All about the weird

So I went to a meetup with my old friend and his new girlfriend, and towards the end, he texts me.  I was really ready to leave anyway, so I'm thinking, maybe chance for some fun, and I cut out of there.  Offer to come over.  He says, too much of a mess, what about tomorrow?  I say, busy tomorrow until late afternoon/early evening.  After some other interplay, turns out that he has a buddy coming over and can't do tomorrow (then why the hell ask?).  Then he says, wish he'd known that I was going to be in Rochester.  And then we proceed to have pretty boring text conversation, none of which includes that parts that I'm really interested, like I would really like physical contact with an attractive man, and I don't care so much about the rest.

And so I feel less rejected but far more annoyed.  What the hell does this guy want?  I don't see how many more positive signs I could give him short of telling him to come here and fuck me.  Which I suppose I'd be willing to do if it got me what I wanted.  But mostly I just feel annoyed and bored.  I feel like I've invited him to do things again and again with not much response.  I can't work it out.  I'm not sure that I even want to.  Now that I feel a lot less pissed off and hurt (kind of magically so), I pretty much just want to get back to where I was. Working out.  Being motivated to do things.  Not being all tied up in this silliness.  Maybe I can stay that way?

At any rate, for the moment, I feel like I have my balance back.

The box

When Michael was alive, when things were worst, I used to imagine this different reality, this world where I had this person who loved me in the way that wanted, who made me a cup of tea and ran his fingers through my hair, who caught me up in his arms and laughed, where everything was joyful.

After Michael died, I let go of that.  I put that aside.  I said to myself, that dream is not for you, certainly not now.  It's not time to look for that partner; it's time to get healthy again.  And I was all right with that.  It felt peaceful.  It was easiest to think about things that way, putting it away, putting it on hold, focusing on me.

These last two weeks destroyed all that.  Absolutely shattered it, and I can't figure out how to get back there.  I sit here, and I'm not unhappy, not really.  Things to do, the weather is ok, I feel all right... but my heart is aching, and it's because once again, I can see that utterly different reality, where I'm sitting here waiting for him to drop by, anticipating.  And he comes in, and wraps his arms around me, and we can't keep our hands off each other, but we do, because there are other things to do... and so on, until at the end of the day we're in bed, wrapped around each other, waking up together, making breakfast... and then he goes home, because we both need down time, alone time, but this time will happen again, and soon.

I need to put this idea back away, back in the box that goes under the bed, prettily wrapped up for another day, a year from now maybe, when my life is back together.  But I don't want to put it away.  I want him to call, or I want something to work with someone else; I want that happiness, even though I know with every bone in my body that this is not the time, that I cannot, cannot deal with this. 

It has to go away.  I have to take that dream, and put it in a box, a shiny green box.  Then I need to wrap it in pink flowered paper, and tie curly ribbon around it, curl the end.  Maybe the holographic ribbon that I got for the kids.  And then a big bow, and some silk flowers.  So I'll know that it's there, know that it's beautiful, and know that I don't have to look at it right away.

Serendipity

I am so angry with myself, that I could be so foolish after so much time.  Not that I chose to see someone, fell for the line, if that's what it was, but that I just know that if there were only a message, I'd be all happy again.  And there we go, hopping down the bunny trail.  But at the end of the trail is the same old story, valuing myself so little that I settle for whatever I can have.

I don't regret the loss of this particular man, since, after all, without running him down, most of what he had going for him was availability and chemistry.  But, oh, I do regret that dizzying happiness that you get from those first moments with someone that fits.  It's been so long... it's been since John, and that was a lifetime ago.  I had forgotten how good it feels, and it's hard not to be hunting for that, thinking, where could I find that again now?  Right now?

I am angry, too, that I believed in the moment of serendipity, that this happy coincidence of events could have given me both a new carpet and a friend with benefits.  Two things that I thought were a long way off.  It seems like a ludicrous thing to say, but it was like that for a moment, all those nights lying in bed with Michael, eying that stain on the ceiling, wondering if there was still a water leak... the surprising coincidence of the raining ceiling, just after the room had been fixed... the carpet that I so wanted to replace, because I couldn't bear the memory of the times that I tried to clean it... the mattress for my son, and the stunning surprise of a man who seemed to be flirting with me from moment one, but not in a creepy way.  It seemed like a gift of happiness, like... yeah, like someone watching out for me, and for one second I believed in that ghost. 

