I Love You. :):)

Good Morning, my Angel,

I'm sorry I didn't write yesterday. You had not posted either, and it felt like there was some tension in the air, and I wanted to let it pass, to sleep on it in order to best articulate what I wanted to say. My sister did not come over for her usual Saturday shopping, so I will be here all afternoon until it's time to go back to Pearl's at 4:30. Thus, I will have time to write. I have always said that communication is our most important tool, and I think that it is best utilized when a person (me, in this case) has had a little time to analyse a situation. Of course, the whole idea of communication is to communicate - and not to wait and therefore be silent - and so I apologize again for not writing last night, but I just wasn't feeling very good, and because of that, anything I wrote would have been influenced by those feelings, and would not have been a true reflection of the totality of how I feel. That totality, of course, is a profound love for you, the likes of which I have never known for anyone.

Which makes my silence yesterday, and my little complaint today, seem incredibly stupid, I realize. But, as humans, we know that feelings can be unruly things, and sometimes they come over us of their own accord, regardless of how silly or irrational they seem.

Because conversation on the internet does not allow for voice inflection, or finely tuned emotional nuance, I ask you to please read everything that follows as being voiced in a loving manner. It's just me trying to explain myself, and I feel dumb, but I still need to communicate. The most important thing is that I love you, all the time. That is the emotion - the most powerful emotion of them all - that conquers all the others, every single time. I love you, so that is what is important here. I love you, and nothing can or will ever change that.

Okay, so that is what is important. Now for the dumb stuff, the stuff that makes me feel like an idiot but I have to say it anyway. Well, of course you can guess, because the timing coincided with when both of us stopped posting for a day, and when the feeling of tension set in. It's my friend again, Aurelien, and before you kill me (and please don't!) - let me explain. It was just a case of timing, and reaction.

For several days, maybe a couple of weeks - ever since you posted your first batch of pictures from Porcupine Mountain State Park, and also your picture before that of your poem on the rock at Lake Superior - I have had this feeling, and the accompanying imagery of a daydream being willed into reality of walking along that shore with you, and visiting that park with you. This was an incredibly special feeling that stayed with me for days (it's still with me), and the imagery stayed in my head as I went about my daily business. In that sense, it was not unlike the much more brief, but every bit as vivid and powerful, image I had last year of your EP cover, which came to me as I was driving. That I described to you possibly the day it happened, in Spring of last year. This recent and present feeling, of walking with you along the shore, I wrote about just the other day, in a blog. Though my description was brief, I hope it conveyed the power of the feeling, of being right there along the shore, with you : my Elizabeth, the Love Of My Life. And we are walking in one of your most special places. I know I write (or try to express) my feelings for All Things Profound to such an extent that it may at times become redundant, but in this case, there was absolutely nothing redundant about such a vision, so clear as if it were actually happening, of being in such a special place with your True Love, and sharing the moments. In daydreaming about this vision over the past couple of weeks, I vowed to make it happen. I wrote about that, too, when I said we could go anywhere in the World. To walk that shore with you was (and is!) going to be special beyond words.

I admit, I am a hopeless romantic (though I think that is a dumb cliche, because there is nothing hopeless about romance! Quite the opposite.....). I am also known for wearing my heart on my sleeve, and at the end of the day, I am still only human. I'm "just a guy", in other words. We guys can be incredibly dumb, and it may seem like we are Big Babies sometimes, but there is a method to our madness, or at least a reason for it. It is called rivalry. Guys like chivalry, but not rivalry. And, rightly or wrongly, we feel we have a radar for it.

So, to get into the mechanics of what happened on Thursday, it's really just as simple as it is dumb. It was afternoon, maybe 3 o' clockish. I was at Pearl's, and I saw your latest batch of pictures come up on Facebook. I could see from the thumbnails that they were beautiful, and they were from the Park. I wanted to see them full-size, but Pearl's computer crashes almost every single time you click the mouse. Some kind of Symantec problem. Not my computer, they don't wanna fix it, so - I drove home. Pearl was at the hairdresser and I had the time. I wanted to see your pictures of the Special Place, the place I'd been thinking about, near the lake. So, Pearl's computer be damned!, I drove home to my trusty little Chromebook, and clicked to Facebook, and saw the photos in all their beauty.

