Overwrought

“Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you. It’s meritocracy applied to personal life, but there’s no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact – to keep from becoming cold and callous – and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn’t spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again.” ― Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

We all do subject each other to personal examinations in the dating aspect of our lives, or “meritocracy applied to personal life, but [with] no accountability”, as the author puts it. But coming to this understanding somehow makes you feel better about yourself, doesn’t it? You’re smarter than those ordinary people that aren’t thinking of this like you are, which you took from a book you read. You’ve got it going for you way more than all of those other people, because you’re self-aware. You see things they don’t. But then you still go on doing all of the things they do, yet because you deconstruct and anatomize every single part of your life, you somehow justify your existence, worth. You’re definitely worth more than all those other people, you have to be.

What do you do? You definitely use dating as an opportunity to talk about yourself. Not that you’re not kind, or you don’t listen to them talk about their life, job, interests, but, yeah, this is coming back to me somehow, right? Something I care about? Something I can relate to? What are you talking about again? Oh, yeah, I don’t know, it’s not really something that interests me.

I mean, it’s important that people you’re dating get to know who you are, that you be an open book. It just so happens that your book is overwrought. You’ve worked too much on it, you’ve edited it extensively. You’ve subjected unwitting bystanders to several chapters of it, many of whom simply wanted to have a drink and maybe fuck you.

Your chapter on sex is rather desexualized. You don’t want to be considered a sexual being, that’s demeaning. You’re not like those ordinary people. You intellectualize things. You need to give greater significance to every action you take. So when you can’t hold an erection long enough to ejaculate, alongside the person you’ve been seeing for two weeks, that has to have a deeper meaning. You think too much, you’ve been alone for quite a while, there’s something holding you back, maybe just relax and stop thinking so much. But if you stop thinking, you’ll be reduced to a sexual being, controlled by desires. Is it control? People seem to have a handle on it.

You stop; you needed to pee. When you come back, you apologize for having ruined the moment. “Nonsense,” he says. And here comes a frank conversation of sex and desire, and how it manifests in people. How does it manifest in you? What do you like? Do you know? You don’t want it said out loud. You say some things through the mumbling and the pauses and he seems happy. You end up back in bed, and he acts on those things you uncomfortably laid out to him. He says those things out loud again in order to turn you on. It’s irritating. You can’t stand to be reduced to a sexual being, it’s demeaning. you’re better than that… I’m better than that. I eventually managed to orgasm. He seems pleased, so I say the first thing that comes into my head: “Don’t read too much into it.”

Projection

“I think that when you’ll allow yourself to appreciate the person next to you the way they are, with good things and not so good things, then the situation will change. But now I think you’re still focusing on what that person awakens in you. You’re only looking at what you become or how you imagine yourself alongside him. He somehow disappears from the scenery as a real, material person. Any guy for you is only a sort of projection of what you become through him. But formulating it doesn’t matter. You lose yourself in pretty words. Just live, goddamn it! You don’t need so much introspection.”

Usually I can hide it better, the fact that men I date mean nothing to me on their own, as individuals, but rather they represent expedients to my own personal growth. It’s a tough notion to grapple with, especially under the watchful eye of society, but relationships are inherently selfish. It doesn’t have to ruin one’s conception of love, but perhaps it can update it.

I tweeted recently that I had the frightening thought that I’d finally found a job I think I’d be good at, Rachel’s in the show Unreal. She’s a producer on a dating competition program and is in charge of manipulating the women on the show to drum up high ratings. I say frightening because my own behavior with men would effect the act  of manipulating. It has been described as aloof and wry, with a subtle camp element to it, which, as a result, makes me ridiculously cute. Is it a performance? Everyone performs. We can go as far as to say that everyone’s conception of themselves is performative. But does awareness of that act make us be held accountable for that performativity?

Maybe I’m trying to acquit myself of being an asshole. The quoted text at the top is something my friend told me, and it doesn’t paint me in a good light, but rather in an interesting light. I find that my complete emotional devotion to someone clashes with my disregard of their individual value and it’s peculiar and an aberration. Do I view others as stepping stones to creating an idea of wholeness in myself? One that would alleviate the loneliness, indecisiveness and reignite a dead will? Probably.

