a new year

I feel like writing about this will either help work things out in my head, and I'll talk to myself less, sleep talk less, cease to feel constantly tongue-tied on the subject OR it will feed my inherent delusional paranoia and steer me towards self-destruction.

Well, alright.

Reading this blog makes me sad. I feel like I've wasted a lot of my latter college days beating myself up about something that was never meant to be, thinking less of myself and the world at large because I was so utterly misguided and depressed for so long. I guess that's just been a part of some maturation process.

I have a fatal attraction to tragedy. My need to fix people derives from some big sisterly superiority complex.

But you know what? I'm so good at being happy. I look my best with dimples. I'm starting to feel like myself again. I'm starting to feel like good things are once again on my horizon.

I guess I don't regret the events of the past year. It was just a dark and twisty time. But you know what? If it hadn't been for this whole diabolical merrygoround, I never would have met him.

I hope he likes me as much as it seems. But you can never really tell.

I still feel kind of soiled. Certain events of the recent past complicate matters. The fact that we haven't spoken openly about said past history complicates matters. It feels dishonest. I wonder if he wonders about it. I wonder if he wonders whether I have sordid motives.

I wish I could explain everything without the risk of oversharing. Without the risk of turning him off. But shouldn't he know where I'm coming from? Maybe it's stupid that I'm even obsessing about this. I know that he knows, but I don't know that he knows that I know that he knows. I just want everything on the table. What if getting into too many now meaningless details is a mistake?

I am very good at hiding. With him I feel no reason to. So why do it?

There is this issue of pacing. Taking it slow. And that sounds great to me, since I have no idea what I'm doing.
Should I worry that he hasn't made love to me yet?

I KNOW. I KNOW. I hate that I called it that too.
But I feel like it's building to that. And then sometimes I think we're losing momentum. And then I see him again.

I've never done this before!

His sweetness scares me. I don't deal well with flattery. I mistrust it. Not that he's given me any reason, whatsoever, to doubt him which is ironically SO petrifying. Or, at least that's how it was at first. Now we're approaching the three month mark, which is apparently significant? Now, I don't hear from him for 24 hours, and I privately freak the fuck out. I hear a strange tone in his voice over the phone and something MUST be awry. My crazy chick instincts are starting to flail about.

And I was so good at being indifferent to men. For a while there.

Sometimes it's just so good with him, I'm holding back happy sobs.

If you sleep with a guy after dating him for a month, it's still probably just screwing at that point. At two months it's probably a little more significant. But waiting three months to bone?

Why?

I wish we just fucked before I started asking myself whether or not I'm in love. Because now that I like him too much, I want it to be lovemaking. Not just screwing. And that's...fucking scary dude.

Maybe we haven't had sex as a precaution against falling too quickly. Maybe HE took that precaution to ward off that kind of serious talk. To delay, what does he call it? The up-keep? Maybe he's freaked out that less than a year ago I gave my virginity up to a dude he's known half his life. Maybe he's not over his ex-girlfriend. Maybe it's that I've become this awesome goddess of fellatio and he's complacent. Maybe it's that I'm not on the pill? I would be if I had a reason. Remember what happened the last time I got on the pill, prematurely?

I think it's safe to say, at this point, he won't break up with me before we've slept together. So I wonder how long he'll make me wait for it.

Oh, Tassia. He hasn't even called you his girlfriend yet.

3 weeks ago he admitted he had no excuse.

And then his basement flooded, and the ceiling caved in.
And then I went 12 days without seeing him.
And then I got my FUCKING period.

It's as if the island doesn't want us to copulate...

LOST joke. wocka wocka wocka

I don't know anything. I just have to shut up and learn.

Did everything that happened 24 hours ago actually happen?

Yeah, I have tangible proof.

Weird.

It's not hate, it's

the absence of love.

I don't hate you, I just can't look at you.
And I regard everything you do or say with suspicion.

Mistrust YOU created.
Sorry.

You appear happy. You behave like someone, if even forcibly, in love.

I don't believe you? Not because I don't want to.

I'm sure it isn't all bullshit, but I don't know where to separate.
Maybe I never did.

I also once trusted you NOT to bullshit me. Simpler times.

Am I free yet?

I don't want to speak too soon because these things have tended to change, week by week, for too long now. And finding out that this is all falsehood next week will really depress me.

But maybe that's part of the grander construct.

Maybe it's that I see no more reason to love him.

Did I misconstrue empathy for love?

Because now that there's no empathy, no reason for worry, or perhaps a feeling that I haven't the right to empathize or worry, mill over his tragedy, being that there is no real place in his life for me...

I don't feel anything!

Maybe a little queasy.
But it's probably just that I drank too much last night.
By the way, are you kidding me, not bothering to say goodbye?

