He actually looked it up. This idea of a soulmate or a twin flame. Like when he looks up names of potential mates on the net. Online stalking whatnot. He actually looked up her name on the Swedish site Ratsit. He got the freebie info. Her name, her age, her civil status, address. He even went as far as to go by her apartment one crazy night full of inebriated fantasies or tormented feelings and ideas of rejections. He confessed to have screamed her name in the middle of the night.
I wasn’t supposed to be a recipient of his thoughts but I had to ask about it and since then it’s been nothing but Niagara Falls over and over again.
I had caught him looking at her with a curious intensity which made time come to a halt. At least for him because all I saw were those few precious seconds a person has let go of time frames, wondering aloof in some space continuum where time doesn’t exist. I glimpsed at his stare and followed it until she came into view. I know the feeling because I’m an expert empath. I sense these minute things like some people are good at seeing details pass by in slow motion which no one else seems to notice. My little gift was to see things as they happen before they happen in our milieu. I see people’s behavior in such a way I can predict their emotional status with ease and rapidness and say with some certain high level of accuracy what they are presently going through in their lives. Like when I spotted a coworker dying her hair with a flaming color. I knew then there was trouble in paradise.
Normally I wouldn’t pay too much attention to other people’s love interests but this guy caught my attention, rounded it up and tied like a calf at a rodeo. Mostly because I knew this guy as a womanizer i.e. someone to look up to. A guy who could get any chic he’d liked yet this one made him stop in his tracks. He discussed her presence as kryptonite. Yeah, he’s superman alright I had said to myself as I heard him babble about the impotency this female brought upon him. I couldn’t understand that metaphor until I felt it too some months later. This women I had no idea of made me weak to my knees just by being nearby or feeling her presence before she was even nearby. She managed to suck my very source of energy to the point where all I did was think of her 24/7 365. I realized then that that was what he meant when he used that reference to kryptonite. The worst of it all was his inability to declare his feelings to her which I intuited was love at some level. I did not encourage any course of action. I am not the one to encourage to make life decisions of any sort and least not about love. I just listen. Maybe that’s why am often in situations which I don’t understand why just me has to endure public displays of whining at work . I really didn’t want to listen more but my own experience made me listen even more intently to his own personal experience with this weird concupiscent astral you-name-it out of body experience, inward desire to be with someone I don’t really want to be with but waits exact the right amount of time to be with said being.
Do you fantasy about her in a sexual way? I had once asked him jokingly. (The female at hand is super gorgeous and a foxy lady). He said not the first year. Which was weird. Not that anything about the whole deal was normal. By far. He mentioned a few sexual positions and what he would do, stuff of the imagination and that never actually happen once one is well at it. The disturbing part was how he fantasied. He talked about how he thought she would come to first contact. A bump, a frontal crash, a laughter. I really thought he was some sort of sissy, I mean, what guy imagines meeting a girl by bumping into her? He did. Not only that he imagined walking with her holding hands. Worst yet. He imagined her having a conversation. He lost it. Surely.
He had also stopped drinking alcohol because he thought the spirits were making him fall into a delusional state. After all, this girl doesn’t even know he exists. I got sad because that’s my drinking buddy we’re talking about. So he stopped downing the brewskies because his infatuation with this woman was getting out of hand according to him. Not that he stalked her or anything. His sole focus on her was limited to the strange burning sensations in his body everytime he thought of her or everytime she passed or happened to glance at her because, like I said, her image or presence burned an image on his cerebral cortex that lasted hours, days and months, years by now if we are to believe him. Which I do.
I warned him of the Feminist Four. This group of females had a theory that men are pigs when it comes to desiring women and that even when they spiritually or unconsciously, unwillingly feel or want a female though no physical contact nor approach has been made was akin to mental groping since unwanted energy was being directed for the purpose of sexual attraction. This group of females had stumbled upon their theory in an obscure tract down in a basement at Wellesley College some years ago and the theory spread like wild fire in the Feminist community. I warned him because I saw in him relish the situation. It was a sick pleasure to entertain the idea of her, the attraction, the possibility of something happening, the hope he kept alive of living a life which only existed in his cerebral cortex. He told me not to joke to a tormented soul. Is that what it is? You are tormented? I retorted. Which curiously brought memories of Gomez from The Family Addams when Morticia commented about Gomez being tormented and Morticia said: “Don’t torture yourself, Gomez… that’s my job.”. Eitherways, he was nearly insulted that his pristine feelings for the lass were questioned and pitted against a feminist theory which almost never saw the light of day when for all he knew it was her redirecting all that energy towards him. Maybe he was being groped at. Yeah, you keep thinking that I thought. Never been a fan of masculine theory.
I understood his conjecture. Like Japanese youth who reject sex or the new wave of asexuals hitting the streets of New York this millennium, it’s not surprising that people yearn and feel attraction to an Other who they are unwilling to confront or feel the call to be a false call of sorts. I thought he was just fearful of real rejection. These calls of twin flames or soulmates are strange at best. In my innermost thoughts I think it’s just frustrated love. Like Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. It’s all about principles and love of many things except the call to follow the heart. Steven’s love of attention to detail is in stark contrast to his failure to notice the call of attraction to Miss Kenton with the sole exception that the novel makes it a point to exact a bitter juice of it all if we heed not the call of the soul or the heart or whatever you want to name it.