May 21, 2010: To ZW

I lay in bed beside you, feeling the damp warmth of your breathe on my neck and the weight of your leg, your thigh, heavy across my hips. I hoped you would awaken and move, but I didn't want to wake you; so I didn't move. My pelvic bones hurt a little, but then love-making hurts a little too sometimes; so it was okay.

I don't know what to feel towards you. I want to love you, but I don't (and I don't know how).

It is not quite lust; you are not really my type, and I know I am not yours.

It is not quite liking: I don't know you, and you don't know me. We repeat the same inane things to each other every time we sleep together, the first things that come to our minds. You told me about how you weren't doing well in school, but how if you managed two B's, you could stay. I told you about how I wanted to be different for different's sake until I got tired of that and now cannot figure out what I want to be, or do. Are these fears that we share, our deepest truths, our hidden selves, or are they trivialities that we discard, harmless minutiae laid out for whoever would have them?

Neither is it disliking: I wouldn't have come again, satin sheets or no, if I disliked you, and even though it was unhappy break-up sex for you (I am just "the girl on the side," those are your words, and you were upset about someone else), I could not sense a disliking.

And of course (this is a given), it is not love. It is nothing like love.

So why have you been on my mind? Why you and not someone else? People I'd cared more about and who cared about me. Guys who were better in bed, or with whom I'd had more sexual chemistry, or more sexual tension. They have not been on my mind as much as you have. Why?

I don't want a relationship. I don't know how to care about someone without eventually asking them to leave. Just walk away, I say. Just leave, just stop, don't. I don't want to make this work anymore, I've said. You deserve so much better. Can we just be friends again? Every old, tired line: I've said them all, often in quick succession, because I didn't know what else to say. I never know the right thing to say.

And I know you don't want a relationship with me, because you talk about the other girls in your life when we are in bed, and I don't mind because it makes me feel safe holding you and knowing we won't need to work to make "us" work, because there's no "us" upon which to work, no pain, no tears, no wounded pride, no break-up sorrow, for either of us. We can be happy together when we are together. We can be happy apart when we are apart.

Then I made the mistake of reading your blog. I watched the videos you linked to. I read about your hurts and sorrows. I began to savor your bittersweet prose and poetry. Now I am presumptuous enough to assume I know you, and I am uncomfortable and unsettled that, while I am just another hook-up to you, your writing has made you three-dimensional and real and much more than just another fuck buddy to me.

The more I read what you write, what you wrote for others' eyes, not mine, I realize I would be delighted to get to know you, to really know you (and not in the Biblical sense, because I'm afraid we've taken care of that already). The truth is, I would like it very much if we were buddies more than fuck buddies, "friends with benefits" more than mere "benefits."

Anyway, you stirred, your cherubic face reassembling and readying itself for the heaviness of humanity, the burdens of the day ahead. I had slept little because your clock chimed every hour, and every hour, I would turn in bed to find you asleep, untroubled. When I finally climbed out of bed, my worries flew ahead to a test  later in the day, but all I could recall was the strange disjointed sequence of dreams, that gift of restless nights, incomprehensible images that exhaustion threads together, and our bodies, and our breaths, the primal panting, the heaving, the sighing--that was all my mind could hold. I did poorly on the reporter's test that day, and I couldn't make up my mind if it had been worth it; so I chose to forget about it, and about you.

"Researching" for writing

This is not the time for this. This is not the time. When is it ever the time to be shoved back into the person you were: you mumble an apology (you don't recognize them) and you can't quite look them in the eye because you're ashamed of who you were and ashamed of who you've become. Curse you, brain! Don't do this to me!

I was taking a stroll down memory lane, when I fell down the rabbit hole of recollection, and I'm no longer entirely here (but neither am I entirely--or at all--back there). I was reading through my notes (not scrupulously kept) of my travels, in the name of "research." I needed the scribbles to jog my memory of that odd month in Paris, when I was an impressionable and unripe 18.

