more distancing, less connecting… equals hard hearted man

the world thinks i am a well socialized being because i interact with so many people via the internets. maybe this is true. i feel a strange sense of non-loneliness benefitted by these invisible communications with people i don’t really know. i’ve had some really tremendous exchanges of ideas, emotions and sharing life events/stories with many people on the webs. something i would have been hard pressed to facilitate by normal modes of communication 15 years ago.

i have never met in person, though, one of these people from the webs that i have made even a short lived connection with. i have met people (women) via the webs that i have worked my photography with, but there is no heart connection with these people, other than that formed for the purpose of artist & model mingling energies together to create art. all of these women leave me with images of art to reflect upon, but their true, earthly personages fade into the mists of memory…

i like to think that they are friends. and that they’ll think of me as a friend. but in essence we are strangers that bumped into each other on a train. sat next to each other for a few hours, shared some ideas, a conversation, maybe created an imaginary story together of which memories and images will linger in our minds, but the train reaches a destination and the strange woman gets off to go home to her family.

i’ve spent a little bit of time, closer, personal time in the association of a couple of different women over the past 10 years. getting to know each other kind of time. not just time to walk around a cemetery to take photographs. i met the both of them in photography classes at the college, nearly three years ago when i last attended there.

one of the women i had a very strong interest in. she was smart, beautiful, talented and wanted to travel. but she was in a state of emotional collapse because she was breaking up with her husband. i don’t think i was the rebound guy, but i kind of felt like it. i never expressed any signs of romantic interest. what i enjoyed about spending time with her doing was being able to joke around, take pictures together, and talk about our pasts without there being an itinerary. what caused difficulty for me was her inability to responsibly communicate her intentions. she would disappear for weeks with no word of what she was doing or where she had gone to. normally i am ok with allowing someone to have this sort of space, but she had developed an emotional attachment to me because she was depressed from her breakup with her husband. and she spoke of suicidal ideations. so it was only proper for me to worry when she would go away on these silent deep runs, alone. i took it personally, and selfishly/childishly reacted by doing the same thing to her. she took it wrongly and told me that she couldn’t be friends with me because i was not trustworthy enough for her to depend on in potential times of need.

it’s been over three months since i last contacted her and i have no intent or desire of giving her a second chance. there was another element of conflict in this contact and that is of class. i am a poor, Pabst-drinking slob of a fella and she is used to dining in 4-star restaurants. i could tell when she looked at me that she shuddered inside at my poor-man character. it is an issue that i dealt with in the last relationship i had over 12 years ago. okay, i really had no original intent of going into this much detail about that when i started this entry.

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what i really wanted to talk about was what happened just last night. another woman friend, an artist, a photographer and model that i met three years ago in photography class has told me for the second time in six months that she cannot “be friendly” with me because of suspicions and jealousies i stir up in her boyfriends. the suspicions are based on the fact that i am old enough to be this young woman’s father. the boyfriends don’t think it is normal for a young woman to hang out with an older man. i won’t venture to imagine what else goes through these young men’s minds when they become jealous of her spending time with me, but their feelings are strong enough that they have made my young friend feel that she needs to take these drastic steps.

and i do not want to cause waves in her life. all i desire to do with her is to work in the field of art that we both enjoy so much. to do photography together. there was a short time recently when she was between boyfriends and she and i were allowed a few weeks to communicate and do some work together, and it was a really good experience.

alas, i now return to my solo role as the lone man artist. i still have access to models to work with and will continue to work on my project with them. but i have no options in site for spending personal time with another artistic creature. if i could go back to the college i would probably be able to connect with someone again. but due to my wavering health and weak financial status, enrolling in the college seems like an impossibility.

i suppose the truth of the matter is that my heart IS broken. i’m manning up though and am just going to call it a hardening of the heart.