collegiate diversion

Here is me, getting tipsy off some white wine Dad left in the fridge. My guess is he didn’t like it, he encouraged me to kill the bottle so we could open something more lovely the next night. A nice red, I guess he was thinking.

We’re not really into alcohol, my Dad or I. Never before college was the matter even discussed. But I take his encouragement as some acknowledgement of my maturity.

I’m almost done with the glass. It tastes like acetone, and peaked so horribly. I’m quite a lightweight that way, being moved so easily by the slightest influence.

I really crumbled at your email the other night. The one about reaching out and feeling the pressing need to feel yours or my caress at one fleeting moment. It wasn’t entirely romantic, I don’t even know you that well, it just really got me. Like, wow, someone is thinking about me and me and me and me. I think about you, you, you even when he and they and them are not around.

I hate that I haven’t heard from you in a while, and maybe I got too used to your slight gestures, every day almost since I’ve been away, that I took it for granted. So silly and superfluous, a facebook poke, but I wish I could have one now.

Just to know that you are there, like you said, so we can appreciate one another’s existence.

How I wish to be on some of the highs that you get. But I was so low during those hours that I waited for you in North Andover. What about Boston and the aquarium and you and me and existence?

Perhaps, I misunderstood. I’ve just been so upset lately, you really seemed to understand. You also really seemed compelled to help. Maybe your presence or your touch, or your poke, would have helped.

Miss you. Maybe we say that too often. But I still do.

I got such an idea to write this while I was driving today.

I took the long way back to my hometown, so I could drive down the roads that reminded me of us. I took a deep breath as I passed over the cement, and stared almost awkwardly at the yellow dotted lines. The single dotted one I felt was challenging me to cross it, to pass the car ahead of me before the other side caught up…I don’t why I like to do things dangerously like that.

I took a hesitant breath as I realized I was getting closer to that moment in the road where I said “Yeah, in high school, I had the biggest crush on you,” just to hint that you’re more than that kind of old friend. And this is the spot in the road when you gave me that curious smile and then ignored my come~on with a “See this sign up here?” and then to the side, “I’ll get to that THAT in a minute but first,~”

THAT was my childish confession. I think it made you uneasy. I didn’t mind that. You went on to tell me that story, about that sign “VINE STREET CLOSED” that had been up for years in that town, and how now a guardrail and a strip of land completely kept VINE STREET from becoming any possible entrance or exit.

That street will always be closed. What pointless signs, we laughed. And then our discussion of my high school crush, you, and your checking me out from time to time, in auditions or in class.

“No, I didn’t know that.” That’s what I said right before you kissed me hours later.

I mean, it seems so stupid now. Me thinking that my silent seven years of foolish love letters and birthday wishes would actually bring you to me in the real world. The adult world. I feel like I shouldn’t have told you anything, given our “ambiguous and contingent nature at the end of the summer.”

I don’t even know what that means.

Those words, Ambiguous and Contingent, how poetic. They were in your email, the one that said you’re getting back with your ex~girlfriend, the one that warned me I wouldn’t be hurt when you came back home.

It doesn’t really. I’ve come to realize that everyone has that EX factor, coupled with their EX story. I’ve come to find that people are always getting back and forth with that EXenigma. Sure, my EXenigma and I have done that too. But he never comes back to me. So I’m alone while everyone is in perfect agony still with their EXenigma and contingent EXcstasy.

Damn it. I still miss you. And him. That’s complicated.

So I drove around North Andover remembering and reviving memories of you and him, just trying to block anything. I repaved the cement, and the memory, blaring Rage Against the Machine out my window in winter, like that would undo something, driving furiously down memory lane.

How childish!

I drove past the common, which they repaved, and remembered the spot where he and I made out. God, how different it all looks now.

And I remember that crooked house off of Pleasant Street, the one with the hole in the roof, that he and I visited on Halloween so many years ago. My best friend’s uncle bought it I guess and now there’s nothing left, just some ditch in the ground. A mud hole. Muddy memories.

So he will go back to his EX.