“Since one does not yet feel oneself as a unity, one posits the unity of the other’s body as something one might acquire in the future; one anticipates the one day one will achieve this wholeness. The image which allows one to anticipate one’s own individuality as a conscious, unified ego is an ideal apparition, it is an ideal ego.”  – Michael Lewis on Jacques Lacan

People misunderstand me most of the time. Maybe it’s because I’m inconsistent. I seem to have created a personality based on performing certain traits for others. A person only by the grace of others. But that’s not very interesting. We all want people to like us. Yet I’m so lost in my attempts at individuality, that I become those things. I will be dramatic, I’ll exaggerate, complain about other people, expound at length on my romantic dalliances. I go on diatribes about my dislike of apples, even though there’s little conviction behind it. I fully approve of political correctness, yet completely dismiss certain social standards that are of too little significance for you to conform to. Mind you, this is based on a very elaborate thought process that I’ve never cared enough to establish. It amounts to “If you’re upset by something I said, you have bigger problems than you think”, which is a Rupaul quote that I’ll never forget.

What I say no longer has any conviction. I want excitement that’s within myself, and not produced by others. I want contentment that’s not momentary and engendered by others. What’s painful is that it feels good sometimes. Others being there to alleviate the loneliness, or as Lacan puts it in abstract and academic words, to make you think you might be an actual person like them someday. Am I veering into teenage angst territory? No, because people do understand me. They understand facets of myself that I’m willing to create in their presence. Subconsciously, most of the time, because it’s rooted in the idea of social standards that I’ve come to be attuned to over time. But what is there to understand beneath that? That’s the upgrade from teenage angst, the realization that there’s nothing to understand. There’s nothing to us but our performative aspect. Judith Butler determines that gender “operates as an interior essence that might be disclosed, an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates”.

“Certain features of the world, including people we know and lose, do become “internal” features of the self, but they are transformed through that interiorization, and that inner world, as the Kleinians call it, is constituted precisely as a consequence of the interiorizations that a psyche performs.” – Judith Butler.

How does one cope with that? How does it not invalidate your every decision, desire, ambition? Individuality is a misnomer. Perhaps there’s a need for a new criterion of self-definition to be universally implemented, one that wouldn’t be so harmful and debilitating.

Definition

I’m afraid I may have exhausted my well of self-reflection. And I’ve never felt less like myself. There doesn’t seem to be anything quite that interesting to say about me anymore. My self-awareness has finally brought me to the realization that I’m as human as everyone else. It seems like a ridiculous statement but I’ve always looked to separate myself from the rest and to have human tendencies was a constricting notion. Yet, in truest human form, I want others to like me. I search for validation just like everyone else, confirmation that I’m abiding by a life worth living.

As someone once told me, there are some human characteristics that, if rejected, will make you automatically unfulfilled in life. You can’t expect to separate yourself from the world and then wind up happy. It’s one of the most human inclinations to want to be a part of something, especially since communities have been present since the beginning of mankind. Yet we strive so intensely for individuality. Because we want to believe that our individual presence in this world will make a difference, that it will be worth something. And, well, good luck with that.

There’s something quietly devastating about realizing that nothing matters anyway, isn’t it? It doesn’t manifest itself as though a brick just hit you on the head, but rather like finding a leech that had been draining your blood for quite some time. By the time you actually do find it, you had already lost so much blood that you’re tired. So very tired. You keep waiting for that blood transfusion to reignite your drive, but no one seems to be a match. Not great metaphors there, I’m afraid. But I’ve never had any intention to be subtle.

“Nothing holds me to anything / I want fifty things at once”, wrote Fernando Pessoa in one of his poems. For a while now, it’s been all I can think about. It’s representative of my own feelings, otherwise it wouldn’t be so evocative. However, it seems to point out something deeper, i.e., my fear of definition. I almost dread becoming an actual cohesive person because it would mean I would need to start living a life worthy of that person, and that breeds disappointment. At this point in my life, though, I don’t want to be any one thing. Of course, people are never one thing, but at a certain age they are pushed into consolidation. Society functions on coherence, and expects that of its people as well.

So I find myself at an impasse. Is the inconsistency of my behavior and indifference towards the world a testament of my age and, therefore, something I will grow out of, or am I actually anything special?

The compulsion to repeat

All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

There is something particularly troubling that occurs when I meet someone that excites me. I go overboard. I’m not sure there is any better way to describe it. It so happens that every couple of months I encounter a guy whom I deem so enticing, so incredible, of such great intelligence that I find myself head over heels after one date. Some would call it love at first sight. If only it were that bullshit. In fact, while aware of my own subjectivity in assessing one’s attributes and regarding them as alluring and of the reality that I only construct those attributes as such because of some deep-seated issues, I am also conscious of another little tidbit: they are not that great. They are not so great as to justify my behavior. And that strikes me as completely absurd. Yet I do this repeatedly.

