What sucks is that I am starting to feel like maybe I'm slipping into old behavioral patterns. I found the greatest thing this summer that I could never quite articulate. Just a feeling, like I could finally afford to relax, like things that happened actually were serving some greater purpose. My attitude stopped sucking. I got a source of income that was decent, I seemed to be free of vices, things just in general were okay. I felt inspired.
It isn't like it's totally gone, because I am clinging to the shreds that are left and praying several times a day for whatever that was to come back. It seems logical to me to do that since it was intimately related to God somehow, whatever all that good stuff was.
I have a hard time forgiving myself for doing stupid things; my ego is still alive and well. Yesterday I sent Noah an email and asked him if he wanted to have dinner with me. I feel like such a jackass; it would have been so great if we could have never gone beyond just being friends and hanging out. Noah is someone who I really, really liked who I just could have been friends with. And now, things are all weird, we have yet to hang out together one time where something physical didn't happen. And I am beating myself up about it, because I could have just let those compliments he gave me slide instead of being such a nymphomaniac that I had to act all sexy and give him no choice as a hot-blooded male other than to kiss me.
That is sort of a joke, but sort of also not.
Anyway he wrote me back with some b.s. about having plans, could we do that next week? Yeah. We can but it's going to be all weird, just like making dinner for you Saturday was all weird because I couldn't stop thinking about how you had seen me naked two weeks prior and now we're "just friends." Plus now that it has happened TWICE, it is just going to be weird. And I am so mad at myself for sacrificing what COULD have been a really great, non-weird friendship with a guy who is really great and totally weird, for a few nights of feeling like I was actually close to someone again. It has been a really long time since someone caressed my face. He did that.
Yesterday morning after I took my shithead cousin to school I laid in bed. I have been taking an over the counter version of cold medicine that I swear to God has speed in it. The reason I am sure of this is because whenever I take it, I barely sleep for like two days, and then spend like 72 hours just completely dead to the world. This is not good. Anyway I was laying there in bed, in between worlds, not quite able to fall asleep because of the speed but also not even close to being awake and alert. Images of Jerimy were floating through my mind's eye: this look on his face that is etched in my mind for all eternity, when we were walking from the terminal in the airport in El Paso to his car. He grabbed my hand and I was feeling uncharacteristically shy and I didn't look at him until he said "hey," and then I looked over and he said, "I love you." And the look on his face was childlike in its innocence. Why do certain images like that one get burned into my mind? I saw him a million times that week but that is the one I remember. He is beautiful. His eyes were especially beautiful at that moment, because the sun was shining into them from above and illuminating them, I remember that, and he wasn't smiling. If I were a painter, I could paint that moment in living color.
Other images of him were floating through my mind, sad ones, images of him wearing glasses and a baseball hat. Him, with his jaw set and brows furrowed, refusing to look at me. Him, looking totally dazed. But mostly that image of him outside the airport.
I realized as I was lying there that I was smiling while I was thinking about him.
I woke up the morning I left to see him for the first and last time, and it was 6 a.m. but since it was May 25th the sun was already high over the lake, and I took pleasure in every single thing I did. The shower was warm and wonderful, getting dressed felt like sliding velvet over my body because every imaginable part of me was clean, and my legs were silky, and my hair was silky, and my backpack and little canvas bag were full of all the stuff I was taking, the cats were fed, I knew what I was wearing, and I looked in the mirror and thought that I was lucky to be so beautiful, and I didn't worry that he wasn't going to love me.
And I will never ever forget the way the street looked as I left. No cars, it was too early for traffic on a Sunday morning. The sparkly ingredient in the pavement had sunlight glinting off of it, and I walked west down Armitage and it was a perfect morning- seventy degrees. I had on shoes with one-inch thick soles and jeans that were tight around my legs and long, long shiny hair. The sun's reflection off of the back windows of all the cars parked along the street went directly through the light receptors in my eyes and lit up that part of my sense of well-being that goes away with the beginning of overcast skies in the winter. I decided to take a cab to the airport and not worry about figuring out the El that morning. The cabbie talked to me, and only charged me thirty dollars, and the airport had so many windows, and it was so bright, and every time I took a step I remembered again what was happening in my life at that very moment. I have never before and never since been so alive in the moment.
And on the plane, I got a seat by the window by myself, and I drifted in and out of sleep for the two hour flight, and all I thought about- I mean, I thought of nothing else except maybe what it would be like when we first saw each other- was what it was going to be like when we made love. I woke up and I could see the individual leaves on the bushes growing in the desert below me.
It was different, coming home. I sat in between two large mexican men and although I was almost as exhausted, this time I could think almost nothing other than "God, please, please help me." When I got off the plane this time I blindly looked for Justin and thanked God he was coming to get me. I burst into to tears the second I saw him and cried the entire way home on the crowded El almost completely oblivious to the people surrounding me who were looking at me with great pity. The city looked different when we got off the El near our new apartment. I had left from a beautiful shiny neighborhood with a beautiful shiny set of possibilities in front of me and when I got home it was to a dirty place with garbage on the streets. Chicago looked different to me. It didn't receive me well because it knew I didn't want it. I had left Chicago in my mind already, and the place I had left it for rejected me. Violently.
Four months later I can write about it and talk about it without crying (unless I'm drunk), and one thing stands out to me: that first perfect day. That perfect, flawless hope. That morning was the longest string of perfect moments I have ever had. I don't think you can buy something like that.
I haven't been to school in two weeks and I'm starting to think that maybe I'm chasing after the wrong things in life. I need to finish this degree but maybe not right now. Maybe not right now. Maybe next year or the year after that. Maybe somewhere else, somehow. The ironic thing about this romantic disaster- no wait, that romantic disaster, heh, is that I think I'm moving out there anyway. It has occurred to me that irony has many faces. The only way anything ever seems to change for me is via romantic fucking disaster. Maybe that was just the only way I could get it that I need to leave the Midwest.
© beotch at
10:12 a.m.
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