And now... it's like taunting a kid with candy.  It's like the things that my mother used to say... "I thought about taking you to this, but I didn't."  Worse than if you'd never believed that there was a possibility.  I know that I'll get back there, but right now, I'd give a lot for none of this to have happened at all.  To be back to the flashes of contentment that came from getting my life organized, from things being simple, from things being all right.  Nothing shiny, but nothing awful, either.

This will fade.  I won't care about it soon, and my therapist is right in that what I probably need is more candy, not less... that with a few more stabs at this, it will seem like just another thing.  But it's not so easy to find these things.  Not when you're trying to value yourself at the same time.

I know I wrote this before, but it's just that I thought for a second that I was going to get to be happy for a while.  I am so angry.  I am so resentful.  I feel like I've put in my time, and that it's my turn.  Isn't it?

Not ready yet, I think....

So I think that I've demonstrated to myself that I'm really not emotionally able to deal appropriately with the menfolks yet.

After Michael died, I promised myself that I would not even think about a relationship for a full year.  And then coincidence happened... the water leak, and the guy who came with it, and the sheer novelty of someone being interested.  It made me really happy in that infatuated kind of way that is the best part of new things, where you feel a little giddy and a little silly and so on.  It was so great to feel that way after so very long, and to feel really attracted to someone.  So very many years since that's really been the case.

So he came here, and we drank wine, andI' the results were pretty inevitable, honestly.  No regrets there.  And I felt, again, so stupidly happy.  Dazed with happy.  We had the "I am not interested in anything serious" conversation.  I'm really not, not at all, and this person seems unlikely to be the person who would be the next serious person (if there is one).  When he got home, he texted me, and we talked about movies and music, and it all seemed nice.

But that was Sunday.  And I stayed dazed and happy through Wednesday afternoon... and then it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't heard from him.  So I texted him, after some debate, and he was busy but nice... but I thought that he'd text me tonight.  We have nothing planned for the weekend.  And all day I've felt nauseated and anxious.  It's nearly 8:30 now, and my expectation is that I won't hear from him.  I am fretting and unhappy and going over everything that he said in my head. 

I know that I'm being absurd.  This is about someone I don't even care about, who I'm just very physically attracted to.  Someone who is in no way a match for me.  Someone who basically I just want to spend a little more time playing around with.

It's his turn.  I'm writing this off for the moment.  I have dinner with Jack on Saturday... something I almost didn't even accept because I was fretting about this.  Whatever way this all turns out, it's clearly not worth the agitation and the unhappy bits.  It's too much like the bad parts of being a teen again.  I think it's time for me to be focusing more on going to the gym and less on other kinds of sport, because I've demonstrated to myself with crystal clarity that I can't handle it.

I am mad at myself for letting this bother me so much.  I think it's just that the happy felt so damn good for a little while, and I resent like hell that it seems to be gone.

Midnight in Boston

Back in my unexpectedly fancy hotel suite, looking out at the lights on the Charles.  It's probably 30 years since I've been here, but the feeling of Boston never changes.  It's not home to me in the way that New York City is, but there's still that familiarity, that piece of me that still belongs here.

Belongs here, belongs with the wonderful friend with whom I had dinner... but then, alone, waiting for the bus in the rain, there's time to think again, and none of my thoughts are happy. 

For starters, I don't want to go to this conference.  It would be more accurate to say that I'm frightened to go.  There are people who will be here who are part of a long-ago past, when I was a rising star in this field.  People who I haven't seen in 15 years, people who probably won't remember me... or if they do, it may not be in a good way.  It's a small academic world, and malice travels faster than truth.  Of course, I type that, and it seems more than a little absurd.  But you know how it is, you know you've heard something about that person, and you can't remember quite what, but you look at them a little differently...

Plus of course, there's my future employment opportunity, the fantastic contract that existed for one brief moment and then didn't.  But perhaps will.  Or not.  And the bridges that I might or might not have burned with my other publisher.  There's just nothing like feeling like you're going to be in a room of people who dislike you or are suspicious of you to just make you feel totally creeped out.  And that's everything that I feel about this.

When I was sitting at the bus station, I wanted to write about Michael and grief and walking around wanting to scream, to say, look at me!  There has been this tragedy, and no one can see it!  I can't even bear to think about that now, and the reality it that tomorrow, the next few days, is all about pretending that tragedy never happened.

