magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

okay, so there's these two american girls who are leaving for florence for the semester named elizabeth and lauren. there were no burning pickup trucks or anything, but i somehow feel that it would be wrong not to draw some parallels.

it's circles. it always was. but it's certainly different this time. er!n and i, for better or worse, never really defined what it was that we meant to each other, and when i left for texas all of that was left just as ambiguously as it always had been. at the outset i didn't know if i was ever coming back, and there was never any direct talk about what would happen when and if i did.

after reading my poems and stories last summer, stef told me that she was worried she was like the girl that i was only compatible with because i was leaving. something that i had written about q that she had slightly misinterpreted. i told her that she was really more in the position that er!n was in, the girl i was leaving behind for eight months (texas quickly turned out to be a bounded trip of the same length that rome would be three years later).

of course q was a large part of the middle of those eight months. and i think part of what would eventually prove that er!n and i wouldn't work out. (we had some large communication problems too, not to mention the fact that i was still hung up on allison all those years later.) leaving for rome however, i would have told you that i was more worried that stef would end up with someone else than that i would. i'm not that type of person, although i had done it before.

stef would say things like, "i don't want to hold you back from something else that is supposed to happen though." but really, i wasn't interested when i first got to rome. i didn't have much of any romantic/sexual impulses at all for the first few months that i was here, and even after that it was only the simplest notice of someone or another's attractiveness.

in the last month or so there's been some crossed wires that feel a little like a crush, and then i started meeting all these new americans, a by-product of my resolution to get out more. and at the same time, stef and i haven't talked, and sometimes i think i forget that feeling of togetherness. and i meet elizabeth and lauren the other night but don't really get a chance to talk much, although i resist the urge to walk them back to their hotel and continue my conversation with lauren.

and tonight, at the cock-wrassle, they find me, looking a bit uncomfortable, a bit out of place. and over the loud music i talk with one or the other of them, eventually elizabeth as lauren talks to alex.l. and she takes my hands and makes me dance, which i had been hovering on the verge of doing all night, but probably wouldn't have done without that push. and she says she'll email me from florence.

and that's it. like i said, no pickup trucks engulfed in flames. no kissing except for a little goodbye kiss on the cheek. and she mentioned a boyfriend, which i guess makes things seem more innocent. i told alex.l that i was glad, in a way, that lauren ended up talking more with him for that fact. i am involved, i don't need to be thinking about new girls. and yet.

it should be easy just to make new friends without all of these extra layers of internal complications. but i also feel like things cycle for some sort of reason. or at least that it is the natural order of things to cycle and worth trying to find the patterns and reasons within those cycles.