I called back the memories because I needed them, but it was too much like waking the dead, or disturbing the dust of many still years. The past now populates my present: I watch the flurries of dust and unwanted ghosts swirl before my watering eyes, of people and conversations and moments I've forgotten (that I needed to forget).

It'll be worth it, though, right? To have something to write about, to talk about, to think or not think about.

First Paris post tomorrow night!

Directional change #1

I've decided I don't want to write about everyday life anymore. It's dull. When it is not dull, it is depressing. When it is neither dull nor depressing, it is radiant and glorious and giving, and I am grateful in ways that I am incapable of describing; so I won't try.

Instead...

I'm going to write about things I've seen, places I've been, people I've met--those pinpoints of wonder and fascination as delicious as the chocolate chips in the chocolate chip cookie that is life (if life were a chocolate chip cookie).

So, coming up...

Strange and romantic happenings in Paris, July 2007
Flying to Vancouver to bus to Seattle to drive to Quincy to attend Sasquatch, May 2008
The escape to Portland, Oct 2008
Rockin' it as an expat in Taiwan, Dec 2008 - June 2009
Random adventures and non-adventures in San Francisco and Berkeley
People (friends, family, chance acquaintances)

Also, I'll be updating my tumblr more often now. :]

I am Sam...

You are cute. I am Sam...I don't know if you saw me, but I was standing near your car in the parking lot. I was the guy in scrubs. (650)362-4172

"But I know Frank is a dream too," AL said about the man she'd been seeing for two years now, "One day, I'll wake up and he won't be there anymore."

A second ago, both of us had been laughing at the note someone left in the car window. Now she slouched with her hands gripping the wheel at 10 and 2, staring intently at the traffic-less late-night N-405.

We had noticed the note fluttering in her window, and she had pulled over to grab it.

"Is it a ticket?"

"It's probably a note telling us not to park there." We had parked in a shopping center a block from where we ended up eating dinner. She kidded, "Maybe it's a love note."

As she re-entered traffic, I opened it and read it to her.

"Did you see them?" I asked, referring to the three men who had been standing, chatting, in the parking lot by her car. I could only recall one--a balding man with a paunch and a tired beige suit and a worn leather briefcase, a professional and the oldest of the three.

"Yeah, the scrubs guy was the cutest."

"So are you going to reply?"

"Yeah, I'll text him later."

We talked about dating, guys, crushes.

She said, "It's good when they're just crushes. Everything's lighthearted."

"Cause they're not real; it's all just a dream."

"But I know Frank is a dream too. One day, I'll wake up and he won't be there anymore."

We sat in silence for a beat.

"Forget Frank! I've got this Indian scrubs guy now."

And we laughed, because there was nothing else we could do.

April 28, 2010: death-sorrow and self-pity

Death-sorrow
He had been crying and I hadn't even noticed.

"My teacher died," he said.

"I'm sorry. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I'm fine."

"It's okay not to be."

"I know it's okay not to be," he said in anger, and left, slamming the door. I never say the right thing.

But death-sorrow is not beyond empathy, and image-memories of death surfaced, uninvited. My grandfather, 阿公, in his icebox. 阿公, bloated and disfigured. 阿公, who was not that bloated, disfigured man in the icebox. But it was, and the image-memories would not stop. My grandmother, wiping the condensation from the tiny window atop the icebox that framed his face, whispering, whispering to the corpse that would not hear. Everyone was in tears. My uncles, standing stoic, guardians of his shrine--they had been there for days, in shifts, honoring the man, my grandfather, who had lived paralyzed on his left side for half a lifetime, who had made a fortune in the plastics industry, who had provided so well for his family that none of his grown children worked, who had stood tall and proud, even pulling off his white-hair comb-over, who had given and given and given until there was nothing left to give. Everyone owed him, and if it was not money that they owed, it was love, or both.

