In your arms

September 18, 2023 - Maya's house

September 18, 2023 – Maya's house

By a strange and fortunate astral conjunction, today is not only my day off, as is very often the case on Mondays, but it is also the day off of Carina and some of her closest colleagues, so we thought we would invite them over for dinner and spend some time together, in fact uniting our close friendship groups a little more officially than usual. We chose my house as the gathering place since it is more common to all, and from my side, Andy, Vic and Stephanie will be there, while from Carina's side Jo and Amelia have been invited. The real truth is that I didn't decide anything at all, but it was a kind of conspiracy hatched behind my back by Carina together with Andy.

If I had the whole day off, Carina arrived at my house by lunchtime, having come off the night shift and rested a bit in her bed. The problem is that this gave me a lot of free time to think, which has been happening to me a lot lately, since I'm still laid up from my sprained ankle and only doing office work. My overthinking and my serenity, however, don't get along very well.

I really like the relationship that I have with Carina because I think it is very mature: we are very good together, we like to spend our free time together, because we really enjoy doing things together, traveling, visiting places, chatting, working out together, eating together, discovering new restaurants... at the same time, however, we both have a great respect for each other's space. Of course, it often happens that we sleep at each other's houses, partly because with our work shifts we don't always have the opportunity to see each other very regularly. However, it also happened that we were both free one evening, for example, but decided to spend it separately, perhaps seeing each other for dinner, but then each at our own home, perhaps with our respective friends or even alone. There was no underlying reason, there was no argument going on, in fact, we hardly ever quarreled, but simply there is the extreme and mutual desire to maintain our own individuality. Of course, I can't deny that waking up in the morning and finding her in bed with me is a divine blessing, but I don't want to rush things.

So far, so good. The negatives emerge when my thinking becomes too much and I read, often incorrectly, between the lines. We talk a lot, about everything, even about our feelings, our doubts and our thoughts, but I am sure Carina has questions that she keeps to herself. At least, that's how it happens for me: there are doubts that run over me from time to time and I can't bring myself to share them with Carina. However, this leads me to detach myself from her slowly, almost without me even realizing it.

The worst part, precisely, is when I read between the lines of her behaviors, voicing my own insecurities, and I can't find an objective match in the facts, so I start traveling with my imagination. This has been happening more and more in recent days when I see her distracted on the phone. I've tried to get to the core of my doubt, conning the question broadly, often asking her if there were any problems of any kind, not strictly related to me, if there was anything bothering her, but Carina always denies it. And this only magnifies the tangle of doubts and questions growing in my brain: why is she so distant sometimes? Why does she get so lost in the phone lately? Is she having problems at home in Italy? Is she hearing Luke again? Will she have met someone else?

The sum of all these unanswered questions go to create a further problem, when I begin to wonder why she so willingly accepts my moments of loneliness. Above all, I begin to wonder if it is normal for me to want these moments: there are moments, when I am together with Carina, when I am perfectly fine...in fact, I am so fine that it is not possible to describe it because they have not yet invented a scale of well-being that really contains my level of bliss while I am with her. Yet, even in these moments, I think about how things must be in order, I think that I don't like eating ice cream in bed that much because there is a risk of soiling the sheets, I think that Carina wearing my blue T-shirt that I used to sleep in back in the days of our relationship in Canada is damn sexy, but I also think about how much Carina had to go through my things to find it...is it normal for me to think about all these things and not simply enjoy the moment?