Emotional infidelity
It wasn't until someone pointed out how noticeable it was, that I realized how frequently I reach for the reliable (if a bit inconvenient) strategy of just looking down while walking when in occupied areas. The sole imperfection is that I (occasionally, whether through an instinct for physical safety, or an inquisitive itch I cannot help but scratch) have to look up.
As has been peculiarly consistent (I am extremely inconsistent in productive matters), I didn't sleep yesterday (the night before a day of travel) and am now feeling all the worse for it. My hands are really cold and my skin is crawling from loneliness.
A couple of years ago (I couldn't tell you the exact year, all 4 of these years in college resist separation with how the days interleave and melt together into noisy gray sludge), I was on a flight sitting on an aisle seat on the right column, much like the one I am on right now (except for the fact that this one isn't in the first row). There was a (cute) girl around my age sitting on the seat in the middle, with the window seat being empty. It's a bit difficult to explain why I get so internally disoriented in commonplace situations like these (forced proximity to females) despite the ability to rationally understand all the reasons why there's no reason to. This state of panic/paralysis is restricted to the period of active exposure, and I very quickly settle back into a sane internal state once I'm alone again (with this regained clarity being accompanied by embarrassment at my fickle sense of self). This "internal disorientation", in practice, looks like a couple of things: (a) my mind racing, extrapolating, and engaging in generally delusional thinking (b) being hyper-conscious of my presentation, voice and mannerisms (often countered by just looking down).
At this point of time, I anticipate the journey being rather uncomfortable unless the girl moved to the window seat like I expected her to. She ends up not doing so, and worse yet, falls asleep with her head almost resting on my shoulder (and my nose being violated by the wonderful scent of her hair). Naturally, I try to awkwardly extricate myself from the situation, but this is hard as I'm restrained by my seat belt. I move as far within my seat as I can, but this isn't far enough to free myself from the sensation of her gentle exhalations against my skin. The thought of nudging her awake crosses my mind, and while it would obviously be the most rational thing to do, I'm far too terrified to do anything but play dead like prey in the presence of a predator. Tens of restless, breathless minutes pass, and she eventually wakes up (and unbelievably, doesn't do the unnamed horrible things my frayed mind expected her to). My relief is short-lived, as she lies down on the two seats she has access to, and goes right back to sleep. Once again, her head is pushing into my leg with some of her hair spilling over into my lap. From the point-of-view of an external observer, the next 2 hours could probably be compressed into a static image without much loss - me in my seat with an expression of vague discomfort, and her just laying there sleeping without a care in the world and a delicate, vulnerable expression on her face. The lack of loss in the compression here mostly results from me not betraying my tumultuous internal states to the external world through expected means like my facial expressions.
Occasionally, my eyes find themselves resting upon the grotesquely beautiful face of the sleeping Medusa. The odd, triangular hunk of flesh we call the nose; the gentle arcs of hair framing the (probably expressive when open) eyes; a solitary blemish on her left cheek, adding even the cliche "endearing imperfection" to her otherwise flawless skin; full, reddish-pink, moist sacs of blood vessels undulating with her breath. I struggle to reconcile the fact that there's a living, breathing, staggeringly complex mass of flesh beside me, with whatever (dysfunctional) cognitive machinery pleads for a reconciliation with such a banal event. One would carelessly reach for the descriptor "voyeuristic" here, but the strangeness, the repulsive novelty of the sight made it something closer in spirit to observing a primal, "dirty" (as biological organisms definitionally are), and fascinating specimen at a zoo. I could of course see the structural similarities between our (human) faces, but I've never experienced the sight of my own face in a mirror with such terror. Perhaps this is explained by desensitization to my face in particular. Or perhaps the desensitization extends to 2d depictions of humans (my appearance in a mirror is far closer to a 2d photo than the unpleasant experience visited upon an observer in my presence). The latter is supported by the fact that the sight of females isn't as overwhelming in digital media.
There are, as there always are, the loud and unceasing alarms that ring with the paralyzing cries of "what should I do?", "why won't she move?", "would waking her up be weird?" and a variety of questions that all stem from confusion, fear, and excitement (in the thermodynamic sense, lacking positive connotations); But as, despite the hypersensitization, I begin to grow more used to this strange and fantastical scenario, there also appear a pair of competing tendencies that periodically take hold of me for a few moments before relinquishing said hold for one another - (a) A sort of warmth within me that is essentially identical to the "intimacy" that fiction like visual novel stimulates within one. The entire situation (the context, and the visuals presented to me for 3 hours) can after all be seen as just an extremely (temporally) stretched, extraordinarily sensorily rich (as 3d reality tends to be) still from a VN with a girl cozily sleeping next to you (b) An inexplicable guilt at implicitly using her sleeping form to derive (a) (which is a bit hard to justify in retrospect as I did move as far away from her as I could, and she woke up multiple times, with clear awareness of her position and the contact).
Let alone the kind of desperate sensory recall that I sometimes subject myself to, even passive recollection fills me with a warmth that feels "innocent" for but a moment, before being painted in a guilt-ridden and nauseously perverse light.
It's probably the "closest" I've ever felt to a girl.