I don't know how I will bear it. 

I will, of course.  One foot in front of the other.  Perhaps this will be my last conference.  Perhaps it will all fall together in some better way, some unexpected way that will make this all right. 

I can't see the future.  It's as hazy as the moon tonight.

A story of the past

When I was 17, I fell in love.  Not with a man, but with a person and a lifestyle and with the idea of belonging to it.

I think that we’re all looking for ourselves at that age, who to be, how to be.  I see that in my kids, Caitlin with her friends and the changes in who she wants to be from day to day, defining herself as “I’m the kind of person who _____”, Jonathan with his style and his shades and his attitudes.  I wanted to be… I don’t even know now, but I think that I’ve always wanted to be the kid that I would have been if we’d stayed in Connecticut rather than moving to rural Maine when I was 12. 

I had two friends in school, Jacquie and Chris.  Brother and sister, a little younger than me.  Their father owned the hardware store in town, and that was pretty much all I knew about their family background, until it surfaced that their mother lived in Boston.  I don’t even remember how it came about any more, but I was invited to take the bus down to Boston with them, to stay with their mother. 

And so I did, of course, and entered a world that I wanted with all my being.  Their mother, Suzy, was twice divorced by then, with another child, an adorable boy of 6 or 7.  And she was magic.  Not conventionally pretty, but the kind of woman that men love, petite and funny and possessed of a deep, sexy voice that made anything seem possible.  She was fun.  She drank vodka martinis from a bottle that she kept in the freezer, and let me drink them, too.  We took picnics to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, across the street from her lovely Cambridge apartment.  We ate dinners of lambs tongues on the roof of the building, and we watched the stars.  We went to church at this wonderful place where everyone knew everyone, and we helped with the breakfast that was served after the service, and I was instantly part of it all.  I loved her, and I wanted to be her, and I wanted to have that life and her style and everything.

I became instantly involved in the saga of Hugh, the man she’d been dating for a while, and her new interest, Bill, a lawyer at the prestigious firm at which she was a paralegal.  We all made plans, me and Suzy and the kids and later Bill, for vacations in Maine and what we would do at Christmas.  And I was home. 

I started college that fall, and Suzy would write me long. long letters, and Bill would talk to me on the phone and give me advice and debate with me about constitutional law, and they were my alternate family, the family that I wanted to have.  I would come stay for a few days every time I headed home or to school.  I hadn’t yet learned that guests and fish smell after three days, but I always came laden with gifts and happiness and love.

Until it all unraveled in the wink of an eye.

I can’t even remember the timing of it any more.  It must have been the end of my freshman year.  And I’d come to stay at Suzy’s on my way back to Maine.  And we were having dinner, and drinking martinis, and she said, I love you, but I have to ask you to leave.  I was, probably first of all, drunk, as was she.  And then astonished.  And then wounded.  In retrospect, I think sitting down and having some kind of conversation about this might have made sense, but I did what was characteristic of me at the time; I walked out the door, and I never spoke to her again. 

I remember that night so clearly… or as clearly as is possible, given years and vodka.  Bundling all my stuff into my crumbling ’65 VW bug and driving over to Bill’s… Boston is a nightmare to drive in anyway, especially if you don’t know it well, and you’re upset and drunk.  I kept accidentally finding the Old North Church, adding a bit of surreal to the whole thing.  I spent the night at Bill’s, and the next day, I went home to Maine, and I never spoke to either of them again.

And my heart broke, more than a little, because I loved them, and more than that, I loved who I was with them, I loved that world.

A different person might have asked, point-blank, for an explanation, and honestly, looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t.  I tried to get some kind of answer from her kids, later, but again, it was never a point-blank thing, and the answers were kind of “she’s like that.”  Or things that made no sense to me.  My friendship with them, never central, waned as high school things do. 

I’m ten years older now than Suzy was then, and I can try to make some guesses about what happened… how hard it would be to pet a puppy and suddenly find that you’d adopted it.  That seems most likely to me.  I don’t know how I would have dealt with this, honestly, except that I would not have allowed a drunken 18 year old to get into a car.  It would have been hard for me to say, you are spending too much time here.  Or whatever the real problem was, since I have no true idea.

