compersion & limerence

I'm having a Terrifyingly Intimate 24 hours, viz:

1. my primary partner started Mrs. Dalloway last night! After almost exactly a year of me emoting! So far he has made a comparison to Miranda of Black Sails so uh, this should be totally fine, for me. I will have a totally supportive and comfortable level of response to whatever he thinks about it, completely chill, I swear.

2. A different partner emailed me, with no subject header or other body text, a single AO3 link. (It's a Captain America fic. Yes, I am reading it.) This was out of the BLUE and very unexpected, characterization wise, and omfg if he gets Into Fandom I am going to LOSE IT in a very particular "oops, didn't think I'd be that flavor of vulnerable to you!" way. The last time we talked about fanfiction I explained some various flavors of dubcon. It went okay. BUT NOW: What if he learns something about me? TRUE horror.

I just finished The Waves (V. Woolf) and cried my way through the entire last section. I am, as usual, struck dumb by her, and thus have no more articulate commentary at this time. I really loved this section, though, and the return of hope and light and beauty after a moment when the soul is erased. I just. I cannot.

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.

'So the landscape returned to me; so I saw the fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me, but now with this difference; I saw but was not seen. I walked unshadowed; I came unheralded. From me had dropped the old cloak, the old response; the hollowed hand that beats back sounds. Thin as a ghost, leaving no trace where I trod, perceiving merely, I walked alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to speak save in a child's words of one syllable; without shelter from phrases--I who have made so many; unattended, I who have always gone with my kind; solitary, I who have always had someone to share the empty grate, or the cupboard with its hanging loop of gold.