Hi sweetheart, just checking in to say hi, & so that you don't worry if I'm not posting, but I really don't have much in me this evening. I'm feeling achy, tired, vaguely inflamed -- not feverish, more like a hot dry feeling. Also, bumming out, just a bit. Maybe a function of having been utterly housebound all day. Not that it was so bad. I filled seed trays and a range of small plastic pots, retrieved from the shed, with potting soil, and I planted seeds, one tray of cosmos, another of zinnias, and a third of nigella (love in a mist, if I recall correctly). I spritzed the lot. Then I went to one of the raised beds and stooped and laboriously weeded it, and scattered seed of rose campion, larkspur, and bachelors button, in rough wide rows. This effort pretty much knocked me out, and the cats were curious and came ambling over to keep my company while I gardened.

No date prospects whatever, and I'm feeling a little discouraged. I think I live in the wrong region, maybe, for the type of man I'd be interested in meeting, & who might like me for who I am, and find me attractive. I had a coffee date one day last week with a pedantic, middle-aged, utterly boring (to me) dentist, and he expressed skepticism that I'd ever find the sort of person I'd really be attracted to, which didn't make me wish to settle on him. He seemed very glad to settle on me immediately, as though I were no more than a new patient on his list -- he has to take everybody doesn't he, out of professional courtesy? But dating, seeing someone, trying to have a rapport with someone - can't be like that.

Is context everything? I think, for example, of how I used to go across the river with one or another of our cats to visit the vets... and I'd find one or both of them kinda cute, kinda attractive. If one of them had winked, or smiled, or whatever -- well, who knows? But then I think -- what if I were to meet one of them by chance, head-on in a "meet"? Do you know -- I think that quite suddenly I would find them really "not my type" at all.

I just had a brief email exchange on CL, including trading 'pics.' And I'm not photogenic at all. I don't know what to say. I think that in person -- I'm quite attractive, to the sort of man who would find me attractive. Which of the sort whom I would find attractive -- well, I'm not sure anymore.

He included 'pics' of himself. And he has good looks, and a good physique. But immediately something struck me about him -- that he's "typical" -- average intelligence, conservative, not very imaginative. He vaguely reminds me of a comedic actor, a very minor one, whom maybe I've seen on SNL or on a sitcom -- I don't know, it's bothering me. Anyway -- not my type -- because I can tell that I would be instantly bored to death by him by his conventionality. There is a hell of a lot of bland conventionality among the homo sapiens (male & female) up here.

I would love to meet someone spirited & lively, who looks in a photo, so delighted & engaged with life, as if tickled, as in a certain author photo I glance at. He is a very handsome man. But I recognize that spiritedness. Maybe I'm not the most photogenic -- but maybe a man attuned to seeking it, might sense, and be attracted to that very quality in me.

I've just read another chapter in his book, very moving, very touching, about how his mother's first love, her fiancé - they were genuinely engaged to be married - drowned in a canoe accident in storm waters -- and her life was never the same after that - had been split in two, as the author, her son puts it (possibly I'm paraphrasing as I type).

It's so curious to me that the author should be so haunted by the presence of this spectre of his mother's fiancé -- not his father. And of course, had the young man not drowned, then the author -- well, he simply wouldn't be in existence, let alone have written this book. So it is a strange, and tragic, and haunting rending, indeed. And the mother, I gather (and not just in her addled dementia) never got over it, the death of her first major love, who was to have been The One.

It's a romantic story, it really is.

But I can't help but think of how my own life was utterly split in two, when my first major love, the one I thought I'd been engaged to -- sorta kinda in his slippery way -- simply absconded to Alaska. He didn't drown in a river. And yet my life was split in two, nonetheless.

Things weren't as sweet in 1976, as they were in - what, 1945?

No, I can believe, as does the author, that his mother & her true love, her fiancé who drowned, were meant for each other, that he was absolutely going to show up for the wedding, that he didn't have a roving eye, had every intention to stay. If the author's mother became, for a time, a Miss Havisham in her late-age dementia, it wasn't because her first true love had been a cad, and simply absconded. He had tragically died -- there is, of course, a difference.

And so I sit here, typing, thinking rather bitterly about someone who rent my life in two many many years ago, then vanished forever... only to reappear, as if in a dream (but not) in epistolary exchanges of whose flames he (well, he & I both) fanned... and he disappeared again, rent my life yet again.

And yet -- I keep trying to tell myself -- oh what's the point, be done with it. He's married to his "Asian ideal" and carries on with emotional unavailability with whoever he wants, whenever, for years and years on end.

Honestly, for me personally, it would have been way easier if he had tragically died. And we'd been frozen in youth, forevermore -- as in fact we are.

But no. He's more like -- I don't know. I can't even romanticize him anymore. He didn't die. He left. He didn't choose me.

I don't know how to end this post, darling, not really. You seem to see me for who I am, and find me beautiful! As I do you!

But do you know, if we were to meet, cold, off CL, probably - who's kidding whom -- we'd leave each other cold.

But since, darling, that fortunately isn't the case between us -- many, many kisses, my love, and you continue to be the most abiding comfort to me, when I wake up in the middle of the night, all by myself, heart after a moment resuming pounding... and I think, oh darling, you... and I can rest