Not thinking, still Aug. 31, 2010

I don't even know his last name. He didn't tell me, and I didn't ask. My earliest impression of him was simply that he was kind, later to be appended with "hospitable" and "considerate," then "intelligent" and "articulate," "ambitious," "wise," "honest." It was like blowing up an inflatable doll that just stretched and stretched and stretched until it no longer resembles the sickly, plastic-thin rubber heap it was (and still is, just pumped full of hot air).

Aug. 31, 2010: My future half-Indian mistake

He got out of the car, and I stared at his chest as he spoke because I couldn't see his face. 

"I'm not paying for your services."

"I know," I laughed.

"I'm such a man-whore."

"Good night." I didn't hear a response, just the slam of the car door, so I drove home. Maybe I should have said, "No, you're not. If anyone's a whore here, it's me." I could have said, "No, we're just two very young, commitment-phobic, and oversexed individuals who found each other." But I was exhausted, and I didn't want to think about pre-cum sperm, or being pregnant, or even seeing him again.

I can't tell if I'm awake or still asleep--it's that sort of feeling, except I can't tell if this life is real or the one I see on Community. These tedious moments, the hideous, humorless routine of cycling to campus, sitting through class, taking notes; it is less compelling and surely, by extension, less real than the one I see on my tiny 10" screen. My dearest friends, you see, dear friends that they are, I can call up at any time and will make me laugh, even if they are only a few inches tall.

New beginning #82

Meet Paolo, my alpaca.

Anyway, I'm sorry about the broken promises, the misrepresentations, the truths-at-the-time-but-truths-no-longer (they are a shade of lie, not lies outright). I'm sorry I never wrote about all the things I said I would, that I stopped writing all together. I thought maybe I'd do what all the great writers do (what so many writers, published and unpublished, do): I'd wake up early in the morning, the sky an innocent gray, somber and sobering and quiet, with just a hint of blue, I'd wake up then and write. And I'd write, oh, for an hour or so, pouring forth my brilliance onto a welcoming and hungry page, to a rapt and thirsty audience. The words would come, easily, as they almost never do in reality. The prose would ring strong and true, with just a touch of irony, wit balanced against truth, and I would approach the day strengthened by the exercise, knowing that if I had the discipline to wake and write, I would have the discipline to accomplish anything (everything) that day.

That remains a dream and will remain a dream as long as I sit here and type at this ungodly hour of the night-morning, trying to remember the name of the boy who capped some long-ago, half-forgotten dream, and those were his words, "I hope that was a nice cap to your night."

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.