Infatuation

A very short passage about a young man who finds himself drawn to a woman who is unavailable.

When the young man got home from work in the evenings he often found himself thinking about her. He thought about the cruel trick fate had conspired to play on him. He was confident now, capable of holding an engaging conversation. He was capable of making her laugh. If she had entered his life previously she would have known a different him. She would have known the quiet, reserved person he was. The emotional instability. The depression. The awkwardness. So in that sense it was best that she met him when she did, but...

Why did she have to be taken at the time they encountered one another? Every time she smiled now sadness and jubilation came swimming into his heart. Every time he saw her he felt a rush of ecstasy lifting him, as he thought about a future with her, only to come crashing down after realising this future could never be real, it couldn't materialise. She belonged to someone else.

They would often go on nights out together with their colleagues from work - this is when he would feel particularly vulnerable. He felt vulnerable because he felt transparent. His intentions were blindingly obvious, he thought. His attention was drawn to her, he was fixated. He would go out of his way to sit next to her, go up and buy her drinks, converse with her. There was something deep in him that he could not articulate; it felt clichéd to use a word like magnetism to describe this phenomenon but that's the most appropriate word he could think of.

---

So he looked to convince himself of that fundamental truth, that it is easier to love from afar - that loving from afar is not real love. Whenever he saw her it was in a certain context which normally involved fun and drinking. He could feel this way about her because he had not witnessed the worst elements of her personality. He was capable of analytical thought with regards to the situation and he knew that the image he had of her did probably differ from the reality. 

But it's hard to reconcile knowing and feeling.  

His infatuation with her was cyclical. The affection would swell, he would want her, long for her. He would spend time with her and this affection would intensify further until it became too tragic to be around her. Withdrawing, he would allow a frost to permeate his heart, to numb his mind. "You don't need her. You don't need this." Composure and relief. She became a beautiful ghost who only haunted him infrequently. This would morph into complacency though. He was inoculated, he thought. She did not not exert that power over him any longer, it was safe to let her back in and when he let her back in, well... 

He wondered, would the day ever come when she'd release him. Would the day ever come when he could release himself? There was something deeply appealing - and he loathed himself for acknowledging this - about the depths of emotion he felt because of all this. There was a degree of acknowledgement though that it was an unsustainable state of affairs. 

So he sat there in his apartment waiting for the day he could be her shoulder to cry on, waiting for the day she got dumped. Or waiting for the day he could find someone just like her. 

"How horrible. How lamentable." 

Reviews

[Bigdek29]

Nice story. I like that I can relate to inner emotions and how transfixed it is possible to become by someone out of reach. The idea of a 'cyclical' situation is strong and pushed me to wonder whether he still longs or whether he has broken the spell. Nice to read your work.

[C Peril]

Hi Bigdek,

I'm very grateful for your review; it appears as though the topic of infatuation has resonated with a few people so I'm glad I uploaded the piece. Thanks very much for your time and I hope I can review some of your work soon.

[JackValor86]

I think alot of guys can relate to this, myself included, at least at some point in their lives, its a pretty common theme in a lot of stories too.

[Fabian G. Franklin]

I enjoyed this read. It brought back to me the ages old proverb of we all want what we can't have or so goes the story from the book; the one with Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit. Through history there have been those torn by similar fates...a man might love his art or his craft as much as any woman like Ovid's Pygmalion, drawn to a beauty of his own creation. Then we have the repeating story of suffering artists like Van Gogh and Hemingway lost to obscurity or fortune and fame. "How horrible. How Lamentable." Indeed.