Dear Jill,
Five weeks ago I met a wonderful guy. We fell for each other, hard (ouchie!). When we were together we snogged, sang, laughed, drank primitivo, looked at medieval tapestries, listened to Leonard Cohen. When we were apart we talked, emailed, text messaged, posted to each other's Facebook Walls, commented on each other's blogs, sent notes by carrier pigeon, practiced telepathy. It was bliss, but it took up all our time. Now both of us have a lot of work to catch up on, and we haven't exchanged more than a few lines in days. He seems fine, but I am starting to resemble Sylvia Plath's less stable sister.
1. Do you think I need to adjust my medication?
2. Can anything be done with these lines from my poem draft, working title "Wrestling the Angel"?
O creature of light, creature of darkness,
your grasp slips. I fall,
down, down, down,
down, headfirst, bumfirst,
legs asplay, arms tucked.
Bloody, bloody, bloody hell,
bloody hell.
Blessings,
Dame Dopamine
Dame Dopamine,
Hmm. You know you're in mad deep when you start throwing down some Lenny C. (An aside: My absolute favorite album of all time is LC's Ten New Songs. It's perfect.) You also know you are in thalassic, drownable waters when you can type the word 'snogged' brazenly and without shame.
The core of this problematic apple is not, m'dear, geography. The issue is that bliss, like gasoline, costs more these days. When we aren't in the same physical place as our beloved(s, if'n yous got more than one), we are forced to rely on alternatives. Malheureusement, these are shabby substitutes. The electronic ones, especially, as they-- I fear-- trick us into thinking we are satisfying more of our need for connection than we actually are. So even if he wrote you a Moby Dick (heh) sized tome of an email, you'd still feel short-shrifted. And even if he tagged your Facebook wall with enough graffiti to warrant a policeman's investigation of vandalism-- it wouldn't be enough. Not nearly. (Remind me to tell you about Viking graffiti in a neolithic chambered cairn on the Orkney Islands. Wait, I'll tell you now. Scratched into the wall in the 12th century and in runic script: Thor fucked Helga.)
But I gather that in this case, Thor isn't fucking Helga, and it's not for lack of desire. My advice? Stay patient and remember that even similarly zip-coded relationships fall the occasional victim to one partner or the other's schedule. Make the mostly most of the time you have together.
So...
1) Depends on the medicine.
and
2) I'd consider the following edit:
Wrestling the Bloody Angel
Bumlast, headfirst:
Bloody, bloody, bloody hell.
Arms asplay and legs inert:
Bloody, bloody, bloody hell.
And [something something] up my skirt.
Bloody hell. Bloody hell.
Bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody
Hell.
