Talk is Skype – or what does it all mean?
Why do you speak to me Oleg? I cannot figure it out….. we’ve been speaking for 4 months every Saturday or Sunday for 2 hours and now I wonder why we do it? I’ve continued to speak to you because I had wonderful visions of us being together… somehow, somewhere, be it here or in the Ukraine. It seems sometimes we get close, even admitting to each other that we’ve thought about being together; you saying only language and country keeps us from doing that, but we both know that’s not a real reason to not be together. You know I would move to Odessa in a heartbeat to be with you, or if you wished you could move here to be with me…. Why not?! I thought last week when I said I’d been offered a permanent position at work and my lodger was moving out and I wouldn’t get another but would be happy to be alone instead and you seemed to light up, jumping at the chance to see the garden and telling me you were going to emigrate to the UK!! But it’s all talk with you Oleg…. Why don’t you really open up and tell me what’s going on in your mind, or better still ask me why I talk to you and what I feel about you…. You’re a psychotherapist; I have this expectation that you should be transparent and strong in your decisions, but all I feel is toyed with…. One week you talk about being here and the next week you have a commission from Uni and you’re unable to leave the country for a few months…… and when I tell you I want to come there for a week to see you and to see Odessa you say you will think about it, but you never bring up the subject again? When I ask you if it would be easier if we stopped talking –you won’t hear off it, you always say “we have so much to talk about, let’s not stop speaking”. I don’t understand it Oleg… I feel a desire between us, I feel a curiosity about each other’s lives, I know I am keenly attracted to you, and I know that I feel something akin to love for you as a person… I think about you every moment of every day, but I feel trapped in my thoughts and horribly frustrated because I can’t truly experience life with you.
Why do I call you every weekend, why do you arrange a time and date to speak every weekend? What do I get out of this? What do you get out of this? It can’t be normal that a man and a woman with such good feeling towards each other and some attraction never ‘really’ talk about their relationship? Today, I could hardly concentrate, I lied when I told you I was tired and that was why I was distractedly playing with my hair…… well it wasn’t that Oleg, I was suffering some kind of shell shock because again you had changed track, from emigrating to the UK, to having to stay in Odessa to complete this project for the Uni. And then my mind goes back to all that you have said since we started talking in mid-February; that for the next half a year or so you want to be alone and you want to finish teaching at the Uni and then take some time off to travel. And I cannot find a lie in your words……. But I also can’t find a reason within them for our continued Skyping. I can’t call it a friendship, because you never refer to it as such and I am not in therapy with you, so it isn’t that…. It is some odd sort of courtship… or so it feels. It never feels one side, nor does it ever feel anything less than magical when I speak with you, even when I feel sorely disappointed by the things you say, I never loose sight of the fact that I’m living my perfect dream… connecting with a Soviet Man.
Twice you’ve told me I’m the only person you speak with outside of your colleagues and family and that makes me feel so special, but then I feel insecure that maybe we don’t speak intimately enough as you’re used to such private and intimate conversations with your clients and we aren’t going deep here at all, though last time you said we speak about our private emotions together so maybe you don’t need to make other friends. Am I supposed to respond to that by telling you that you are the only person I speak with and that you have absolute ownership of me? Do you tell me such things in the hope that I will share with you my feelings about you? I don’t know how these things really work. For me I can’t open up fully until you are here besides me in the flesh….. until I can touch you and look deep into your eyes, I don’t think I could tell you how much I care for you when 2,000 miles separates us.
I think about every aspect of our connection and wonder what it is that keeps you wanting more? Perhaps it is simply because it follows the natural pattern of psychotherapy and like your clients we speak weekly and maybe this feels enough like work for you to feel safe and also allows you to dream about a life abroad too? I feel myself disassociating with my own feelings… how can I speak intimately with you, whilst holding back the fact that I am so deeply enthralled with you that I live my life in a stupor just dreaming about being with you from Monday to Sunday….. Only to find that when we actually speak I am unable to admit to my burgeoning feelings? I dearly wish you would open up and be honest with me, because I really don’t understand what we are doing….. At first it was exciting and exhilarating making a friend in the Ukraine – something I’ve always fantasised about and then we got a little deeper, a little closer, more honest…… but like two tides meeting we just don’t seem able to merge, we each rub against each other’s edge continuously together but separate?
How do you see me?
I feel an overwhelming need to bring this relationship to a
conclusion. I want to experience you in the flesh. I want to touch you, hold you, taste you, smell you…. I want to care for you, love you, make you laugh, touch your heart and see your vulnerabilities. I want to support you, study you, watch you. God knows I even want to be you! But if I can’t do those things then I want to know what to do with all of these feelings? What use are you to me as a weekly Skype? How does that enrich my life going forward? How would I feel if you fell in love and moved on and forgot about me, started missing calls or cancelling? I am stuck in glue – I love you, but I can’t have you. I don’t want to and can’t bring myself to ‘cheat’ on you, so I am stuck feeling all these emotions with no one to really share them with. It makes me feel very lonely. Why can’t you love me back and take a chance and come here and see how much of a good wife I want to be for you? We share the same dream even, of living by an ocean with no neighbours in a hot country. We could do this Oleg, we could have that life…… A tiny isolated house on the edge of a sea. Don’t you see that we could achieve that? I feel like if I had you by my side I could agree to anything you wanted.
Time is ticking and already I am older than when we first spoke, I really don’t want to wait any longer, let’s be together and see how it goes Oleg, please? I love you.
xx