Now, I ask you to read with some compassion for my Guy-ness, because I am me, but I'm also just a Guy.

I had driven home, mission accomplished!, and I was looking at the photos, and they were beautiful, and.........then there's my friend again, Aurelien. Please don't kill me. It's just that, I have been thinking about that park, and especially the lake, as our special place. For a couple of weeks I had been thinking of it that way, really visualising it, and then there he is again. I know he is your friend, and I don't expect otherwise, but please, please bear with me. I am a Guy, and we Guys feel we have a radar for rivals. No doubt women feel the same about their own radar. I ask for just a moment that you remember back to when you posted the Pavanne For A Dead Princess by Ravel, and it took me a few days to understand who you were referring to, but when I did figure it out, I understood completely, even though she has been out of the picture for ages, and even though you were the one who got me to stop wasting energy on her. But it was still only natural for you to post that Pavanne. Feelings are feelings, and as we have said, all feelings are legitimate, because we feel them. Posting that piece signalled to me that you did not like Lillian - perfectly natural and understandable - and so I tried to stop mentioning her altogether, although I may have on one or two occasions since, perhaps for storytelling reasons or some non-personal detail. But it was natural for you to feel dislike, knowing what you know about her, and reading what you read in the old blogs. And she has been gone for ages, out of my life since before you were born. So, I only mention her for comparison now, on the subject of rivalry, even if she was never a rival to you. I only mention her because you indicated natural, negative feelings toward her, and so now I ask you to put yourself in my shoes.

I will admit, I am not Aurelien's biggest fan. I don't know him, but it's just a couple things. The first was way back, probably more than a year ago, when he first was sending out his FB photography page to potential fans and friends. I was not his FB friend, didn't know him, but had seen him post on your page. He sent me a solicitation for his photographic page, I accepted it. I "liked" it on FB. He was talented enough, no problem there. He called his page something like "Photography (the French spelling) du Autre Temps". That may not be exactly right, but it's close. So, I thought he was Alcest's photographer, their personal guy. So I was like, "cool"!, and I sent a quick message saying something to the effect, but I think it was a question, like "are you the photographer for Alcest"? I heard nothing back, so I just forgot about it, and it passed. Later, probably last summer, I would see him posting on your FB occasionally. Nothing obnoxious, just "likes" and a few comments. But it reminded me, "oh yeah, the Alcest photographer", and so I checked his FB, and all the Alcest info, and I could see he was not the Alcest photographer. He was using Neige's phrase for his own stuff. That rubbed me the wrong way, but just a little bit. Not very original, but then he was just some guy on FB who posted once in a while on your page, and so, he didn't really cross my mind much for a while.

Then fast forward to this past Spring. I had lived through Fall and part of a Winter in which I thought I had lost you. Elizabeth, you will only truly understand the day you meet me and see my eyes, but the feeling
I had inside, beginning with Bai Xu on New Year's Day, and continuing with Eric Whitacre "A Boy and A Girl", and culminating with Sam Cooke - realizing that you were not only back in my life, but that you loved me - can never be described in words, except to call it pure euphoric joy. To go from thinking I had lost you forever, to mutual love? As I've said before, you have no idea ! :)

So, it was maybe around late March or early April, just a few months ago, one day you had posted a song by a group I did not know, but it featured Neige on vocals, another of his many guest appearances. I listened, and then made an FB comment, something like "another great find"!, because you had also just previously turned me on to Insomnium. Well, a minute or so passed, maybe a few minutes, I don't recall but it wasn't long, and there was Aurelien with his own comment : "Haha! Secret revealed." Here is where my "Guy's Rival Radar" kicked in for the first time. I remembered his comment because I took it as a snide remark. I had given you the credit for the discovery, but he wanted me to know it was really his discovery; that it had preveously been a "secret". And so......"Haha", in his words. Again, I didn't think too much of it, and that's the honest truth. At the time, I hadn't even thought of the guy for months. But, I still got the feeling he was trying to get a dig in at me. So I thought,  "Oh, it's that photographer guy again, the guy I thought worked for Alcest". And I got the feeling he'd made a smart remark, in the way of "Elizabeth and I knew about this song before you, and that's because I told her". It was like he knew I was in love with you, so he wanted to get a little dig in.

