I'm sorry

­­I awoke to find despair had mutated into terror in the hollow dark of night; my familiar bedfellow had grown horns and fangs and claws. I awoke hungover, and the jackhammer in my temples did not relent as I cooked eggs and pumpkin pie pancakes for brunch. I wanted to leave this world, to leave it all, come back or go somewhere else after I'd done my time in a place amongst people I do not know, who do not know me. I could be anyone then, and I suppose that is why I drag my feet everywhere I go: I am trying to run away to a world that I fear (that I know) will be exactly the same, so I move ever onwards, always looking backwards, afraid to be anywhere but exactly where I am, the vastness of the discontent such that it spreads into my past, my future, my termination (it destroys my determination), but I try to pretend I can/will/would-if-I-could outrun it.

In the evening, EZ and TS brought a cupcake from Love at First Bite, pink crumb beneath pink frosting with pink sprinkles--a "Pretty in Pink" strawberry, and the book, Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan. Their presence, these friends from a better time, reminds me of a younger, more optimistic version of myself, and they are real in a way none of this semester has seemed real, these few months a dream I was silly enough to have but too drugged to awaken from.

The drugged dreaming continues: I walk into the Zoo party at Cloyne, silver sheets as walls guiding people in with a welcoming sign that un-explains the party theme ("Welcome, zoo animals to robot land!" or some such similar drivel). As an unidentifiable purple-wire-winged version of an animal, I snag at people all night, and it is a good way to meet people, I suppose: "Well, hello, I am sorry you are caught in my wings and unable to escape. I will watch you attempt to untangle yourself from me as I stand and stare helplessly. Good-bye. I hope I don't run into you again either."

I saw BS again, naturally with SA, who was naturally with TT, strange the string of naturally's, the who's who of social relations and networked connections. I thought again about apologizing for having wanted to fuck more than wanting to have become acquainted. There is so much to get acquainted with, after all. There is substance and depth and hurt and love; there is contradictory complexity and emotional reality and intellectual curiosity, and all I had wanted was to fuck; and I hate that sort of reduction, from human to animal, from sensitive to primal; and that was what I had done. I'm sorry.

Later in the night, someone approached me, an animal desire in the eyes, not terrifying but feral, and something in me wanted to respond, but I’d so recently apologized (if only in my mind) that I dared not. It was not what I wanted. I will not reduce. I will not be reduced. I do not believe in casual sex anymore.