short-story fiction sawtooth furry
Brief outline
- The slow formation of a crush
- Falling for anyone who’s the slightest bit nice to you
- Intolerable limerence
- Limerence as unwanted emotional attraction
- pining
- dreaming about just being close, casual affection, etc
- Not wanting to talk about it b/c afraid of coercion
- Just try to be the best person you can be for them
- Except that just makes it all the more intense
- Crisis point and denouement
- Bounce off each other at some point and the limerence starts to fade
- Picture what would have happened had they gotten together.
Told in the form of journal entries after long online conversations, complete with snippets
Characters
- Dee
- Coyote guy
- Psychology student
- Has the terminology and some of the self awareness, but not enough
- Raised very religious
- Has a crush on…
- Kay
- Coyote gal
- Music student at UI Boise
- Transferred after a year, met in the last few weeks of shared class
- Not religious, and the thing that they bounce off each other on down the line is her refusal to not demonize religion
Story
I wrap emotions in the cool embrace of jargon to soften sharp edges, take the sting out of ones I feel to keenly. It’s why I got into this field. It’s why I studied what I did. Of course I care for my patients, and of course I live what I do, but my reason for being here, for being a psychologist, is a simple insatiable need to explain away my emotions.
I’ve talked about it with my therapist at length - we all have them, therapist-therapists, and you should never trust a therapist who does not. We talk about my need to hide behind words as a way of reducing my vulnerability. They become armor, when taken in this sense.
There’s a tension, then, between these two explanations: to put it the way I did at the beginning is to allow words to be a useful tool to define the edges of my emotions and perhaps make them easier to digest and understand in the process.
To here Jeremy’s suggestion, though, my words are a means by which I might reduce my responsibility to actually feel the emotions I try to define.
Thus me, sitting here on my lunch break, writing journal entries on my phone.