anamnesiac

i used to be an anne mccaffrey fan. dragonriders of pern and all of that. one of my clearest images from the books is that of the baby dragons emerging from their monstrous eggs and catching sight of their future rider. in that instant, they were imprinted and forever bound to that one person. this, for better or worse, is a geeky sci-fi version of what happened with me and the first person i fell in love with.

curtis is a familiar – maybe even tiresome (as in, get the fuck over it already) – motif. this memory is about him. and this one. and this one (which makes me think of this song). and just for good measure, he is here, too.

like most obsessive patterns, the current outline of him bears little if any resemblance to who he is now, or even who he was. it is more about the idea i had of him, how he made me feel, and the part of me that he [read: my image of him] represents. but pop-psych aside, his impact on me was, is, huge.

he amazed me. his mind was like a vast, unexplored territory with unimaginable varieties of things to look at every two inches. a single tangent in the conversation would yield an entire world unto itself with fifty more angles to explore. and, best of all, after we explored them, he would remember the exact place where we veered off the path. and if i was the one to run suddenly off into the middle of a new idea, maybe tripping over two, three, fifteen more on my way, i would look over my shoulder and he would be there, following every step of my thought process, excited by my excitement.

walking with him in the fugue state that characterized our every meeting, in the middle-of-the-night, adolescent dreamworld of well-manicured lawns under streetlights that was our stage set, i could not imagine ever being with anyone else. or, at the very least, anyone who did not make me feel the way that i felt.

so when the small detail of my non-mormonism led him to cut his ties with me, i was left with a moment, or a series of moments adding up to a feeling that defined my experience of being most alive. and i associated this feeling with a kind of intimacy that i had experienced only with him. is it a scar? that implies a wound. his presence in my life didn’t harm me, but in the context of his leaving, i am permanently marked.