ride
Since Beth, I’ve fallen for five guys. Plus or minus. I was thinking about it on the el train. I am trying to learn.The first, the very first, way too soon (and that was the whole point) was graph. That’s not his name but he wrote it like that, with a lowercase letter, like he was bell hooks or e e cummings. He was a sculptor who lived in his van so he could spend all his money On His Art. He was incredibly hot yet oddly insecure about women, which – since I hadn’t dated a guy in four years – was ideal on both counts. It wasn’t about us liking each other so much as it was about him feeling lonely and me wanting to delay my sadness about Beth. It was just fine, and it was just fine that it ended.
And I went to the Netherlands, and looked around for a nice Dutch boy to marry so I could stay in Amsterdam forever. Instead I met Serge, a writer from French Holland who thought he was F Scott Fitzgerald. He called me bebe from the moment he met me, brought me to jazz clubs and tapas bars. He loved all the obvious things that young self-absorbed writers love, bullfighting and cocaine and women and hearing himself talk. The first time he propositioned me was by text message. Soon enough I flew home. Being Zelda is fun but if you try to stretch it out you’re likely to die in a mental hospital.
So I swung the other way, tumbled over myself for Chicagoboy. He had resurfaced from my past, the one in which I favored kind and friendly types, and was delightful rather than just distracting – a dorky engineer programmer who played silly folk music. He seemed like such a gift out of nowhere and I fell for him wholly and wholesomely. I was looking for where to go next and Chicago would have done well, but this he found understandably Insane.
And so I found someone more conveniently located, but I overshot. One door was as insufficient for sanity as one thousand miles. Disaster was a joy and a frustration from the first, and so familiar that his bad decisions still wreck me – wreck me in the way that your parents’ bad decisions can, because you see yourself in them and you want to think you know better.
Which brings me, a bit worse for wear but with lots of good stories, to Operaman. We are good to each other in satisfying ways; when he’s next to me it is thrilling and when he’s not the absence has gravity. He sent a package to my hotel in Chicago. But some days it seems he has nothing left for this. And sometimes I think that relationships have their own math, that when it’s working it gives you time and energy and makes the crappy stuff bearable. But sometimes the balancing of it all just defeats him, and I feel like one extra weight. And I don’t like being a weight - as much as I don’t like being so light that I’m nothing.
And somewhere in all that one would think that I might have learned what to do next, but it just keeps being different every time. The fact that it’s been a fucking trip is enough, I know. But it wouldn’t kill me to have learned something too.
I love the el train.
posted by tortaluga @ 6:08 PM
3 Comments:
What about le quebecois?
i started to write about him, because it’s a pretty good story. “then i moved to quebec for a guy i’d known for eighteen days….”
ultimately though, he backed out before i had any chance to fall for him. which in a way saved me from feeling even shittier than i did, but in a more important way was just Really Fucking Lame.
"And I don’t like being a weight - as much as I don’t like being so light that I’m nothing."
Sounds like you've learned a lot more than I have. I'm sure you'll get there without realizing it. Seems like that's how it usually happens anyway.
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