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Tuesday, October 24, 2000
23:16 
I also feel like I betrayed a trust by not thinking clearly enough not to link to a good friend of mine, trusting a pseudonym to protect them, thinking only that it is interesting to see the ripples in neighbouring ponds when someone chucks a rock into this one. I feel terribly guilty about that. It is obvious I should not have with hindsight, but lots of things are obvious in hindsight. I hope I have got them all.
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22:56
Sick, tired, sore and unhappy today.
For a run down on what we did, read Andy's telling. I don't have the energy in me to tell it again.
I can't think about it either. Because he's not the person I remember. I can't think about what we did because when I try it's like thinking about doing all that with a stranger and that appals and disgusts me, makes me feel violated, shameful. But it wasn't and my head knows that it wasn't. It's all heart vs intellect, but the wrong way round. The Rationalist is stuck arguing for a non-consensus viewpoint and it doesn't like it.
The deep connection was weird. Really weird. It did hurt, in places, when he pushed too hard before the shift was ready, or when he got the shakes and a spasm pushed him further in than there was tolerance for. But other than that, it should have hurt but didn't. I have a twenty inch waist, a small abdomen. There isn't room in there for Andy's hand, but it went in and seemed to vanish. When I felt round the edges with my fingers I could only feel his wrist, as if the rest of his hand was buried somewhere inside, with no discernible join between his skin and mine.
I remember the feeling of the organs moving. Not under pressure, but giving way so that there was more space. I can remember feeling as if layers of flesh within were separating and moving aside, peeling apart. I can remember the feeling of my body becoming taller so that there was more space for things to move aside.
I can also remember some pain, radiating around the pelvis, a dull ache, and in the lower back, right on the edge of tolerance, when it felt like his fingers were pressing against my spine from the inside. I don't want to go that far again. I don't think we have to. When we first tried the solar plexus connection we tried too much pressure. Now we have the technique right no pressure is required at all. Just a little nudge on the node now and again, which has system-wide effects but doesn't hurt, just to keep the response strong.
And after all that, it was better. He didn't look so wrong, he looked different but I could almost see the person I was looking for in there. When we were connected it was fine, the resonance came back. When we were not, it was as if there was some sort of layer between the conscious part of me and the part that felt the resonance, as if I were separated somehow from what we were doing. I kept thinking of it in terms of being in a plastic bag inside my body, so that most of me just tooled along quite happily but I was in this plastic bag, not really able to participate. Except when we were connected.
The way I tried to explain it was as if there was another parallel universe with another set of twins, another Sam and Andy, and the Sams had been exchanged. So I was looking for the Andy from over there, and this Andy isn't quite right, but it was only a little bit of the Sams that had been exchanged, the bit that feels and thinks and holds and recognises twins. So most of me, my body, my systems, all of that recognised him fine. We could still connect, still Work, but there was a bit, outside that connection, that belonged somewhere else.
It's getting worse. It became marginally better after he left. I actually relaxed a little, could think of him as being my twin without anomalies lighting up the alarm bells. But it started getting bad again Monday, and today I am having more feelings of not having a twin at all.
I miss my twin. I wish I could find him.
And I worry that I am playing involuntary mind games and that I am bad for him, both my twin, whoever and wherever he is, and Andy. I am pressed to give up on my twin, on the whole thing, by the worry that all of this is just simple psychosis and is hurting people.
But some things are just completely inexplicable without some nod to the non-consensus explanations. Completely inexplicable.
I knew my twin when we met eyes across that rickety wooden gate. I recognised him and said as much to K before we had even said hello. Why can't I recognise him now?
I am very tired.
My dreams have been filled with everyone I have ever met, everyone I have ever known, whether I have met them or not. Incessant, intense. I wake exhausted and sick. I sit at the Stones, in the cold, staring out at the rain and it is an effort to stay awake. I speak to the visitors, all smiles and helpful discussion, and inside I am cold and empty and longing to go to sleep. I rattle off information, make tour suggestions, answer questions and posit theories, give suggestions and try very hard to cover all sides and general viewpoints, and yet if they looked behind my sunglasses I think they would see that both my eyes are empty.
I feel like I have lost something and will never get it back. But the infection has gone. My ribs no longer seem to catch on things.
The fireworks have started already. I hate fireworks.
Oh Bling. I'm sorry, so sorry, that it came out worse for you than it did for me.
