2002-12-23 - 7:59 p.m.

So like I said in my last entry Annie and I seem to have sorted out our differences. And Jane and I had the (okay it might have been alcohol influenced but nonetheless) "what are we?" talk, but I seem to be feeling less secure than I did a week ago.

Why?

For starters I am going through what I've alternately labelled "Charlie Syndrome" or "Daisy Syndrome" with Annie. There is a scene in "High Fidelity" where Rob catches up with his ex-girlfriend Charlie after many years- he goes to a dinner party she is holding. And this is not just any ex-girlfriend, this is a girl who he was so utterly infatuated with that when they broke up he lost it, quit Uni and when he came to his senses found himself working in a record store. And he comes to a startling conclusion- she's boring. How had he missed this before? She says the most awful and incredulous things and is, well, less than meets the eye.

When Annie called me on Saturday morning I was relieved that we were back to normal. We sorted things out via email on Friday, but just the way she was talking to me on Saturday appeared to be proof that things were back to normal. Only I found myself disinterested in what she was saying. For a start there's always been the fact that I don't approve of some of the things she's been getting herself into in the time I've known her- be they substances or people. When they let her down and she rings me in tears there is no thinking necessary, I can tell her honestly that I think what she's involved with is not good for her, and I stress my belief in her that she will get through it. But when she's happy about these things (and let's face it on some level they make her happy or she wouldn't be involved in them) it's difficult. I'm faced with the thought that if I bring her down to Earth and say "look, you're kidding yourself, they don't care about you and they treat you like nothing so why are you so happy?" she might resent me.

As a true friend I should tell her how I feel even if it means conflict, and not just try to keep the peace between us, but when we've been through the month that we've just been through and you're relationship feels like a torn up piece of paper held precariously together with sticky tape, believe me it doesn't work that way. Against your better judgement you smile and nod and sound happy or at least relieved that they sound happy, even if what's making them happy is very flawed. As I say to her, most of her problems stem from her relying on unreliable things or people. Such that every time something goes wrong she falls back on them and it makes it work. It's like building a fortress on quicksand.

"Daisy Syndrome" is a reference to "The Great Gatsby". I could sum up my last paragraph with a Gatsby quote, in that I believe in Annie, and as difficult as it is sometimes I see her inner light- but it is what she involves herself in that sometimes makes me just not want to know...

"...I wanted no more riotous excursions with priveledged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby...was exempt from my reaction- Gatsby who represents everything for which I have an unaffected scorn...

...Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short winded elations of men"

-despite how I feel about Annie, a lot of what she represents I do have an unaffected dislike of. Take drugs for example. But I still believe in her, I believe that there is a battle between the Annie that I hold in my heart and the self-destructive Annie that is trying to take over, and I haven't given up hope that my Annie will triumph.

I digress though, for "Daisy Syndrome" in fact refers to the fact that Gatsby was a romantic with an immaculate dream, only the focus of his dream was the inherently shallow Daisy Buchanan. I've said this about myself before, that love makes me a better person- yet perhaps the object of my recent affections has in fact not been worthy of such pure and honorable feelings. I'm not saying I truly believe that, but it has crossed my mind.

In the moments before his untimely death, Nick imagines that Gatbsy has perhaps come to the stark realisation that Daisy may not have been the wonderful person he thought she was. He ordered his butler to immediately inform him of any telephone calls, hoping in vain that Daisy might care enough to contact him...

"No telephone message arrived , but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock- until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that were true he must have felt he'd lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts breathing dreams like air drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen fantastic figure drifting towards him through the amorphous trees".

That's been my favourite passage of literature for seven years, let's hope I'm being overly melodramatic and just looking for a way to apply it to my world.

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