Voids
Death-voids are not so different from friend-voids, those created by people leaving in frustration and slamming the door behind them (the door slam echoes in your heart, and your brain aches and bruises as if it had been hit). Both are mired in regret, all the things one could have said but did not, all the things that one should not have said but did, and then it's too late to say or un-say any of them because they're gone. When CW came in again (the first time, AW had been crying, and I had been mute beside him), it was me that was crying, alone, thinking about how I had failed those who tried befriending me, how people were not encouraged or uplifted the first time or the second time (and they would attempt a second time only if they were particularly hopeful) they talked to me about life-difficulties, because there was nothing I could give, not love, not money (I am not my grandfather's granddaughter). Is anyone so loveless, so self-involved, so useless as I? I crawled beneath my blankets, wrapping myself in the cocoon of soft warmth that would not judge me, and I cried.

On the I-5

It was just me and the asphalt and the cows. The sun was bright enough to make cloud shadows sharp, and even as I drove, I thought I could see them crawl across the hills, across the golden plains and planted fields, these massive masses moving, enshrouding the land only to have it lit up again. It was gorgeous. Everything was gorgeous, even flying by at 80 miles per hour.

How can anyone be unhappy when they're in transit?

Movement--movement--a simulacrum of progress. Progress: forward movement. But any movement at all must be better than none.

In sickness and in health

I do not write things that people want to feel. I do not write things that I want to feel. I don't know how to, but I want to. I do. Honest to God, I do.

I stopped writing because it scared me. These words, these useless memories and wandering thoughts, the melodrama spelled and spilled out in so many words, so many lines of painful, pained text and pages of painfully purple prose.

Was any of it real? Was any of it true?

Well, I've never been so honest before. This is what I saw, and said, and thought. Here it is. Behold my heart upon my sleeve and these tears, still wet, upon my cheeks. Yet I'm convinced I've never written anything falser or more disgusting than all of which I've regurgitated into this virtual space. As if this space were my confessional, my personal urinal, Dump everything that is ugly in life Here, reads a sign in flashing neon (and yes, that is a lot of neon).

I don't believe in it. In any of what I've written. Just as I don't believe in umbrellas and I don't believe in shoes on a warm, dry day and I don't believe in casual sex and I don't believe in me. (That song from Hair plays in the background: "I believe in God, and I believe that God believes in Claude--that's me, that's me, that's me..." but alas! I am not Claude.) This little pet project that involves me being honest feels too much like manually filtering all the sewage flowing from my own house. I must be out my mind.

Tomorrow, I will begin to write things that people want to feel, things that I want to feel, things that I will feel.

How would you like to feel?

Whoosh

Spasms of horror and unstoppable convulsions of disgust--my body that of an epileptic lying in the devil's embrace. I couldn't explain it, not to myself, not to anyone, and that is the frustration of this pain and confusion: it is inexplicable, irrational. It is an obsessive torment that grows with every feeding, every night I lie awake, counting away the minutes, the seconds, of a life I no longer desire to live.

I clutched in the darkness for my bike lights--they were where I had left them, in the top drawer--listening to CW's even, raspy breath, a cold gripping his tired lungs and throat and nose. I tried not to awaken him as I slid our door shut, the wood catching and groaning, and with it, we wake each other in the early hours of the morning, when one or the other steals softly into or out of bed. I do not know if he awoke.

I rode out into the city night, a dark of perpetual light, orange-yellow streetlight illumination on the potholed pavement, and I rode down College Ave., knowing the Rockridge Safeway would be open at two in the morning. There was one pack of Benson & Hedges left, hidden beside boxes of American Spirit, an inappropriate categorization and impossible to find, non-menthols, but I'd promised to wean myself off of menthols anyway, so I savored my unusual morsel of luck.

"Could I get the last pack of Benson & Hedges?"

"Expensive," the clerk grunted as he swiped it across the scanner, almost as an after-thought; I could feel no ill-will nor malice.