Everything is so strange and different every time I visit home. Yes, it still feels like home and No, the people who I want to be here are not.

I just like taking the back roads and reviving their presences as much as I can stand, or remember

I called you and said, “I don’t know.”

It’s how I begin a lot of my conversations these days. Apathy greets you through my phone.

“Well, what’s wrong?”

“Sam, how have you been?”

I don’t know, I don’t know, Jesus Christ, I don’t know. I feel like I lost a lot today, of myself, and just from reading some words in an email. Damn technology, and damn long distance.

I called you, of all people. I typically would call my ex in situations like this, cry over and over “I don’t know, I don’t know.” But I called you.

And I didn’t cry but thank you for knowing something was up regardless.

“I don’t like this depressed tone in your voice.”

Thank you stranger, for reading my words.

“I just don’t know what I’m doing,” I say. “I pursue relationships or friendships or goals or any path in my life that should yield something, anything and ~”

You interject: “I know what you mean, it’s like you think all these things in your life will help you out, and you pursue them, but when you get to them, they’re just bullshit.”

“Yeah!” I really did exclaim. You still know how I feel even though that exhaustion in your voice which means you’re wicked ripped.

“Did I wake you?” I say, because I really do care. Your voice just sounds so sweet.
“Nah, it’s fucking 8:30 at night, what am I? Nine years old?” You’re just ripped.

You’re so Boston.

“You know what we’re going to do, to cheer you up?” you say. “We’re either going to go to the Boston Museum of Science or the Boston Aquarium.”

Oh my gahd, babe, you’re so Boston.

Thanks like hell, for that. I miss home and I’ve missed you. The aquarium would really be nice. Apathy, we’re going to the zoo.

He called me and said “Aside from my need to make love to you, I want to see you. You in your room?” He means, I want to talk.

I have to just confess that there is something about you that makes me feel incredibly sexual. Not like I want you, or we should be together at this instant. There’s something very chemical happening. This metamorphosis you put me under as you lighten the mood with, “there’s ten minutes till I leave, I can think of something great for us to do,” or “you looked pretty incredible at the meeting tonight.”

You know, and I know that you are so incredibly in love and so incredibly taken that there’s no way you would do anything so incredible as to break an impenetrable woman’s heart. I admire her, and you, so much for the way your love holds her in the highest regard, and the way that you can be so loose about it.

What a strange triangle we have here. I wonder if things would be different if we were all very very single and very very inexperienced, but that would take all the fun out of it.

You’re so cute when you say you prefer egg nog to beer and that you think the word that describes me best is the same one we apply to my hair: windblown.

Like there’s an uncanny system to every random thing I do in my life.

We can talk about anything, when it’s you and I flirting about our knowledge, our education and our complete loathing for the current state of journalism.

But for the most part, people don’t know we have these intimate moments. This platonic and intimate thing going on. We’re very hush hush.

I’d say, “What would the state of contemporary art be like if we didn’t have the hallucinogenic and mind altering power of drug substances?”

And then we can talk about how much we respect drugs, but mostly that other people do them. Not us, but that we can reap the benefits of their literate trips when they describe in some abstract artistic form.

I can say “Is it weird that I don’t have a routine when I wake up in the morning?”

And you can say how full of shit I am, how one of these days, my days, must have began the same.

I mean, you let me get away with almost nothing. We’re such curious friends that way.

You can say “she’s got this childlike quality that makes men want to fuck her” and you know what? I do not judge you.

I think your honesty adds to the intimacy of these late night conversations on my bed.

“It’s safe here, friend, in my bed,” I laugh.
“That’s what I hear,” you say. Oh, your wit.

If you were any other man, I’d kick you out for implying any such thing. But you’re so special this way. I like our platonic thing.