Josh's Alan

When we’ve learnt to stay apart is when we can come back together again.

There’s a woman’s face against the marble wall and that’s the sound of the accordion she’s playing. The harpsichord next. The songs she plays, they remind you of when you weren’t seventeen. It’s not like it was when she was really there -- that’s not to suggest that she’s all here right now -- and me?

I’m pregnant on another one, it’s going to be a boy and he will take my place and his son his. When I’m a great-grandfather I’ll have a heart made of perfume and pinecones, but mostly just a bottle of wine on the corner of the street again.

You said “we have to be careful.”

I said “I wish I could put it all back together again.”

You said “maybe next time around,” and then I realized we had failed for the first time yet again. How many time around the circle will it take? “Very close this time,” you said with a sad expression hanging from your face.

“Sure can’t we give it another go?” I asked. You said no. Not this time. I wondered if her songs that sat there next to us knew what it was that I’d eventually have to do in order to make all my shortcomings up to you. The songs? They said nothing.

But doors open, and doors close. People come and go, that’s what makes us want to turn around, but we can only remember now.

FUCK.

I reject this concept of quarter life crisis.

I think I'm going to let myself be angry.

Let myself fall off.

Dig a me shaped hole and rot there for a while.

WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I PUT ON A SMILE FOR YOU?

And then I'll go really far away and forget about all of this bullshit that I've somehow convinced myself is worth the misery.

IT'S NOT.

I'm going to turn off all the speculation that builds in the silence.

It's not real! IT'S NOT REAL!

Movie Night

Do you think it's possible to be in love with someone, and not want to be with them?

At the same time?

Genuinely and truly?

How can this ambivalence be possible?

Well, anything is fucking possible, but everything is still impossible.

I'm not sure what I mean by that, but it's not just a note of despair. I mean that anything is fucking possible when it's just happening to you, but everything is still impossible when I am actively participating.

So, it's a more PRONOUNCED note of despair.

I've discovered Netflix Watch Instantly, so I've been watching these terrible quote "Cerebral Foreign Dramas" and quote "Romances Featuring a Strong Female Lead", and these people in love are always longing for each other's embraces and imagining futures together and praying, praying, praying that that bitch would just disappear.

But I don't think that's it. Because all of these things send a sharp pang of fucking fear up my spine. Not a twinge, a pang, it lasts a while, but it's worse than the usual quakes I've always had. A gaze will stop my heart, only because I want to stop myself from seeing it. I want to run so fucking far in the opposite direction, I'm starting to imagine a small voice screaming somewhere in the back of my mind whenever he's present. And as for that bitch? Like her where she is. As long as she's around I will not ever, ever, ever end up in bed with him.

Does this coincide with my actions?

Well, no.

Because

more than anything I feel like I have to bear my teeth. Put on a mean face. Or at least a brave one.

Because I still care what he thinks.
And I don't really care about anyone else's opinions.

The other night he sent me into this completely blind frenzied RAGE because he looked at me for too long. Wasn't a big enough deal. I was drunk and couldn't do what I usually do, keep it in my periphery but pretend not to notice. I was too drunk for that, so I yelled, and then I kind of slapped the shit out of him. Really hard, too.

I haven't recovered from this. And of course, my kicking his ass is just a point in his corner.

Anyway, also in these movies, the smitten characters (though mostly men) are able to fill the vacancies of their beloved, if only for a fleeting 3.5 minutes, like with whores or their co-workers or people they pick up in bars.

Here's another delineation. Everyone repulses me. Can't look at them.

I don't even really feel lonely. In fact, right now I'm feeling like there are almost too many people around. And like I'm involved in too many lives. I guess I can let them distract me, and I do when I have to, but I don't really feel like burying myself in anything else.

I'm burying too much.

I think what's really driving me to distraction is the fact that he was the bravest thing I've ever done, and now that it's over I'm back to being a huge pussy.

That's what's really depressing me, not having to watch them dry hump not ten feet away from me.

Though it doesn't exactly help.

Also, I've been listening to too much Fiona Apple, and she just sets me off into crazy.

But Jesus, how does one stop listening to Fiona Apple? That sounds even more impossible than getting over him, or trying to quit smoking,

so I'm just not going to do any of those things.

Not yet.

Need to keep writing regularly, or I'll end up talking about it too much, and people will suspect things. I don't want anyone to know. As far as everyone knows, I am not in love. Though it's still true that I don't want to be with him. So none of it matters and it shouldn't make any difference.

I'll do my homework, though, really.

And watch movies.

It's not love, it's

Stockholm Syndrome!

Right?

Right?!

Now to search the internet for "Treatment of Stockholm Syndrome",

"Prescription Drugs used to treat Stockholm Syndrome",

"Street Drugs used to treat Stockholm Syndrome".