That might sound really stupid to you, but remember I have asked you to bear with me through the perspective of my Guy's Rival Radar. My Radar works pretty good, because I had to use it many times before with Lillian. With her, things degenerated to the point where she invited rivalry, as I have said before, and I could always tell who my rival was, almost from the get go.

In this case, much is different. Most importantly, you aren't like Lillian. This is also FB, so a lot of guys who admire you and like you do so from a distance, and with that electronic wall in place. Most of the guys from the Alcest fan base just press "like" or make nice little comments and leave it at that. But even though it is "only" FB, you and I have seen how our feelings for each other are just as real as if we'd known and loved each other all our lives. So in our case, there is no "wall" at all, electronic or otherwise. I have read of others who have fallen in love at Facebook (and other sites) and gotten married, and please Lord, so may it be for us! But just as we can develop feelings, and even though most FB friends are nice, polite guys, there can always be one who can feel like a rival. And, that is how I feel about Aurelien. I am a guy, with Guy's Radar, and I can see how he feels about you. I mentioned it before, I know.

There are other guys who like you a lot, guys from other countries who hit "like" all the time, and that would be just as if you were famous with a big following. Perfectly normal, perfectly understandible. No Guy Radar involved. But with Aurelien, my radar went up, and it did back in the Spring when he made that little remark. Please don't kill me for being a Guy, but I had to deal with so much BS with Lillian, that I do notice the way in which other guys act around you. And he is the only one who gets my radar up.

Now for the "boy, it all seems so stupid" part. I must admit that, on the surface - being perfectly honest here - none of Aurelien's comments seem suggestive, or that he is "coming on" to you in any way. But though he once posted infrequently, he now turns up all the time. Fine, right? He is being seemingly polite, and enthusiastic, and after all it is Facebook; the point is to comment and converse.

But that's part of the problem; he can converse with you, I can't, because of our post-2012 conversation limitations. And, though he is certainly polite, he is in a subtle way leaving no doubt that he really likes you. Couple that with my own take that, at least as of last Spring, that he didn't like me (hence the smart remark), and there you have it, the reason that I am not his biggest fan. Then, add into the mix that I was thinking all week about being with you at Lake Superior, and then on Thursday you posted your second set of pictures, and because Pearl's computer didn't work I drove home to see them, only to find.............Aurelien.

So, that was the emotional mechanics of what took place, as dumb as they might sound. I am in no way asking you not to be his friend, or to stop or even slow down talking to him, because that really would be dumb. That's why I wanted to wait until all the "hurt feelings" part of this episode passed, which they did overnight, because had I written all of this with only those feelings as an influence, and without any analysis or rational thought (and humor) about those feelings, then this blog would have been truly irrational. I know it is your nature to be friendly, and conversational, and enthusiastic. Don't change a thing. One way to see my side, however, would be to imagine how you might feel if there was a girl you felt was a rival who was posting on my FB all the time, leaving subtle clues about her feelings. It might make you dumb to feel jealous, or it might make you feel justified, but either way, the feeling would still be present, and therefore legitimate, and would therefore need processing. And what better way to process feelings than to communicate them, am I right? So that's what I am doing, and I hope you aren't mad at me.

I wanted to wait a night to let my hurt feelings settle, feelings which developed out of a dream of being with you in a special place by the lake, then blossomed with more beautiful photographs of that place, then were frustrated by a faulty computer, then reinstated by a drive home, then frustrated again by...........a rival (?).

I know Aurelien is your friend. Please change nothing about that. I know you are not trying to instigate a rivalry, but I have that residue from the past, from you-know-who, and I guess I am still working on it. Aurelien may bug me a bit, but in the long run I am sure he's alright. I just wanted to explain to you the mechanics of what happened, and I hope you aren't mad at me.

I Love You, Elizabeth.  :):)