Sinister: were you born sideways? did you learn to rotate and hold your spin unafraid?

[lindsey baker]

hello sinister.

dimitra. lovely, lovely posts. i have just gotten around to reading some of 
the posts in my mailbox this morning, and for some reason i feel like the 
world has cracked open again and the soft middle is exposed. honesty has a 
way of being made of both cliched brutality and striking pain, and i feel 
like almost everyone is breaking ranks and speaking in plain truths rather 
than guarded half-whispers.

everyone except me, that is.

dimitra said 'things are never as scary as they seem from a distance,' and i 
hope this is true. and somehow i know that it is both true and false, simply 
because it is a statement and a belief here on the dual earth, and so must 
be both something good and something bad in order for people to grasp any 
essence of what it means.

which is a fancy way, i suppose, of saying that i am worried. about what i 
always worry about, i guess. love.

someone told me last night that i should let myself fall in love with this 
boy. just let it happen on its natural course, and throw my usual caution to 
the proverbial wind. nevermind that he is gone now, and shall remain gone 
for the next four weeks, after which he will return and then something will 
happen.

the pending something is scary. and i am scared now, as i should be and 
would be, regardless, and, at this point in time, there is a great distance 
of states and time zones and education and vocabulary and understanding 
between us. and i have been zero distance away from his face, and i cannot 
decide if the beauty of it was scarier then or now.

i cannot decide if when he returns will be scarier then now, when he is 
gone.

perhaps because of my week and a half disease. a week and a half goes by, 
smashingly, and then he realizes something, and kisses me goodbye and rides 
off to the next damsal in the tower down the road. usually, she has an 'ex' 
before her title, and i realize i was a catalyst for love. just somebody 
else's love. and so i write to sinister about my woes, and someone takes 
pity on me and gives me a wee bit of love and support, and i pick up the 
pieces and glue them back together with elevated language in lengthy 
paragraphs that indulge me and make me remeber why i love the dictionary 
more than men some days.

it has been one week since he and i met. i am getting scared, now, that 
whatever it is that scares the boys who have been here, right in front of 
me, will somehow reveal itself to him, and, because of the distance, become 
magnified and transmogrified into some thing huge and glaring.

and if it isn't over by wednesday, will it be over a week and a half after 
he gets back?

people have told me i am silly. perhaps i am. slightly mental. certainly 
temperamental. certainly ill. certainly taking pills.

i have talked of this song before.

now i am trying to decide if i am also blind, and if it is them that will 
drive me to it, or myself. and i am also left floundering with the idea that 
maybe being blind is a good thing, as long as i can crochet a long enough 
chain of yarn to bind my heart beack together in a little while, and still 
have enough rainbow colors left to make an afghan to throw over my shriveled 
legs as i rock the rest of my life away in my big, drafty, spinster mansion.

aside from that. on the opposite side of things.

i think.

several things have happened to me in the last week.

i have learned about discretion, and when to use it and when to throw it, 
too, to the proverbial wind. i have learned that some things really are more 
important than classes or proprieties. and both those things, as it were, 
mean i have learned, too, that when you stop trying to pull and sit 
frightened, waiting, someone will come and ask you for a light and throw 
everything off balance, and all the shit that follows is worth those few 
suspended moments when you realize everything's not lost. (that always was 
my favorite coldplay song. in my coldplay heyday, that is.)

at least i hope that what it's all supposed to mean, what it's all supposed 
to teach me.

i am not being honest. i am not as brave as will (and when i get to 
scotland, mr. salt, you had better allow me a good whole minute to hug your 
amazing pig-tailed self) or dimitra or david. i am, instead, selfish. and 
scared. and small.

the distance is a good thing, people say. but these days, i am more 
concerned with the length of things, and finding something that will sustain 
indefinitely.

or infinitely.

the difference, at this point, is moot and most likely pretentious.

xxx your lou

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