People are different.  I was an 18 year old damaged and needy kid.  She was a 39 year old alcoholic and probably very damaged woman.  We were both pretty damn self-absorbed… at different stages and for different reasons.  I find, writing about it, that I’ve lost most of the curiosity and hurt about what happened, but I still mourn the loss of that world, the world that I wanted, the world that I felt like I fit into so neatly.  And those people, sparkly and kind and who I wanted to be. 

I’ve never been back to Boston since then.

There are only three times in my life when I’ve felt that instant sense of slotting into somewhere I belonged; one very recently, which is what made this all come to my mind.  Once with John, the man I loved so much and couldn’t get over for so long.  And this time, in Boston, so long ago.  I don’t know what any of it means, honestly, except that it makes me afraid of my instinct, and afraid, too, of being that homeless puppy again, wanting so much to be loved and ruining everything with your need. 

And on a side note, I did some Googling.  Bill, sadly, died five years ago of leukemia.  Just before his only daughter graduated from high school.  He stayed in Boston, still owned the Beacon hill building that he had when I knew him, but moved to Brookline at some point and also changed law firms.  He was a wonderful man, and I am sad to know that he’s no longer here.  His daughter loves Scotland and ice hockey and looks a little like him. 

Suzy moved to the Midwest years ago and married again… I knew this before.  She’s in her 70s now, and there’s not much record, although she doesn’t seem to have been at the wedding of her son, the tiny boy of my memory who is now tall and gorgeous and lives in Massachusetts. 

The last ghost, the ghost of the future

The one I find hardest to let go of, in a way.

Luke.  Luke doesn't exist.  I feel very strange even talking about Luke, but in a way, he's as real as anyone else.  Luke is the creation of my mind, when things were worst, last fall and into the winter.

I made Luke up, the person who I wish existed in my life.  The person I would have chosen if I had valued myself more when I was younger, for whom I would have waited if I had been able to understand who I was and what I needed, rather than scrambling desperately for the security of any relationship.

Let me tell you about Luke.  He's quite tall and dark blond, and he has a beard most of the time.  He's not picture handsome, but he has a quirky charm.  He's the kind of guy who wears jeans and cords and Icelandic sweaters and soft shirts.  And he has a smile that can light up a room.  He's a professor, maybe a biologist, some kind of science.  He likes to be outdoors, and he likes to run and play games, but he's not a serious athlete.  He loves to read, and he's happy lying in bed together reading.  He likes to play games, the old-fashioned kind, cards and board games.  Maybe he sings or plays an instrument.  He knows how to fix things.  He shares household chores.  He's reliable and kind and free of too much shit from the past.  He has a nice family, some brothers and sisters, who all like each other and like to do things together.  He's interested in what I like to do, and supportive of it.  And he's kind.  And affectionate.  And not particularly touchy.  He likes to travel, and we go together to conferences and just on vacations.  He loves to be with me, but he's ok on his own, too.  He's smart, and he has a quick sense of humor, loves a good pun.  He thinks about other people, especially me and the kids. 

My perfect guy, in my head anyway.  There's a bunch of Freudian things there, especially since there are some pretty strong resemblances to the father of my best friend, who was kind of the perfect father figure of my childhood.  And no one is really that perfect, although that's not what I want him to be.  Just a type of person.    He would have his flaws, and we would argue and so forth, but no one would sulk.  We would remember that we loved each other even when we were angry. 

Anyway, when things were worst, I made up Luke in my head.  Sometimes I wrote to him.  I talked to him a lot, in the car, alone in bed at night.  I imagined how my day would be if Luke were here.  And it made me feel better, in the way that imagining the time with John made me feel better.  It took me out of how awful things were, and it gave me a strange kind of peace that I could find in no other way.  He became real to me.

I'd like to think that Luke is real.  That he's out there somewhere waiting for me.  But I don't really think so.  I don't know whether I'll ever have a real relationship again.  I'd like to think that I would, but I don't think that my task right now is to be looking for it.  I sometimes think that my karmic path is to learn how to live without a relationship.  And so I feel that I have to let Luke go, too.

Luke, you may be imaginary, but how I feel about you isn't.  I don't know what it's about, really... a refuge, more than anything else, but it's not going to help me learn how to be a strong and independent woman.  So I have to send you back into the ether from which I created you.  It makes me surprisingly sad to let you go.  It feels like a real and complete loss.  But I am breaking up with you, too.  Not because I don't love you, in a way, but because you are no longer good for me.

And now I have to figure out how to be just me.