July 20 1998, Monday

Kim, the girl about whom I developed a fully-requited infatuation while in Ann Arbor, knows nothing of these musings. So it was an easy task to flavour my email to her with vivid accounts of survival on the road.

I learned today that Kim's friend Lisa (the brunette girl who flew out to San Francisco the morning after the WCBN party) had just returned to Ann Arbor. This made me nervous, because at the very same WCBN party, Matt Rogers, stupid with the foolishness of being cunt-struck, had disobeyed me and blabbed to Lisa about these musings. Now, I don't know if the reality of these musings really registered with Lisa or not (it would have been easy for her to dismiss such information as typical party hyperbole), but I didn't want to take chances on ruining a beautiful new thing with Kim, a girl I really may love. So I pulled down the accounts of the days from July 11th to the 16th. I'll put something in their place eventually and it will surely all be restored some day. It's been the most well-received writing I've done thus far and I'm certainly not going to just throw it away. But I can't have Kim reading my objective analysis of our relationship or my unflattering accounts of her family, at least not in this critical period.

K

im called me in the evening mostly to hear my voice and make sure what had happened wasn't just a dream. With me being suddenly gone, she'd been nagged by fears that perhaps it had never even happened. Dreams can be vivid sometimes, frighteningly so. We could pinch ourselves and find out we're just fictions. It wouldn't be the first time for either of us.

Kim went on to try to convince me to fly with her out to San Diego when she begins massage school graduate work there in September. I told her I'd like to be with her in California, but that I'd rather not fly. I said it was too much like stepping into a machine, having someone pull a lever, and materializing somewhere else. It has no soul. Besides, there are people in, say, Lawrence Kansas, that I want to see. She has no idea, of course, that I'm a petty web micro-celebrity, that my musings front page got over 500 hits today. She just thinks I have nice email conversations with a few weirdoes around the country and that's it. She doesn't know, and I don't really want to break it to her. I'm sure there's an idiot reader out there somewhere who will blow the whole thing for everyone. Sometimes it seems there's a premature ejaculator behind every fucking tree.

We spent considerable bandwidth both over the phone and over the internet telling each other how much we think we're meant for one another. "This" being there provides strength in my life, but I'm deathly afraid of the happily ever after. Does this make sense?

Kim also told me that her old boyfriend Paul had intercepted a bunch of her AOL email, most importantly a correspondence in which Kim wrote of a future filled with fucking and anchovy-tomato pizza for both of us. Paul was so alarmed when he read this particular email that he spitefully printed out a copy and left it in the apartment for Kim to discover. It was, to say the least, a shocking development, though in retrospect Kim isn't especially upset about this breach of privacy. Indeed, she sees it as a good thing. It forces Paul to fully appreciate that this is something too vast for him to destroy. Kim has now admitted to Paul that she's deeply in love with me, so he's resigned himself to this fact. She says he's moving into Detroit soon and will never return to her apartment.

Kim noted at the end of our conversation a realization she'd just made: I'm my own person, I have my own things going on in my life that are quite distinct from her. She said she found that unusual but strangely refreshing. In her past, evidently, she's had more experience with people who are blank slates, people who she expects to conform to her plans. She didn't admit to being especially controlling, but I've seen this tendency in her. It's manageable, though. I can assert myself when I need to. I won't be flying to San Diego, but I'll be getting there somehow.