Stereotypes Of Fermina

 

Because I miss persons, lack who I imagined myself to be in their orbit, or more inherently have this mental nagging void when not contemplating them because my mind has evolved along wayward paths distancing exponentially with the wander of time, I leave for myself faux breadcrumbs upon which I know I’ll stumble, opportunities for associations which do not actually exist, but whose nature or vague borders allow my lips’ corners to indent towards squinted, wrinkling eyes to drink from the drips of sorta quenches in this otherwise oasis-less valley I’ve carved for ease of eventual next steps towards the reality of extinction.

During decades after losing access to my friend Donna, I would build my livejournal friends’ feed with a woman who look so like her that it allowed me to sketch for my walls surrogates for photos of my once-upon universe-center with semblances to greet me with the memory of her smiles that once upon a moment were birthed purely for added accent while she would gaze upon my face.

I even maintained at least tangent relationships with workplace colleagues, found business purposes for overlap or allowed myself to be an open path for mentorship, for no reason other than that their voice, their face, some aspect of their giggle, reminded me of someones who no longer are in my bubble of existence.

There are many Fermina’s in the world, but only two for me, one the character of a novel that became the usernamesake of a unique woman who changed much about the very essence of me and my orientation to myselves.  I’ve begun in the distance of more than a decade likely begun to attribute to her aspects of life not hers at all.  A person (always hard to know if anyone online is actually the gender identified) who I’ve added to follow in Tumblr has nothing to do with anything in my normal world nor my normal choices for those whose posts I might follow, except that (s)he posts under “Fermina” and so each time something shows up under this name, it makes me think of my long-ago connection.

This new Fermina, based on her posts, is a lover of colors and more particularly a lover of architecture, filling her feed with various old buildings and houses and street scenes from around the world, almost always with blatant broadsides of pinks or blues or stark red walls, often with windowsills or doorways draped in flowers.  I have come to convince myself that the long-ago Fermina, too, probably is a lover or old buildings, a person like me who stops amid moving crowds along sidewalks because an archway is so becoming that it may as well have been a live nude model upon a pedestal outside of a coffee shop.

And so much did that Fermina of my memories love art and artists (and poets) that these vibrant colors are too, surely, something she might adore and share in posts were this new person actually her.

Too, I do get random smiles because, in allowing myself to believe the lie that this is my own true memory providing me visual daily communications, there are the actual random posts of lovely naked women that I do feel certain my once-upon one-sided adoration would have shared specifically to make my day.

The stumble-upon thing here is that I’m blatantly aware when I allow myself to breathe is I always know even in my conscious scrolling mind that this Fermina is not that Fermina, that there are surely hundreds if not thousands of Fermina’s given how popular was that novel and novelist.  However, I am now unclear how much this self-imposed psychological trickery may be imbedded in my subconscious approach to life, in fact am befuddled and a bit underwhelmed with myself when I discover how I may have built multiple houses with walls constructed of attempts to grasp and live within memories, how much I’ve lost the ability to be truly objective.

I no longer have any confidence that I am reacting to life’s daily stimuli with an open mind and free will, but instead may now be wallowing in a web of established anchors, of preferences for manufactured a sense of analytical evolution that masks lessons I’ve never digested, existence that never were realities but nonetheless are the only molds my mind can accommodate, reruns of the only round holes I could even imagine lubricating with my square soul.