You sweep your toes across the sand as you stare at the ebb tide. Your gaze is focused but your mind is elsewhere. To be more precise, your mind is hopping somewhat rapidly between several different elsewheres.

Your companion is standing nearby, blissfully oblivious. You muse that he is in the εὖτόπος and you are in the οὐτόπος. It is clear that you have been pretentious since you were young. You would prefer to call it precocious, but that term is no longer applicable.

Your friends think that you have a sweet deal and would be a fool to throw it away. He treats you well, mostly. At least he spends lots of money on you and lavishes you with attention. Of course he does get a bit possessive. He thinks that with all the effort he puts into wooing you, he has earned some high status. Maybe he has. Of course, you hate him a little for putting you on a pedestal. Is it really you whom he sees, or some imaginary creature of his fantasies, some ideal to which you can never approach?

Your ex treated you quite poorly by comparison. He was a liar, but in some ways he, if not his words, was more honest with you. There was something else that drew you to him, some reason you kept having affairs with him even though it upset your other boyfriends.

The guy who treats you the worst, though, is the one you have been in love with for ten years. You are unaware of what has caused him to lash out at you, what unleashes his venom every time you sneak away to make yourself vulnerable to him. He acts like it is obvious, but your reasoning cannot produce a reasonable hypothesis.

At last your consciousness lands on the man you secretly crave the most, so much that you never tell your friends about him. You think you would give up everything if he only asked, but he never asks. You have never been involved with him, and you fear that he would reject you cruelly if you let him know you were interested. You think that that would destroy you. You are perhaps a bit prone to melodrama. At any rate, you need to make the smart choices, and do the things that you would do if you were normal.

So when your beau leans in for a moonlight kiss, you tell him how happy you are. Maybe someday you will be.