365 Days (Part 1) | ✓

20. Missed Connections

20. Missed Connections: If you go to Craigslist, there is a "Missed Connections" section where you can find some interesting story lines to inspire your writing.

Here's the one I found: Why do I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and still think about you? You never really loved me, but yet here I am another night, another ceiling and another thought. I just wish you would get out of my mind and my heart!

I don't even see the ceiling anymore. It could be painted blue or formed of bananas or nonexistent, and I wouldn't notice. This is because you occupy my thoughts. Your face is the image I see. I think about you so completely, every fiber in me concentrating on you so wholly, that it is you that my eyes stare at, as if you were real. You are real, but I'm not sure if the idea I have of you is real.

This is a repeating process. Every night, with nothing left to distract my attention, my brain inevitably drifts to you. Perhaps that is the wrong way to say it. It is not like you are a last thought, hidden behind others, and it is when I have exhausted those others that I can turn to you. No, you are persistent in my head. You force me to dwell on you, and I always do so with guilt. It is actually with relief that I turn in for bed, because it is then I allow myself unbridled freedom where you are concerned.

Sometimes I just picture you. I mentally trace over your features, so well known to me: your smile, with that one tooth turned just slightly. I love that imperfection. I visualize your eyes in all of your different moods. I imagine the lines of your face and study them.

Other times, I fantasize about you. Of them all, this is one of the most dangerous pursuits I dabble in. In my dreams, your behavior is not true to life. People don't dream about reality, though. I create dozens of scenarios involving you possessing powerful love for me, and usually you act in a way that the real you would laugh at. In fine, I imagine you as how I wish you would be, but if you were to be like that, I would not like you anymore.

When I am feeling masochistic, I review how we got in this situation -- or how I did, because you don't have feelings for me. I am the one who walked into the trap and was caught. You're still free.

I look back over our relationship and try to rationalize my feelings: "He is a nice man, and I respect him, that's all," "It is fine to be in love, it is nothing, and it will pass," "I am just being silly."

You cannot reason love. I discovered that too late. I was too busy trying to pretend it wasn't love when I should have been trying to prevent it. Now I have given my heart to a someone who doesn't want it, and -- what's more -- doesn't know he even has it.

I wish I had not. You don't love me, I know. This only brings pain. Yet even knowing how hopeless a happy ending is, I still find myself staring at the ceiling and thinking of you.