Field Trips

On my trip to Idaho, I noticed the feeling that there was some objective missing or that I was missing out on something big and girl-related, being out here alone like this. 

I was thinking about school field trips. The way I felt on those trips as a teenager, hours away on weekend-long journeys or pretty much any time I was more than a couple hours away from my home without my parents. 

And I realized that on just about every single one of those trips, age 12 to 18, I was mentally preoccupied, maybe even obsessed, with some girl, some fantasy where the change of scenery would inspire a change of heart or at least some kind of change in my willingness to articulate my feelings.

Nobody ever taught me How to Get Bitches. Nobody ever sat me down and told me the truth and justified it until I believed it. 

And I was too pathetic to even try, so my feelings only manifested in elaborate mental fantasies which never made their way anywhere near words on a page because I was too afraid to even write them down for myself. Because then someone might read them, and then they would know. And they can never, never know. 

These fantasies were never sexual, even as I got older. I yearned for the Disney Channel type of love: sexless, intimate friendship. Where you eventually kiss then an audience screams OOOOOOOOOOOH in the background and everything is suddenly different now.

Things changed in a pretty extreme way for me, as you may have read, but on my trip I felt that nagging feeling and realized that it was my younger self yearning for some hypothetical girl to meet while I’m away from home. But I don't want that any more, especially in light of the fact that I now have a girlfriend who I love, but the habit resonates like the urge to eat breakfast.