For all anyone knows, I may have postulated the existence of L as a convenient literary device: the muse whose sweet voice ebbs and flows internally, a voice which is later translated into the blog entries you read here.
L, then, might be a work of fiction - the aggregation of my own experience cleaned of imperfections, filtered through an emotional male mind, and carefully laid down in words I sometimes stare for minutes trying to select.
The woman to whom I was engaged and the few slivers worth remembering from that exhausting and pointless journey; the sun which blew the lid off my reasoning in South Africa and made me swear to commit my life to someone who had lived so many times before that my single strand of existence could never tether her to me; the whirlwind who scorched my retina once and then disappeared; the distant pit into which I vanished when I was still a teenager.
All these could well be distilled into a composite form called L, the bones of love upon which I work to add flesh and incident. I carefully revise, edit, monitor, control, and eventually pull off the veil and present to you one person's account of what it means to feel.
Yet L does exist - she is not a sanitised media product, or a figment of the imagination. There is an element of fiction, though, to our relationship. Without thinking, without knowing it, I turn myself into something revised, edited, monitored, controlled. I become a convention, a list of characteristics which are chosen at the expense of others, one side of the omnidecahedron that represents me. I am my own modulator, my own prism, and L and I converge in the production of symbols and soubriquets.
To become a media product is to be reduced and simplified. In the same way that the dream-work is the fusion of symbols and the carrying out of revisions, the 'media-work' is the accentuation of particular characteristics, the rejection of others, and the shoehorning of the accentuated, accepted ones into a convention.
In recent days, L has commented upon a particular piece of clothing I have which she finds attractive: a grey jumper which I happened to be wearing one time when I switched on my webcam. The media-work, then, states that I am to some extent reduced to this simplicity. L is likewise reduced to the image of her hand with a wedding ring upon it.
Like the famous photograph of Tony Blair's sweat-soaked shirt at the Labour Party conference, we are trapped in one moment, in a single image which defines a person, an era. Like a computer model of climate-change which predicts severe global warming lies 50 years in the future, only for it to then have to be revised because the variables we deliberately omitted - or whose existence we never knew of - cause reality to spiral out of control in a classic case of chaos theory, demonstrated.
I, however, do not expect to meet Tony Blair anytime soon, so the mental image I have of him doesn't matter in the slightest. Similarly, I'm not the scientist who staked his career on the climate-change model being accurate to with a particular error bar. I wonder, though, how the boiled-down worldview which L and I share will affect our long-term, real-life relationship? When I am more than fiction, when the grey jumper breathes with life and insecurity and frustration - as well as happiness, wit, and statements which can't be retracted?