the Hologram turns 25

Sometimes I get covered with the things that are all over other people's lives and I suddenly find myself there...

I was at brewery today [because it's Wednesday] and missing my lover because he was off doing himself things as he should...and I struck up a conversation with a friend of mine. A friend who, if I were still the sort of girl who were still shopping for lovers I would consider [if only because he smells so good and seems superficially powerful] and I thought to myself about this friend and another friend sitting across the table from us both: are they sleeping together?

It's not as though I am the sort of person who thinks she really has a 6th sense for these things, in fact I've been hoping that they would sleep together for a while, so it could be wishful thinking. Because I like him and I like her and I think that they should each be able to enjoy one another's company [sexually] without the encumbrances of social graces. And I truly was just intoxicated enough [as often I can be on Wednesdays because my lover is off doing himself things and I am free to be as thoroughly silly as I can muster] that I thought I might be good enough friends with this friend of mine [as friends from long ago] to just ask.

"Just as an aside," I began. "Are you two sleeping together?"

"Well, sometimes. Occasionally. VERY rarely," he answered. "Why can you tell?" Which struck me as an odd question. Is this female intuition something that people really put stock in?

"I'm mainly noisy," I responded. "I wouldn't say I'm observant or anything. I just wondered."

And those are all things that are rather true [true enough] for polite brewery conversation with fairly good friends when I am mostly more drunk than they are. Mostly I am intoxicated by the idea of the two of them sleeping together, that is having sex, that is making love, and mostly I hope that it makes them feel good about themselves and each other when they do it.

Do they?

It makes me think back to those days of early love that so easily get eclipsed by really getting to know someone [as in, seeing them when they have food poisoning, or washing their socks]. And it is not as though those things make someone less lovable, but they do make him different in my eyes than he was before [which is an appreciable difference].

Of course, I then have to remember that these two friends of mine probably aren't really on the track for being in love. They probably are fighting against it, or one of them is, or neither is but they assume that the other is...

It's so hard to be young and have feelings for someone, to have obligations for someone. To not know who you are and want to see if what you might be looks good next to what someone else might be.

And it all gives me that obscene surging feeling just below the navel and just above the clitoris.

What exactly does it look like to other people when they see me with my partner? I've been walking around in my recent life not quite knowing people enough to ask them what they think, which is in it's own way liberating because [seriously] who was ever better off for caring what others thought about their major life decisions? But on the other hand it makes one feel isolated from that continuity of self that others can reflect when you forget yourself.

He fills me with this feeling of being comfortable in the way I act myself, in the things I want, in the commitment to decide to want the same things together. Can someone see that when they look?

In a time when my whole life could be on Facebook or YouTube or on some blog somewhere [...] what does it really mean to appear a certain way? I could almost convince myself that I was deconstructed if I really thought any specific way about identity [other than to say it is some sort of hologram].

But I say things like "I love you" which are exactly true...and exactly only possible because of what time and in which place I live [and yet knowing that does not change a thing about how I feel]. Meaning that feeling is it's own bottomless pit of trying to mean something...

I sometimes get to having these conversations with myself [and my future and past selves], and incarnations of my lover, exemplars of my parents and far off ancestors...my unconceived, unborn children. And fantasy is every bit as real as reality even when you know the difference.

Finally, I know that what I am isn't crazy: it's human. And I don't walk around wanting to be enveloped in the fantasies that I lived for as a younger me, but I sometimes wish that I had something solid to stand on. And I wonder if many of the things that the me of today does are to hold onto that fantasy in the same way that the old me thought that sex was love and caressing was intimacy.

The farther that I get from what I was supposed to be the more I realize what I am, and the more I see that what I am is curiously similar to what I was always supposed to be. And it makes the me in the middle, the mistrustful and rebellious me, wonder if I will have to pay later [with the joy of a later me] for the incongruity of these choices and the irreconcilability of self and other. Just as it makes the me of the present resentful of those poorly formed versions of myself who can't believe that anything is "right" or "correct" unless it is painful, lonely and detached from the affection of others.

So the comfort must be the later me [who can only be the projection of the current me]. The me who is just enough of myself to look back over this period of life and see that it served its own purpose and taught me everything that I really needed for the next thing.

And what does she look like?