Travels with Petey

By the morning of the 16th, with me in Little Rock and headed to Amarillo that day, the woman I had fallen in love with and I were mutually confessing having feelings for each other--"catching feels." So it had started to settle in for me that an event had occurred, whether I liked it or not. I was still in denial to some degree about the power, depth and breadth of my feelings, and wary of tipping my hand too soon (crazy stalker alert!) as well as getting hurt by an entanglement that seemed frankly impossible to me. What had started as joking (a series of heady puns) and had led to experimenting with writing erotica to each other and flirting/still joking, had shifted-- maybe like I saw a little pile of straw and playfully flipped a lit match on it and, in turn, the smoldering chaff set fire to a million acres. 

I spent the driving day from Little Rock to Amarillo thinking about her. I discovered I could use voice-to-text to send her text messages while driving. The road trip had suddenly morphed into a completely different trip-- the entire first half until the turn around in New Jersey had been about me going back to my past. This second half was new, reframed and had a delicious kind of total freedom in it. I felt inspired and light headed, and admit to questioning my sanity periodically. It quickly became more and more clear that she and I meshed in many ways beyond the fundamentals of flirtation, sexuality and banter. 72 hours, one third of those in the car, and 1600 miles-- the quantifiable parameters of time and space. But, by my arrival in Amarillo, a mysteriously stretched and pulled time and space had been constituted somehow, oneiric, metamorphic and with a life of its own, in which we two had embarked (again, whether conscious or not) into uncharted territory. 

I think of it partly as my whole self falling from a great height, and then my weird, disembodied sense of identity looking down-- "wow, look at that! falling!"-- and then and now, my identity variously trying to jump also. Trying to catch up. Catch its breath and follow. Let go of the ledge. Trust. The first plummet, as I have said before, can happen very, very quickly. It's the catching up that can be challenging. And takes time, care, caution, patience and love. Now (so to speak), on August 22nd, it feels like it could take as much time as constitutes time itself. Golden apples of the sun kind of thing. 

But I wasn't headed that way consciously as I drove ever westward through Arkansas, Oklahoma and the panhandle of Texas. It was an exhilarating encounter. I was having a great time. I kept telling myself it was just play. I was on my way to Santa Fe, my old adopted home town, to Albuquerque to see a new friend, back to the Valley of the Sun to close out the road trip and get ready for my 4th year of the PhD program. That's what I was doing. The burgeoning connection with this new lover was fun and all, but couldn't possibly be very important. 

Right?