. We are the youngest of the bunch, and we are following in the footsteps of the older kids who are now neuroscientists, lawyers, urban planners, and physics teachers. They are in various stages of being married, being engaged, and near to getting engaged.

And then there are the two of us huddling in the corner that get treated like the little kids not because we are little kids but because we cannot live up to what is already there before us. Yes, we have not been there as long, but sometimes I feel so dwarfed that I -- I don't know how to finish that.

I'm not saying that I don't like them. They're quite likable people. Very nice. But sometimes it seems like GG and I seen with such comparatively less seriousness than the others (some of whom really aren't much older at all or are the same age) and then I turn around and feel something that to me seems very serious and I just...wish things were simpler. GG and I will both have to make some important decisions in the next year and I just don't look forward to trying to explain this to the world.

Not that we're planning on getting married next month, next year, or the year after that, or even in this decade or the next. But damn. This can't be nothing if I can't wash him off after being with him with I hadn't been with him.

I hope he doesn't read this.