I was searching for my music collection to try and find something that represented what I’m going through right now… and strangely enough, I found it.
Mario instant messaged me tonight. He said that he can’t talk to me anymore because he “has deep feelings for me” and I don’t have any for him.
Which isn’t completely true. I like hanging out with him… mostly because he’s the most doomed person I know. Someone with adequate money, friends, but still very, very unhappy. He’s also really awkward… endlessly playing on his iPhone…making those faint throat-clearing sounds that increase in intensity whenever he’s uncomfortable.
I don’t know… I wanted to date him just to fulfill his dream of there being something better in life, but that isn’t a reason to really date somebody. He just seemed so lost…and so alone…and I just wanted to do something to make his life less horrible, but I couldn’t. He had good taste in movies and music and stuff, but he just didn’t do it for me. I can’t explain it.
Friend number two that I lost tonight was Sam. Well, I guess the seed of that was planted a while ago, but I called Brian after he got off work. We were on the phone maybe five minutes, and all he could say was that Sam was mad at me (gee, news flash). He had that “you are a terrible person” tone in his voice.
He dropped this hint that Sam had a blog, and that Sam was probably mad that I had read it or something like that. It was some tiny link on his Facebook… to tell you the truth, I haven’t really looked at his Facebook at all. I just went on it and it says that he’s crying. It was updated 40 minutes ago. He is going to send them a text message to try and make them feel better, but he told me only to talk to him “when all this Zero bs is over and done with and you’ve had time to actually think.”
He’s right, I haven’t had time to think about anything. I found that as I get older, everything just becomes so epic and complicated that when you think about issues, a hundred more spread out…every situation, years of corollaries, mountains of evidence, every glance and comment to be weighed for its veracity. Everything explodes out of proportion infinitely, and I feel like I’m left with nothing. This rift with Kelly will probably never be repaired. I was considering calling her this Christmas, but I’m just not willing to apologize. I don’t think she is either.
I guess I just need to stop overanalyzing relationships. I haven’t seen Christen lately as much as I’d like to… but I feel like I’m being a needy friend if I call her all the time.
Also it feels like there’s this big rift between Brian and I.
I’m satisfied physically and emotionally and I feel guilty about it. I’m disappointed in all of my friends when they get into a relationship and they don’t have as much time to devote to me. I mean, I know that it’s unfair but you do miss it. And for Brian, I guess it’s not only that but my being totally in the wrong with the Sam thing.
I want to be friends with people so I unintentionally of lead them on. I mean, maybe it would’ve been better if I just said “Mario, I’m not into you. I’m never going to date you.” But it wouldn’t have been true. I might have ended up dating him, but it didn’t turn out that way.
When I would have fun with Zero, I felt like it was just going to be a fluke. Oh, surely I’ll get sick of all this. Surely, he will be douchebag. Oh, I don’t like it when he does ___. And then I was all “Hey, you should ____, I don’t like ____ so maybe we could ___” You know, stuff like that. And it’s the old thing with me of the things I hate when I first am exposed to them I end up loving.
But he was an awesome conversationalist and a grade-A cuddler. Which made everything that was going on with Sam so precarious, because just as Sam was actually asking me out it was coming to the point where I was starting to admit to myself how much a genuinely enjoyed being around Zero. And then with the hours of homework, all this cramming for finals, my car breaking down… it was just this tumultuous avalanche of three people pursuing me and I was just overloaded.
Mario endlessly instant messaging me about the next Latino band he was obsessed with, Sam and I getting to know each other with the increasingly uncomfortable subtext of him being interested in me, and then the days where I’d wake up next to Zero… I just felt like it was this oncoming three-way train wreck… and I was trying to guide everything so that it didn’t end up being destroyed.
The only thing I can think that comes close is one time I was ice-skating on the East Coast and I lost my balance and wasn’t able to turn. My brain calculated the trajectory, and I was definitely going to hit this little girl… so instead of crashing into her full force, I grabbed her and picked her up right before I would’ve hit her, and then somehow managed to stop. But it was still really embarrassing. The girl had this expression on her face like “what the fuck are you doing?” and maybe nobody else in the rink had noticed that I was going to hit her before that…but the thing that was obvious was that I had just picked up a stranger…and knew there wasn’t going to be any kind of good ending. I did prevent her from getting hurt, but it was really embarrassing and afterwards I felt like I should have just crashed into her. I mean, it’s a risk you take when you skate. But I convinced myself that I did the right thing.