“So how did you meet him?”
“A friend from work’s mother’s 50th birthday thing.”
“Wow.”
“He was so wasted when I met him.”
“You were?”
“No, he was. I’m not even sure how old he is…”
“Does he go here or to Cornell?”
“No, he went to Harvard or something. He works for a major architectural firm up here so…”

I was standing in the elevator next to this man talking about this apparently “great” guy he met at his friend from work’s mother’s 50th birthday thing when it hit me. This conversation is such bullshit.
And I’m sorry self for being this bitter but, one moment this person you are attracted to is so great and then it turns out, he actually went to Boston University or something and this “major firm” is the fifth largest contractor for midrange office depots in the Northeast. Not that there is anything wrong with BU or said architectural depot…
What I mean is, I think we easily construct a person from pixels of a conversation and create a statue. When we find our Pygmalion’s stature to be worthless, we then break it down when something awful will, or eventually does, happen.

It’s so fine, my perception. Because I thought he was amazing when we first met, and I thought our first date was so great and for one of the millions of conversations I’ve had with my mother, he was the greatest guy I knew.

And then what happened. He’s engaged to his Xbox now or, suing Bon Jovi for $400 billion. I’m just saying, I’ve made a lot of grand first impressions that were eventually tossed into the reject pile. And this denouement of last judgements was of course, based on one final event or breakup.

How can I trust anything in my life if it is so slanted by surrounding circumstances? If this bias exists forever based on my personal experiences or current events? Objectivity IS such bullshit.

You would say “Sam, you’re always sick.”

I guess that would be true. In your exaggerated, and truly undermining sense of everything, yes, I am always sick.

In middle school, I faked it. I would have my mother sign notes about headaches and runny noses so I could avoid the girls’ teasing at school.

Funny how during my evening of absolutely none and painful sleeping last night, I remembered that time they tried to set me up with this jock so I would fall on my face at the school dance, asking him to dance.

Imagine if I had telekinetic powers, and was covered in pigs’ blood. It would be just like that movie. Thankfully, i found out before that dance about their evil setup, and I have smartened up some since sixth grade.

In high school, I’ll admit it, I lied all the time about “illness.” Migraines, and bloody noses and such. I of course, had to up the anti of my exact sick symptoms. They were mostly “mental health” days, because on the weekends I’d cry and feel completely too drained for homeroom.

I bet a lot of you did that too.

At college, you don’t want to get sick. There is way too much going on in the real world. And way too much meaningless shit going on in the facebook world for your sickbed to be bothered with.

Admittedly, I indulged today when I should have been attending my politics class. That’s the only class I will miss this week, I promise!

So here is me, 19~years old and most~likely and obviously dying from the formidable flu. AVIAN FLU! But not really. I’m just ill. Big deal, that happens.

But not like this. In between classes, the lukewarm dormitory tea and the power naps, and my uncalled cellphone, in my single single room, in my single single life, it feels sort of lonely. Who will catch me when I pass out on the floor? Who will “ooh” and “poor kid” me over my gigantic sneezes, too big for this apartment?

Yeah, pity is underrated. It’s the phone calls that make it count. From home, and from my friends that didn’t see me in the dining hall today.

Isn’t that so conceited? That I miss the care and the looking after? I watched Sex and the City today, a lot of it, after French 202. So great, but so probably not healthy for me.

Our SINGLE protagonist, Carrie, complains about being alone. Some other characters cry about being single. And about what would happen if one of them died all alone in their apartment?! No one would find them, and their underfed cats would gnarl off half their face…

The good news is, I don’t have a cat.

I do have this floor, carpeted by a sea of used white tissues. No one’s hear to yell at me about the unsanitary~ness of the situation. And my clocks haven’t all been turned ahead the hour they should be.

I mean, here in flu~land, all logic is defied. And my life feels hidden.

My dear friend in Chicago, ahoy!, he encourages me that I am far from being a hermit. He says I am single woman, and I should ROAR! And it makes me realize, I should probably forget about my anxiety about all these troublesome men. And that I don’t look that great when I pass them, all sniffling and sneezing, in the halls.

Someone has to tell those beautiful women on Sex and the City, I know it makes for good television, but you’ve got to get over those awful, time~consuming, blatantly not~worth~the~time men.

(And my illness has halted my resolving the problem with this hyphen button, I am still using the ~)