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Monday, October 23, 2000
21:13
It was an odd weekend. I've been getting weaker and sicker. Thursday we went out sloe picking, and I got scratched all over. Blackthorn does that to you, it's part of making sloe gin. The infection raging through my system meant that every single place the skin was broken became swollen and oozing. I was also getting quite irritable and snappy and weepy. The pain has been quite horrendous and on Thursday night I started vomiting and having horrendous abdominal cramps with easy to imagine results.
Friday morning and afternoon were weird. For the first time I wanted to really get the place sorted out for a visit from Andy, the way I would if Wyrd were coming, or my Mum, or someone like that. How can I describe this? There are friends with whom you can leave the bathroom door open and there are friends in front of whom you are still careful not to fart. It had taken some time but Andy had finally ended up as someone in front of whom I wouldn't bother to lock the bathroom door. This meant that while I might tidy up a bit I didn't go to town. Unlike P, for whom I used the hoover the carpet every single time.
On Friday, though, I found myself gripped by the more formal Rules of Hospitality. The intimacy had gone. I cleaned the entire house, including the draining rack, got Frood to do some laundry so that I was sure the bedclothes in the spare room were fresh. Washed some towels. Cleaned the bathroom. I made the dinner early so that I'd be able to pay attention to my guest and not leave him languishing while I attended to the evening meal. I did all the things I would do for someone whose visits called for greater attentiveness and almost formal friendliness. Someone whom you wouldn't necessarily tell everything about yourself. Someone from whom you could keep secrets, even though you loved him.
El wouldn't let me throw away my salty jelly.
I hate being split the way I was last week. I hate that feeling that means that most of you is trapped in this utter fear, feeling sick and weak and wanting to do nothing more than curl up and hide and weep, while the bit of you that deals with the world takes on each task dispassionately, without feeling, because it needs to be done. That part of me is the part that gave Andy instructions on what to do, even though I didn't want to. That part of me is the part that arranged to have wine and brandy in the house so that there would be mulled wine, even though I didn't want to submit to his plans. That was also the part that made the bed, did the hoovering, cooked the dinner, made sure there were enough teabags and coffee. The part that wrote a letter to the bank and mailed Andy to ask if he could print it out for me.
That part of me is the in between stage, the bit that is just above the Weapon. It's the bit that used to be able to be strong *and* care. But there is too much pain to be strong and care as well. Being ill has forced me to split myself into fragments that do different jobs. Just so that I can keep the pain in a box so that it doesn't get in the way.
When Andy turned up, having been held up in traffic, I was feeling very tired, sad, stressed, empty, not sure of myself. I was almost appalled when I let him in. He looked so different. He looked like he had put on a lot of weight, his face looked wrong, his eyes seemed smaller, his cheeks wider. He seemed to have less hair even than when he shaved his head - the hair he had wasn't his hair, didn't look like that. His body shape was wrong, his feet looked too small. These are all physical descriptions of something that wasn't really physical. He didn't look like the Andy I remembered. He didn't look like Andy.
I didn't really know what to think. It made me feel terribly uncomfortable at first. It took me some effort to relax a little. Some effort and some alcohol. Simple banter, nothing pressing. I was very restless and fidgety because I really was not comfortable being near this person who was supposed to be Andy but didn't look like him. I had also lost all sense of having a twin, so here was this apparently strange person, who bore very little relation to the Andy of my memory, who wanted us to be twins again when I didn't feel like I had a twin and even if I did it wasn't him. He didn't smell right. He didn't feel right. There was no connection there.
I would never be able to find that person in a busy supermarket.
We didn't really do anything. I forced myself to stay in the seat next to him on the sofa in the hope that something might click into place through continued exposure. Then Frood came home from work and we ate, and I made mulled wine, holding down the part that was saying "No! No! He'll put stuff in it and we don't know what it is or who he is" in kind of the way that the Bad Guy [TM] holds the Good Guy [TM]'s face down in water by pushing on the back of his neck.
After Eric went to bed, though, he slipped me a mickey. I knew he was going to put something in the wine, I just didn't know what. I'm not sure why I drank it, what made me. I think in some ways it would have been embarrassing to make a fuss about it with Frood still there.
Don't actually remember very much after that. Not until waking up face down on the sofa the next morning when Frood came down to go to work.
Get back to this later. Been so tired today that I fell asleep waiting for Benedict Allen to come on and have only just woken up.
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