So, if you’ll excuse the odd metaphor, it was like I was barreling towards Sam and Mario and their was just nothing I could do to stop their feelings getting hurt. Which is why I feel really guilty and conflicted… and I have a hard time talking to Brian, who is obviously hearing about what this is doing to Sam.
It’s nearly 2 a.m. The bottle of violet that I needed to finish my painting is sitting here in its oddly condom shaped bag (apparently Utrecht has bags designed for just tubes of paint), but I won’t get to do anything with it until tomorrow.
My grandma wants to go out and get a Christmas tree tomorrow. I have no idea where to go. She asked me if I knew which kind to get. I wanted to respond with “The kind that’s a tree?”
About a month ago, I threw away a lot of old photos that I had scanned in (a lot of those were of me and Andrew Taggart), and I am finding them EVERYWHERE. Two weeks ago there were three photos arranged in my bathroom. I took them. Today I found five more piled on the breakfast bar. I angrily ripped them up and threw them in my wastebasket.
I am seriously going to have to wait until trash day and then go out and empty my wastebasket after she’s gone to sleep. BITCH GOES THROUGH THE TRASH.
Sometimes, I hate my grandma.
She also left me this note telling me I needed to clean the kitchen. I had just come home with a bag of groceries. Bitch.
I should leave her a note.
“Was going to shank you, decided to get you some nice delicious fruits and vegetables instead. Have a fucktacular day, bitch.”
Whatever. Bitch is too crazy to know that I have finals.
I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt that my mom and me and Zero were at my old house in Crescent City. The place was all dusty but it was sunny outside and the neighborhood kids were out playing. Zero was throwing a stick to my old dog Rose throughout the dream.
My mom unlocked the door of our old place, and everything was just as we left it. My big blue fish Max in his tank, our cats Lucky and Sukiyaki Tsunami. I asked my mom “did you pay the rent here all this time?” And she smiled and nodded. She had saved this little slice of our life, our one and only home.
I just teared up writing that. I miss the feeling of having a home. I miss our pets. I miss my mom. I miss Rose. She had so much personality, even though she was disobedient as all hell.
I just get so sad when I think that everything that I’ve loved is gone. I didn’t have much of a problem with this when I was 17, but as I get older, I have five or so years of friends, lovers, and hangouts that are just…gone. I often think of this one evening at the beautiful Endert’s Beach. My friends and I had gone camping for the weekend, and one evening Tawna and I went down to the ocean to watch the sunset. I don’t think we had even planned it that way, our friends were being grouchy so we took a walk and sat down on this big rock that overlooked the sea. The sun was going slowly into the waves. We didn’t say anything for hours, it just listened to the birds and the waves…I just had this profound sense that everything was going to be okay.
Of course, there was some big blowout with the friends that were up at the campsite….we had run out of food and everyone came down to fetch us. Tanya and I wanted to stay, but reluctantly, we started hiking back to the camp.
If only I could live in that moment forever.
It’s the office christmas party for the second year…it’s so strange to see that flyer circling around work. The year before it was neon green. Sign up for the potluck, the secret Santa crap. I got my boss’s Christmas card. Got some candy for my secret santa person. Another year goes by, and things seem to be looking up, but it seems like the things that are most precious to me (my friendships) are slipping away.
I guess the message of that dream was that my mom and I both have the dream of a true home, and she has been keeping the dream alive (as have I). I just hope we both live to make it come true.
Good post! You definitely do start bursting with perspective as you pile up friends and lovers and jobs and “homes,” but on the other hand, eventually you get more patient, too. I didn’t know if I would ever feel like Magalia was home. Just like when I moved to CC I wasn’t sure if or when it would ever feel like home. I guess it’s pretty obvious that you don’t have a home right now, just a place to stay. But you’re pretty good at passing the time as that comes closer. When you want it badly enough, you’ll figure out a way to get a job that pays well enough to afford it.