Vicarious attraction

I have to write this somewhere, it is just too bizarre not to mention. I've been noticing that in a situation where someone is strongly sexually attracted to me, I can feel it - or I feel something - through empathizing with how the other person feels, or how I imagine they feel. It's not even thinking about it, I can reproduce a physical response. I can see a picture of myself and, bringing that other person into my awareness and knowing about the intensity of their feeling, experience a thrill, a strong pull of attraction in my whole body. Attraction to the person in the picture, apparently. I get a kick out of that. I think this is similar to romantic attraction, it evokes something I have felt on occasion in my life, the rush of seeing someone or a picture of someone who was very important to me, or receiving their letter. Without being sexually aroused, I think. But with this vicarious thing, even when someone was appreciating my, um, physical attributes, I could identify with that, looking at the same picture of me and feeling a kind of tug from my core, a kind of boost of energy, like electricity, and a knowledge how satisfying it would be to merge with that body. Is that what they call sexual attraction? I just think it's weird that I can feel it for myself. (I've heard of autosexuality - but when this feeling happens, I have no desire to do anything about stimulating the body I'm sitting in - just that I see the picture of myself as if it were someone else.) It's like identifying with a character in a movie or in a book, I can re-live something akin to what they are describing - I just can't take it seriously in real life.

And I can persuade myself to a certain extent that I'm feeling the same thing for someone who is attracted to me - but I question that, I question that it's really coming from me - because it's so easy for me to drop the idea of pursuing any kind of sexual relationship with any person. To have certainty that there's no chance of that happening, and that they don't want that with me for whatever reason, just feels like a relief and a complication taken away. Then I look around and wonder where my "need" evaporated to. Just yesterday it seemed I might be interested and willing to experiment with sexuality with you if you ever wanted to - and today, knowing that you would not want it to happen, it's a complete non-issue, unnecessary, and I feel happy to move on.