Journal of Timothy Porrell

Thursday

She’s sleeping. Buck is too, I guess. It’s hard to tell with him, these days. Sometimes I think he’s sleepwalking all the time.

I covered the windows with cardboard in his room. He spends most of his time staring at the arm lamp. The birds have stopped smacking into the windows.

I don’t know what to do, or how I really feel, about this woman. Things have been so very strange lately. Buck went missing. I had those encounters with Barbed online. We found Buck. I’ve met Lily. Then Barbed seemingly tracks me down, which is just a little bit stalkerish… and then she seemed to freak out when I said Lily’s name. What the hell is going on?

But Lily is compelling. And that’s such an odd feeling. She’s older than me. A lot. Maybe not a huge amount, I suppose. But she’s older, and I don’t know what to do with that. She’s got this interesting color to her hair. And she’s so pale. The freckles across her nose make me laugh inside. The shape of her nose, and how it rounds and merges into her face… something makes me want to keep looking even when it’s bordering on rude staring. And she’s so damn smart. I can just listen to her… her voice carries the knowledge, the information, so well.

She makes my teeth ache.

But she’s a professor at a college two states away. It’s ludicrous to even think that I might even have a chance to spend time or be with her or anything. She’s been married, too, I think. Not anymore. No ring. I thought to look. After that thing with the blonde girls, I’ve learned that lesson well. I guess that doesn’t mean anything, either, really. But she hasn’t mentioned a husband or a boyfriend yet. Still, she’s been around and knows a lot more than me. I don’t buy it that age doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the long run, but at some point there has to be something to the fact that a person has had more experiences than me.

Maybe I can learn from her. Obviously I can. Her job, her career, is teaching. But she’s not a teacher all the time. She points things out a lot, but she listens, too. She asks me questions. I’m glad for that. She seems to treat me like a person, not just some undergrad. And she pays attention with I explain things. It’s like she understands that I might know something she doesn’t know. And that’s refreshing.

But I have to ask her about this Barbed thing. It was so strange when she called… and my cell phone, at that. That’s totally weird. It’s hard to find those numbers. Barbed seemed as shocked to hear Lily as I was to hear Barbed. I don’t know what to do with that. And if I ask Lily about it, she’ll maybe be confused, or want to know how I know this Barbed person, and explaining the whole role-playing thing is not something I’m looking forward to. Especially the cyber thing.

The most frustrating thing is that I can usually find some way to say what I mean or what I need to get across. I feel good about that. It’s why I’m an English major, I think. And now, I have someone who is with it and sharp enough to understand and follow, and who seems to be patient and kind enough to really listen and let me speak. But I can’t figure out how to say these things to her. I can’t work out a good way to approach her about it, and make it make sense.

Drives me so crazy. Dammit.