So I had this conversation a few weeks ago with Jason (Interpellate), with whom I've been corresponding since we discovered a sharedlove for awesome music on 8tracks:
Me: I hate blogger too, but I'm too lazy to switch platforms and redo everything. Plus, much as I like Tumblr, I'm not sure my blog is right for Tumblr. Thoughts? Jason: Well, you're definitely more into the long-form blogging than I am (I'm still suffering from a grad school hangover, so writing that involves more than two paragraphs feels like work). Tumblr is perfect for me, but perhaps not so much for you. Or is that whole "Tumblr isn't for people who write long blog posts" just a myth? Perhaps one perpetuated by some Blogger zealots? Oh, and the other downside of Tumblr: it seems overpopulated by teenagers. I am following far too many fifteen year olds... Me: Yeah, but sometimes I feel pressured to do a long-form blog simply because of the fact that I use blogger and not tumblr. How dumb is that? It's the heretofore undiscovered syndrome called "Platform Guilt." Jason: Platform guilt. Nice!
What I'm trying to say is that I'm moving. Platforms. Not apartments. Maybe I should wait until 2009, but... no. I've never been one for delayed gratification.
I got a note from a friend last night in which he said, "Every once in a while I think of what you said about with being done with M.I.A. and I chuckle. I agree wholeheartedly. And your urge to correct grammar, even when being callously broken up with over IM. I laugh again. You're pretty great."
So onward and upward in the new year. At least the latter half of 2008 has been atrocious for everyone. Perhaps I'm laboring under a delusion here (and don't we all?) but I'm fully convinced that 2009 won't be worse. I'm still tweaking the resolution list, but I've added a few more:
Deposit checks in a timely fashion.
Leave the hipsters alone.
Record Divorce Court (seriously, the one time I saw it, this woman was suing her ex-husband for $250 to replace the shoes he'd cut the tongues out of).
Stop thinking I've failed all the time.
Keep quarters separated so that when laundry time comes, I'm not searching aimlessly.
But later that night when she went to bed and I followed her to her door she stopped me.
"No, Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don't know. I don't know if I want love."
Then something, some surviving ghost from those dead ten years — for one cannot die, even for a little, without some loss — made me say, "Love? I'm not asking for love."
"Oh yes, Charles, you are," she said, and putting up her hand gently stroked my cheek; then shut the door."
Somehow I feel less lonely. I had this big, exhaustive cry very late Saturday night. I got in bed, my dad in the hospital, totally lost with regards to my non-relationship with my semi-secret-non-boyfriend, and thought What the hell have you done? You gave yourself again to someone who didn't want you.
So it came as kind of not really a surprise that he non-dumped me. Over AIM. Apparently the AIM dump is all the rage among boys in their mid-twenties. "I'm kind of retarded at this," he said. "I just don't know if we're compatible. You're just so much smarter than me."
At which point I kind of balked. Of all of the reasons he could have given for breaking up with me, this was the one I least expected. How about, "We've been vaguely trying to make this work for 5 months and it just clearly wasn't happening." Or, "I read your blog and you don't even see yourself as not single." Or, hell, "I don't want you."
The truth was there was never any future with Ryan. I wrote several posts directly referencing our history which were all deleted once I realized what I was saying (with the exception of this one which I left up because it seemed the only honest thing to do). I basically said that I didn't know if I even liked him or if he even liked me. I was troubled by the way we got together.
But I did like him, you know, sometimes. I liked him when he made me laugh or decided to let me in to his thoughts for brief moments. I really liked him when he kissed my neck and hiked up my shirt.
That should tell you everything you need to know, I guess. It just galled me that he didn't have the intellectual honesty to admit it. He told me he worried that I thought he wasn't good enough for me. And when I said, "You just wanted someone to fuck and I was there," he just said, "No."
"I'm not allowed to get angry?" I said.
"You are." "For all the times you said you'd come over and then didn't pick up the phone and disappeared... or all the times you cancelled on me? And it's like... fine, come over and fuck me and then go. Try it sometime. It feels like crap." "I'm sorry. I tried. It was the best I could do." "It was all you wanted and I knew that, so I guess it's my fault."
But I was less than honest, too. And I'm not even particularly angry about this, really. I was angry at his timing (dad/hospital). I was angry at his dishonesty. I was angry that I had ended this on my own terms in November and he came back after me because he was lonely and, "a little on the crazy side."
Then again, I'm the one who let it go on so long. I could have said no and actually had some integrity. The thought of having someone who pretty much only wanted me because I was, "so nice to touch," was better than the thought of no one touching me. But vaguely (and sometimes explicitly) pornographic conversation only really gets you so far in terms of a relationship. Especially when that person doesn't particularly want a relationship with you.
And he did some egregious things to me. "Why do you stand for it?" he asked. I gave a bullshit answer about hoping things would change. Let's face it, I stood for it for the same reason he came back in November: because we were both lonely and full of hormones and desperate and wanted to feel like we weren't completely beyond hope. Because being single in your twenties sucks. Because there are worse ways to kill an evening than by letting someone you sort-of like see you without your clothes on. Because it was safer and easier than sleeping around.
So that's that.
All I have left are hundreds upon hundreds of AIM logs and some anti-bacterial soap, which is something that amuses me to no end. Anti-bacterial soap! And for reasons that seem far too personal (for his sake and dignity) to expose here. Even I have my limits.
This is how I come to find myself a handful of days before the new year: indubitably, irredeemably and unremarkably single and unwanted, which was much how I started this year. On the other hand, this time I find that to be a plus and not a minus and I am ready (very ready) for 2008 to end itself. I will see it out with bad champagne and friends which is more than I had when I welcomed it. No one to kiss, sure, but I'm done with kissing (and all activities that tend to sprout from kissing) for a while.
