I got a message this morning from A. He's been away in Cornwall with his wife the dance instructor and their son, also called A. He's desperate to speak to me and can I please be online tonight.

So here I sit.

A and I have never hugged, never touched. We met 10 years ago online. I was smitten but A had a girlfriend. Eventually he realised the error of his ways and chose me. I thought I loved him too.

A introduced me to B, a mate of his who wanted to travel to Canada. He was 18, I was 19. He came to stay with my parents and we fell desperately in love. But that's another (tragic)story I'll get to eventually.

A and I have taken years to get back to where we are today. Now I'm wondering where we are exactly! Let's see...

It all started last May. My memory's not so good. Luckily, I had bookmarked his blog:

See it like a time machine
So, I had an old flame IM me out of the blue a few days ago. This has led to me not having a shower for a few days and re-evaluating my thoughts on pasts loves.

It was a little strange, we exchanged pleasantries and then I ran off because I had things to do. Will you be around?? I was asked. Yes, I replied. Not really knowing where I'd be going this time round.

But heres the catch. I've never met this woman. Its one of those crazy stories of love on the net that we can all quite happily mock. I loved this girl. Well, not immediately. But she insisted, and eventually my mind switched to her way of thinking. It all went horribly wrong from that point on.

So last Monday I sat down at my computer to get some work done when she came online. We ended up chatting until 2:30am. It was quite a rush - and I'm not quite sure why. She told me that she couldn't remember all of the events that surrounded our relationship (and the subsequent break-up that went with it). There were gaps she needed to have filled in. Of course, I was the fountain of knowledge for memory!

It was quite hard to open up some of these old wounds, even though so much has changed since our initial encounters. We have both moved on. We're both married. We both have a son. We both live in England. Yet she felt in need of some therapy. Maybe I do, too. That's the beauty of the mind - you think you know yourself, yet I am personally capable of hurting people who are close to me by dropping hurtful remarks into innocent conversations and allowing them to fester. I know that I do this to two people at least. Both are women of whom I've had a relationship in the past.

We covered our past feelings for one another. I was the first person she ever loved, she said. She complained that she always had to prise information out of me. She explained that she couldn't believe I loved her, because she had to work on me to make me feel that way.

I admit, she was persistent. Still - 7 or 8 years on and I still have difficulty being straight with her. Nevertheless, I confessed my sins. I could never get out of my head the moment that she told me over the phone that she'd fallen for the guy at work who was over there on his shag-a-thon (I think that's what he called it). At the time - knowing that he'd drop in on her while on his rounds - there was an inevitability to what was going to happen. Every time I think about it I also think about the lyric from Marillion's The Space. For about a week leading up to that moment I knew what was going to happen to me. I remember holding the phone in my hand and it caused me pain that I hadn't felt in a while - so I hung-up. She didn't call back and I ex-communicated myself from them. I changed my email address, my online name. Everything I could think of (that didn't cost money).

So, that's how my relationship is epitomized with her. And I told her. A phone burning in my hands.

She told me to stop it.

So, I'm moving on (again). I felt quite buzzed about the whole thing. Then I chatted to her again late the next day. The buzz gradually faded and I became defensive again. I was a jerk. She was trying to talk about things that mattered, and I couldn't deal with it.

I remember Phill chatting to me during his last visit. There was a cross-examination in a cafe. Was I really happy? Where is the passion? Do I actually feel anything? You know that you have a good friend when he tries to make you question your marriage, family and place in life. Still, I found opening up to a close friend equally difficult - but I was much less of a jerk.

Still, I think I passed. I love my life. Sure, I work hard. Harder than most. And sometimes I get in a rut, or feel down. Then there are evenings I spend chatting with my wife. Afternoons that I play with my son. Everything is great. I find myself feeling emotions through others rather than in myself. If I can make people happy, I can be happy. Sometimes I've been told I'm too generous - but the end result is actually quite selfish.

So we've moved on in two ways now. In life, we've found happiness. In our online relationship (we've still never met in fear of space/time collapsing if we do), we've grown and moved away from those young people who couldn't quite get it right. She still has trouble extracting information from me. This evening I tried to explain why I'm sometimes hurtful and defensive. I can't understand it myself. Maybe subconsciously a mechanism for feeling too much for someone who isn't in my immediate family? Maybe guilty for still having some feelings for past loves? Who knows.

Still, too much internet chat mean that I haven?t had a shower for a few days. That shows that I've been online far too much!

If I can get over my own personal emotional problems - then life can only get better. I'm sure I'll be aiming for that until I die - but as goals go, it's the journey and relationships that make it worthwhile. If you think you've succeeded, then you're probably missed the point.

In that respect, all of the trudging up the past could only have been a benefit to me. I thank that I have recently forgotten that there's always room to improve myself, something I've neglected recently.

It's time to change that - time to take a shower.

Tags: IM, Internet, Love, Marillion

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Life.

How come when I cut and pasted this from his website all the ' turned into ?'s ???

Anyway, in editing it I was forced to read it again and even though it's more than a year old it's making me feel very guilty about the way I behaved last summer.

But to be fair I was a girl desperate to fall out of love, with more than one man.