Alive

I feel most alive with the new friendship.  More than alive, passionately, heatedly, loss-of-appetite alive.  I know reality is not the cause, but it's a conduit for feelings that I must have been craving for months or years.  It lets me daydream.  Infatuation phase--and I just want to enjoy it.  

The contrast with relationship/marriage reality is so stark that it feels even more fresh and quenching.  I think I was looking for something to channel emotions that I've missed.  Full, deep, emotions.  Not shared, I hope, actually, but just as I want to imagine them without reality getting in the way.  

I imagine telling M. about an amusing anecdote from the day and I imagine his response would be something along the lines of calling me unprofessional or narcissistic or self-centered.  The same story he once would have found endearing.  

(Anecdote:  I have a student with me for the quarter and today was her last day.  A long-time patient had  come in to follow up on weight-loss medication.  He's an easy going and fairly transparent 60-ish year old man who loves nothing more than fishing from the pier.  I'd been trying to encourage my students to take the patient history over the course of the quarter, and today we'd ran through the schedule to decide which visits would be appropriate for her to try.  This patient was one of them.  

Her previous attempts, I felt like I'd taken over too early as the patients habitually turn to me or look at me for reassurance and I habitually give non-verbal feedback.  I warned him teasingly that I'd been doing this all day and he joked that it might be because I liked to be the center of attention.  I told him that my husband would absolutely agree with him.  

We joshed back and forth a bit more about the treatment that I proposed for him making it so he wouldn't really enjoy etoh as much and he told me that would be no fun.  In the midst of this we got the business of the appt done and a plan in place that we all felt was promising for him. Then he tells me that he used a q-tip that morning and that when he took it out of his ear, the fuzzy part was missing and could I check his ear also.  My student had also been practicing ear exams so I had her look in. She confirmed said fuzzy foreign body.  After we fished the small strung out puff out of his ear, I gave him my standard recommendation that q-tips are not actually good to use in ears for reasons such as presently presented and that pushing too deep could cause ear-drum damage.  He retorted that his mother told him to use a q-tip and mineral oil in the ear to cure all auditory ailments.  "Well,  who are you going to believe--me or your mother?," I countered quickly.  "Ohhhh!" 

I left to get the paperwork summarizing our visit to give to him and my student lingered in the room to chat.  After he'd left, she told me that he related how he first became my patient years ago.  Apparently I told him that I was cuter than his previous doctor.  Hmmm, now that I've written it maybe it is a little conceited.  How much of a skew does intention give things?  Better think on that one.  I was partially trying to make him feel more comfortable about something he felt, I think, little foolish having to ask us about.  And I was partially just bored and trying to keep myself entertained.  

I'd been so sassy during the visit before he left that I even ended up actually checking in with him at the end, "Sorry if I was too sassy today! I thought you'd be able to roll with it.  Are you okay?"  "No, no, I like it.  That's why I stick with you.")

Now that I've told you, dear electronic diary, I might not need to tell anyone else.  

I can picture if I did, though, responses from friends or polite acquaintances would vary from amusement to disbelief and at the far end of the spectrum would be my husband's cloaked critical response that I would take personally despite my best efforts to ignore. And the one that he would try to convince me was the most honest and accurate response because he knows all my dark mal-intents best,  The least kind of them all.  And the one that even thinking about now breaks my heart a little bit.  He honestly seems to think very little of me lately.  It feels like he's curled up into a shell and walled me out.  We are both so hurt by the other that everything is twisted and sensitive and painfully raw.  

And so I bathe in the fantasies of something fresh and light and thoughtful in that first blush of