Lobe

By Georgia Bowan

I care for him and my heart aches when I remember.

I do admit that the feeling is like the stone of a fruit in my guts, it won’t pass or turn to acid. It’s silly to explain it so vividly, but this is something that has been incessantly choking me. But it doesn’t matter and life moves on: there are beautiful things worth living for and I am a waste of flesh if I spend my days internally rotting over another. There might be a day when I hold a baby or create a portal or help something sick get better. These are things worth much more than stone fruit, stomach cancer or feelings of pining, affection and lust. I will do better things than fuck you, or wait for you forever.

I thought about it, easily it slipped out of my frontal lobe as I lay on the deck floor. I was trying to get the pain in my stomach out, as if it would burst or crawl out of my torso like in Alien. But the thinking helped and I became less focused on the pain.

I thought about our relationship, his and mine, and how it had changed, why that was.

It had never been friendship, nor strangers. He had said to me;

“I know too much about you to be a stranger. But I think we don’t really know each-other the right way.”

At the time, this had hurt me. But he was right, we didn’t know each-other. I admired him during this time, giggled at things he said, wanted to claw him open to know more. He hurt my feelings more than once, but over the years this shifted. Later, maybe one or two Christmases later, he asked me;

“Why do you think we still talk? Isn’t it strange since we don’t really know eachother?”

I mulled this over, much more relaxed and unoffended. I think my nerves and feelings for him were more sterile, I was more logical as I got older, my feelings already hurt.

“Why are you asking this now?” I asked.

He said it had just crossed his mind, I highly doubted this, but maybe it was true. I wondered if he secretly wanted me to confess some kind of love or admiration for him. I wondered if he wanted me to explain why I stayed in his orbit after so long.

But this love admiration was no longer a fire that choked me inside and out like it had in the beginning. I didn’t feel that way as much anymore, I wasn’t a child anymore, I could hardly recall his face anymore, I hadn’t heard his voice in years. I told him the truth.

“I find you interesting.” He knew what this meant.

I admired his ideas and passions for and about the world. They turned me on, and strangely, for someone who was as not present in my everyday life, had made me more positive and optimistic about myself, my future and the world around me. He liked my writing, I liked his mindset.

“I don’t find a lot of people interesting. I like talking to you.”

That’s all I said.

“I see.” There was a pause before he continued. “I like our conversations, you know this already.” More silence.

If we had been in person, the silence may have been replaced with sex. That’s what I assume is under the surface of most conversations anyway. Everyone’s just waiting for eachother to stop talking and start taking off their clothes. Didn’t know if this was a universal truth, it might just have been mine because I was a raging pervert.

But I wouldn’t do that with him even if I could. I feared that motherfucker.

He felt I picked his brain, kept his idle hands busy. He knew I was in love with him, deep down, probably. If you can call it love? I would call it a twisted mild infatuation causing cancer of the lungs and soul. Someone else might call it, as my friends did, ridiculous foolishness and a hellish low self esteem.

But I knew the way he thought and how his emotions cultivated. The only thing I didn’t know is how he felt. But that had stopped mattering years ago.

After that conversation that night, we both went to bed, separately of course, and in different cities.

I mulled over the reason for our mutual contact after so many years of nothingness. I wonder if it was like this: growing up you realise you may have just been friends with some people in school because you were all forced to be together. Similar demographics and age, all crammed together in a small viscinity, forced to get on, and occassionally, rub up against eachother naked. Then you got older, graduate, start office jobs and develop drinking problems. You got to pick and chose real people you wanted around, and anyone else, you left behind.

He and I had been somewhere on this spectrum.

Not friends now, not friends then. Reconnected due to distance, or boredom, or a strange unfamiliar feeling of freedom to do and say whatever you want without consequences. Something left unsaid, undone. He and I had stayed in contact. Talked every few months, hours and hours on end about false Gods and philosphies and blah blah blah.

Never asked who he had in his bed, never asked if I was touching myself.

We had said a number of times that we got on too well, like we should have been companions in our youth, but it hadn’t occurred. And it would never come to be, which was fine as well. I wondered if when he got a girlfriend, our talks would end, I assumed they would. No matter the intention, nobody wants their boyfriend talking to a girl they barely know. And he wouldn’t be interested by my thoughts anymore probably, too busy with tits in his face I assume.

And just as well, all was well.