The incel sees his grade school crushes in his dreams every few months or so, which he attributes to going in and out of similar headspaces as he was in back then. More precisely, he chooses to reopen his fixation not on the people themselves, but his projected image of the ideal partner loosely based on them that has sprouted legs and taken on a life of its own. He just uses the name and face as shorthand at this point.
The dreams usually follow the same premise; they are mid-conversation at some liminal school setting with other classmates for a minute or so, and then it’s over. The topics in themselves aren’t noteworthy but rather the uncanny ability for his brain to reproduce their (often) eccentric speech patterns and trains of thought is what leaves him with residual melancholy as he starts his morning. The most recent one, however, involved the two of them alone at his home. The afternoon sun cast a hazy orange glow over the childhood room where they were. They were both sitting on their heels on the floor facing each other about a meter apart staring at each other in silence. The only peculiarity was that she was naked and he was completely clothed, with no attention brought to the fact at all (non-sexual). Silence was the bulk of their time spent together, but she might have interjected some aphorisms or blatant projections back at me - all in all , a very confrontational atmosphere. His feelings throughout these dreams can be best described as cautious entrancement and stifled jealousy, which, as far as his brain chemistry and hormones are concerned, are very real and also linger on for about an hour or so after waking up.
The fix to stop having these dreams is mundane enough - stop indulging in and entertaining degenerate themes and narratives - yet using the word “fix” like that implies that these feelings are defects that offer no merit, which somehow seems like a waste. In a sense, he feels like he is reconnecting with a lost part of himself and with an experience he has left unresolved for a long time out of fear.
But now that he’s opened this can of worms, the incel acknowledges some peculiarities in his reasoning.
For one, one in particular is the only person he never wishes to see again, not out of rancor or spite, but rather embarrassment and self-consciousness. He’s seen college crushes, coworkers, and clubmates after their respective fallouts and that was all fine and dandy, but he has had a good laugh rather candidly with his OCD-diagnosed friend about running and hiding behind a bush if he even ran into this specific person in public. The reasoning is simple; she’s the person the incel has made the most indirect advances at while also being the person he’s admired the most. She really didn’t deserve some random dude to impose on her the way he did, and his only saving grace from ruin was a casual greeting from her that has since (several years) ended their thread of communication.
But what are the chances of actually running into her? Not zero, but pretty much zero. They live in the same city, but their friend groups don’t overlap in the slightest and there are enough NPCs in the city to simply fade into the background and pretend not to notice. But still, the idea of being accountable to his past self and being put on the spot to keep up appearances lingers in his mind at night when he can’t sleep.
Just to put things into perspective, even if the incel might have gotten the closest physically to a coworker or a classmate, he recalls feeling ten times more vulnerable when talking to his crush. Simply put, he saw the former as lesser than him and he saw the former as greater than him and better suited to discerning his intention. There were more stakes, it felt like. Similarly, even if he ended up conversing with a coworker an order of magnitude more than his crush, he had a much greater appreciation for the latter’s vibe and input on life (granted, even if most of that came from observation instead of conversation). If he were to compare two events - going to watch a scary movie with a girl at age 21 versus quietly studying together in grade school - the silence comes across to him as infinitely more intimate than whatever script or role he felt like he had to enact with his coworker to advance the agenda of sex.
Of course, the limerence plays a big part; he slowly but surely grew infatuated with his crush, the only girl that gave him the light of day, but he never quite got to that place with his coworker. Later in life, he was very much aware of his warped paradigm of inputting choices into a dating simulator or a slot machine with more odds of losing than winning, and understandably, never really quite felt again that existential need to be enveloped by somebody else.
The incel’s judgements of the two are also worth bringing up; from the get go, he knew his coworkers and classmates were promiscuous, aimless, and complacent based on what they told him about their past experiences, whereas he had always placed his crush on a pedestal of purity and sensibleness, and inferred that anyone that would give a headass like him the time of day would had to have been acting out of genuine interest. Any male reading probably winced at the mention of the word “pedestal” and with good reason - it’s not true or sustainable.
People’s politeness can go really far. Who would have thought?