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Relatively little happened for the rest of our visit, but we did rather front-load our plans. There was the movie, the concert, then I did my hike, and after that, we spent the rest of the visit just kind of...hanging out.

We spent a lot of time reading together. Reading and listening to music. Kay spent a morning putting together a playlist of songs that she knew that we both liked, and we listened our way through that as each of us skimmed through our books --- at least, I skimmed through mine. Kay didn't seem keen on reading through her newly-purchased scores while other music was playing, and I certainly don't begrudge her that. Instead, she raced through a few novels that she had pulled from her bedside table.

We talked, too, of course. Once we had fallen back into the rhythm of being around each other, and once that initial bump of the concert was over, we opened up more. I spent a good amount of time talking to her about a lot of my memories surrounding St John's, and she talked about growing up with parents that were largely perplexed by her and who largely perplexed her in turn.

She freely admitted that she did not have the slightest clue about where I was coming from when it came to the topic of my discernment, and that to an extent, she had no desire to learn, but that she was still pleased to hear me talk through it, just as I promised her that I was pleased to listen to her talk through her music.

I mostly managed to keep my yap shut when she talked about her parents and youth. Something about growing up autistic with autistic parents was outside of my realm of experience, and the desire to dig deeper into that was strong, but she seemed to need to speak her thoughts out loud more than she needed the process of sharing.

It made sense to me, too. After all, that's what I've been doing to a greater or lesser extent with this journaling experiment, and I am certainly getting plenty out of simply stating aloud my memories of and thoughts on discernment.

Leaving her behind was sad, of course. I wished that I could spend more time with her even just doing nothing, just being normal together, despite also being glad that I was heading home. Sad, yes, but not in the way that I expected, I think.

I will miss her, that goes without saying, and I wish that I had more time to be close to her, but I was was also distraught due to the mess that my emotions were left in after we said goodbye.

Nothing changed between us.

Nothing changed, and I am struggling with the competing thoughts of:

* Of *course* nothing changed. We were friends going into this, we were friends during the visit, and we are friends now that it's over; and
* I wish that I had had the courage to tell her, such that things might have had the possibility of changing.

I am a coward.

We have such a solid basis for our friendship. We share hobbies, our communication styles line up almost perfectly, and we are comfortable in our silences together. We even share tastes in food[^lentfood], for heaven's sake.

But I'm a coward. I wanted this to be an incredibly meaningful and emotionally fulfilling visit. I wanted to have long, heartfelt conversations about how I felt and I wanted to understand her better than I did before. I wanted to see if there was the possibility for something more.

I am a coward and I am greedy and I am, I'm realizing, a narcissist, and that is why I'm distraught.

I will miss her.

I will miss her scent, even though it still clings to me after that last hug at the bus stop.

I will miss her voice, though I promised to call her once I made it back to my place in one piece.

I will miss her wit and her sarcasm and her intellect, though we will doubtless continue to talk every day.

I'm sad to be leaving her behind, but beyond that, I am sad to see what I have become, what limerence has made me. I am sad that I have been split in half. I am sad that I am less of an entire being when I think of her, and I am sad that I can't help but think of her. I am sad that some part of me has decided that she is just a limerent object rather than a friend, that I am the subject, and that even if the feelings I have for her *were* real --- for now I'm sure that they aren't --- I am too much of a coward to actually do anything about it.

Limerence, I have read, fades when feelings are either reciprocated or rebuffed, and yet neither happened, so I am back to hoping against hope that they simply fade with time. I don't want them, these feelings. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to be crying while writing about a girl on a steno pad in an uncomfortable bus seat.

[^lentfood]: So long as it isn't lent, of course. She requires meat with every meal, she joked at one point, and I laughed, though I am not sure how much innuendo was behind that comment. Innuendo! Look at you, Dee, all grown up, thinking about innuendo.
