...one missed step, one slip before you know it...

Though I've tried, I've fallen...

For the third time in the past month I met up with my past for lunch, a catch up. The fact that chemistry persists over time and distance knocks the breath out of me, because I could want him as much as ever. I do want him as much as ever, physically at least. But as to everything else, that at least seems to have dissipated. Or at least I'm thinking more clearly this time around. Which is why, when he mentions today that maybe we should give it another go, I know without much thought and anxiety what my answer will be.

I have sunk so low

The thing that stuns me the most is that it was three years ago, because then I automatically start running the math in my head, and it occurs to me that I was 17. And what in the world was a 17-year old doing with a guy that much older... not even withstanding the question of what a guy like that was doing with a 17 year old? Oddly I felt older then. That summer was such a step out of real time - living on my own, another city, another world. I felt more independent, more like a grownup.

I have messed up

Now I am a Student, not even playing at grownup whereas he is a Grownup, full-time job, and all that. I have Student issues, papers to think about, exams, and student life is a self-contained bubble that leaves no room for anything on the outside really.

It's funny because the guy sitting across the table from me today was someone I barely recognized. The touch was familiar, and the scent, the body. But what I remember doesn't coincide with what I saw. Because what I remember is an obsession with old CD's (700 of them), a red collared shirt of Sandman 3 of 7 days in the week, a dirty apartment, playing guitar to his roommates bass, sketchy beer and too much coffee. All things that screamed "boy-ish, still growing". Today was too... clean cut. Which is more scary than not.

Better I should know

Maybe I'm more grown up now than I thought though, because I'm not going to do this again. Me at 17 would have jumped at this. For months afterwards I wanted to be back there. It was only last year that I took the picture out of the frame, front and centre on my desk.

So, good. It's a "no" then? We've decided?