un paseo por la nostalgia

to this day we remain "friends" in the generalized, hand-wavey (as we people who've been to the physics playground like to say) sense of the word.

but it was heartbreaking. living with people whom i didn't know very well, being far away from any friends i might have had (and in all honesty i didn't have many) and being depressed on top of that. i once remember walking under a crane as i entered the building on my way to my astronomy class (astronomy for ENGINEERS, mind you) and wishing it would fall on me.

and it still makes me sad to think of how sad i was then. but i guess i wouldn't be where i am now if i hadn't experienced it.

but checking your email every five minutes and experiencing the same stab of disappointment every time, that's obsession. a behavior repeated without any rational reason. i could not relax and tell myself i'd check my email when i got home. i had to check it RIGHT THEN!

and i'd play over and over in my mind all the mental footage i had of mariano. and would always end up crying thinking of the last time i had seen him - waving to me slowly through two glass walls as i was the last person to board the plane. i know it's cliched, but it is what it is.

to think that was only after two weeks and we hadn't even slept together!

i even spent a whole day reliving and reliving every moment of it. when i was supposed to be watching horses go over jumps!

of course for some time after i returned i'd get an email from him every two to three days. but then they decreased to almost weekly. then bi-weekly. and august 2001 when i moved to the apartment in champaign, he didn't write me for more than a month. after two weeks of nothing, i wrote him like five successive emails, saying that i was going to send him an email every day until he wrote me back. i was hoping to at least get something from him after sept. 11th. instead i wrote him and told him everything was all right, etc. i received a response a few weeks afterwards.

one night i was watching tv, and when i returned to my desk i saw that he had sent me an instant message but had soon logged off. this was the first contact i'd had from him since that last email in august, and i was kicking myself hard for not being there when he was.

i remember the moment before i saw him again a year and a half later. i was in the lobby of hotel salta. my heart was pounding i was so nervous. god i even remember what i was wearing at the time and regretting my choice of clothes! later one of the program directors would comment "what a hottie!" (in castellano of course - and yes, he was gay.) that was during the orientation phase of my stay - the very beginning and we spent a week in the northwest. for a while in the middle of nowhere, and we were to fly out of salta.

the trip from cafayate to salta was interminable. we kept stopping what seemed like every two feet. i called his house like five times constantly revising my ETA. anyway when we saw each other, there was an asado at his house. these two hot twins from shan ishidro were there, they were snobby ass bastards but whatever. also a girl who was trying to kill me with her eyes from across the fire. in fact her stare was so cold the fire almost went out.

at salta's airport once again and i'm exhausted and crabby because i didn't sleep more than three hours at hotel salta. i wasn't sure if it was the same gate but there were glass walls again and i couldn't help it. i started to cry. sergio (program director's boyfriend) asked me sympathetically te esta pasando la nostalgia? i could only nod my head and try to breathe through my runny nose and choked-up airway. when i returned to my host mom's house in buenos aires, she took one look at my face and gave me a hug. i started crying again.

he remained my obsession probably until july of 2003. i spent 2002-2003 in buenos aires, and though i dated a bit, i still always came back to thinking about him. there were a few days though where i actually recognized the fact that i hadn't thought about him at all the day before. towards the end of my stay i made my way up to his part of the country and visited my old host family (yes, a military family in argentina, can you imagine? as in, retired important person military family, as in at the time son was a suspicious 27 years old and looked nothing like anyone else...) but it wasn't the same; i didn't feel the same. he slept through my departure. but i didn't really care.

my last time in south america (august 2004) was spent in santiago de chile with a friend i had met while staying at a hostel in salta. i don't remember what we were talking about; perhaps he asked me why i had been in salta and mariano came up or something. i told my friend that i was over him. he said he didn't believe me and accused me of being enamorada. but really, though the nostalgia does bring the occasional tear to my eye, it is in the past. had i stayed in salta it would not have worked out anyway. i'm sure sister mary would have driven me insane! (that's what we call his mom - we as in that memorable salta trip group.)

so there was no relationship. i did not invest much in it, just may hours spent making out on park benches, in la plaza 9 de julio, on the hood of his car. i'm not sure there was even a connection between us. our conversations weren't even that interesting. that was before i really even knew what an interesting conversation was. and the last two years i've forgotten to send him an email for christmas or his birthday. i've also forgotten to acknowledge our meeting (25 july) for the past few years. i used to wonder whether he thought of me too that day. but now if i think of it at all, it's just a passing thought, like a tiny cloud you can see through. i've now come to realize that those things are in the past. things happen, and nothing ever stays the same. i used to always want to perpetuate the past somehow; whenever i'd stop seeing someone, whether i cared about him or not, i'd want to remain friends because i hated the thought of never seeing the person again.

but like a sweater that got snagged on life, all my memories of that experience are unravelling into an abstract mess on the floor. there are some things i can't remember anymore, like the order of events, anything we talked about. only of the most interesting points can i recall the details. some things i remember because i've written about them before; i wrote an essay on a lie i told his mom for a comp class, have probably written a few poems about the girl with ice-daggers for eyes, and definitely a few copies of some lines about how i was feeling (ie, waking up to the sound of a violin weeping and wishing i could go back to the dream world i was in prancing around the hayfield with him, when i woke myself up laughing.)

so was it longing, or obsession?