It can all but break your heart In pieces

Staying back in your memory

Are the movies in the past

How you moved is all it takes

To sing a song of when I loved

The prettiest star

One day, though it might as well be someday

You and I will rise up all the way

All because of what you are

The prettiest star

These are various photos from subsequent trips to the place a person whom I mentioned in my last entry took me to. For many, many years, I revisited this place without them, looking for what I knew could not be found. Again, like some Brigadoon, I knew it wasn't there, but I just needed to see where it was. But I didn't take my friends here because I wanted to relive those moments with them just to insert someone else into that fantasy. There was magic there for me that existed outside of that, that I wanted to share with them. It wasn't like being one of those people who take every (different) date to the same spots over and over with no regard to who is in that role.

As aforementioned, this person is probably the only one who didn't hurt me the way that the others had done. I was frustrated by their stupidity and self-sabotage, but they lacked the guile and the overt selfishness and cruelty of the others. For years, I had told myself that it was just that the time was wrong, but now I understand that it was just wrong, and that that's okay. Outside of that instant connection, we were (and are, I am sure) two people who are vastly different and incompatible. I still hold the day we spent those 14 hours together one of the happiest days of my entire life. 

Ultimately, that person would self-sabotage their life and join a cult (I am not sure that they are still in), marrying some random person they knew for a couple of weeks off of the internet, who was another long-lost priestess in their weird bargain bin Sailor Moon narrative. I would become a figure in their weirdo little online comic (which has since seen itself out of the backdoor of the internet), the long lost moon princess star girl they could never reach. But I wasn't lost or unreachable; all they would have had to do was to call me.

When I say that it had been magic when it had been magic, I mean that with all of my heart--that it had been magic.

The first time we had met, we said "I love you" in unison instead of hello, to both of our surprise and the laughter of our friends.

And the 14 hour day, which remains one of the most magical of all, was just one magic moment after the other and seemed to go on forever.  When I said, "let's go to the playground!" they didn't even blink. When they said, "do you want to get a coffee?" and then whisking me away on a night time adventure through the haunted backroads of Marin, and I didn't even blink.

Then Camelot crumbled.

Complicated people with complicated emotions are going to make complicated mistakes, and I include myself in that. Unlike other complicated people with complicated emotions making complicated mistakes, there was no malice in this person's actions. There was no cruelty, there was no selfishness. It was clumsy misguidance met with my inflexibility. I am accommodating and understanding until I am not, until close my heart off, until I become cold, detached, and immovable. I very vividly remember the last day that we spoke, which ended in my screaming at them in frustration and them crying. It didn't matter to me, because I didn't believe in love anyway. I just remember the tears and the disbelief, how they refused to believe they lived in a world where someone like me could not be loved.

They promised to write me letters, and those letters never came. I admit that I did wait for them longer than I should have. But the letters never came.

I still introduce friends to the places they showed me. I know, like Brigadoon, it's not there, and maybe it never was. I take them there because someone once cared about me enough to introduce me to somewhere they loved. I haven't been there in years, and maybe someday soon I will return. Whatever magic they know exists in this place, they also see it in me, and every fresh revisit is a new discovery.

I hope wherever this person is, that they are happy. As long as it's as far away from me as possible. ✨