choked.

There's something significant about a year. I have, for a long time, thought myself to be well versed in short-term relationships, not long-term ones.

I somewhat tragically blame this situation on what began on a certain December evening back in 2002. It was my first semester of college, fresh out of high school, fresh into an academic system which included males. I was a kid then, I really was. And the snippets that remain are movie-esque. The cold, a strange house downriver, the jeep, white sheets in the morning sun. So maybe now it's coming full circle, my first semester of college and then my last, 5 years...

Maybe that's why I've felt so ashamed about those 4 years between, trying to find what I had found that December night. The seduction, the games, the disposability. Carelessness. In recent years I learned to refine my "skill," the longer to play the game the better you get at it (but it's still always just as painful). Perhaps that's why I told myself after getting the Norwegian I had nothing left to prove. You always reach a point of finding the next step.

And I let go. That freedom, a fault? Stepping back, stepping up. "Don't get stuck in South Africa unless you're sure you want to." (I don't think he understood how relevant that phrase would be a year after he said it to me.) I don't know this game, I don't know what's supposed to happen after two months-- how much do I give my heart away?

But I know. It's too late. I already did. It's true, the uncertainty. A month, four months, a year, (never?).... it doesn't matter, it would still be breaking. This thought fucks with my head. Because I don't want another SFB1; where even now I freeze, I'm consumed at the thought that I might see him again.

I choked. I'm beyond my experience.

I'm frightened by how quickly a year goes by.