I am often tortured by an incessant anxiety when I am not in their presence, and I find that the anxiety is at its most intense when they cancel our plans or don’t want to hang out a particular time. Basically, whenever it becomes apparent to me that they don’t want to hang out at any and all times, which probably means they’re simply well-adjusted, something that made me fall for them in the first place. Either that or they’re emotionally unavailable but, spoiler alert, I may have a thing for that too. Yet oftentimes, even if I think I did something wrong, it doesn’t translate to self-doubt. What it becomes is a frustration that boils down to this: “I am rather amazing and pretty good looking, so please hang out with me at any and all times so that you will see that and you will stay. Please stay.”

This pattern that I feel compelled to repeat exposes something that truly saddens me. However strongly I feel about these guys I meet, they are never as important as what they symbolize, which is a sense of grounding. For the past few years I’ve been in a state of aimlessness, and I can’t seem to escape it. As a matter of fact, I romanticize it, glorify its meaning to myself and to others. Most of what I write is a romanticization of my lack of direction and purpose, the emptiness of it. And it is not something I am yet ready to put a stop to. Glorifying my lack of purpose gives me, ironically, a sense of meaning. Thus, the only part of my life that I can allow myself to be grounded by, something I desperately crave, is represented by my romantic entanglements. But, I go overboard. I push it too much. I become anxious, worried that it may take them too long to fall for me. If they do, I have a feeling that after a few months, a year, I would quite possibly grow bored or tired of them, because, remember, they weren’t that great to justify my initial behavior in the first place. Wash, rinse, repeat.

“Don’t wait too long.”

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. – Viktor E. Frankl

They say clinginess is a very unattractive feature… wait, I’ve been over this already. I used to be very clingy, you see. And then I thought I overcame that. But behavioral patterns have a way of resurfacing time and time again. Viktor E. Frankl’s notion of happiness is problematic. Initially, I believed that by simply substituting the word happiness with the word love in that particular quote, I found the solution to clinginess. “You can’t pursue love,” I said to myself. And that seemed to work, if merely as a great censorship tool when talking to potential new love interests. Yet Frankl seems to be saying the complete opposite, that happiness ensues from your pursuit of love. Not only pursuit, but a complete surrender to another person. This is the same man who was in a concentration camp and the meaning of life he came up with amounted to love of another. “I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved,” he wrote. That, if anything, is the definition of idealization. Perhaps that in suffering, at the lowest and weakest point of the human spirit, you shouldn’t be delineating philosophies of life to conduct yourself by later on, or worse, for others to conduct themselves by.

Perhaps I’m scared that he may be right, that I may never find happiness, since in the past two years I couldn’t even hold on to anything long enough to warrant a surrender. I’m scared that I may empathize, given that some of my few moments of bliss occur in contemplation of a beloved person. It’s bullshit, though, because my happiness shouldn’t be directly linked to and engendered by the existence of another person in my life. Yet I wish it was bullshit. Two days ago, I met someone. Handsome, adorable, smart, complex, troubled and with whom I have so much in common. A smile and demeanor that made me joyous. Upon returning home that night, I thought to myself, “I suppose that’s a good reason to stay here now.” I should point out that I have recently moved to a new city and a new country and I had been contemplating leaving. Yet now it’s been made clear to me that he only wants to be friends. Perhaps that was a lot of pressure to put on someone who’s not even interested in kissing me.

But my beloved person… he’s on the other end of the world now. However, even if so far away, the fact that he exists gives me some comfort. He is unlike anyone I have ever met and the time together was simply remarkable, if frustrating. But something truly noteworthy about that period was that it brought to light an even deeper fear of loneliness. I was always aware of that fear, of course, but he managed to produce a desire in me I didn’t think was possible and, instantly, a failing. He wants a family. And I had never thought I could hope for that in my life. There it was, the only person I met in my twenty-two years that I could imagine having a family with telling me this. “But to have a family I need to be someone that can be relied upon,” he then told me. That he needs time for self-development. And to that I replied:

“Don’t wait too long.”

And right as I said it, it broke my heart.

“Are you strong enough to be yourself?”

Around the age of fifteen, I came to the realization that I am gay. In this pivotal moment, I made a friend, and what he said to me elicited a simple acceptance of this part of me. I don’t remember wallowing in misery or hating who I was. It became matter-of-fact. Yet there was something else that this process engendered in me. “There are two types of gay people,” he wrote to me, “the ones who say they are gay and screw everything that moves. Then there are the gays who simply love differently, nothing about them changes.” I became neither. I was special, suddenly. And the way to remain special wasn’t to conform to any types of gay people, but to reject them, as I rejected being shaped by the cultural norms of my environment. How could I ever expect that nothing about me would change because of my sexuality? It’s a nice, effective notion to advance gay rights movements. “We’re all the same!” Except we’re not, are we? But it isn’t my sexuality that differentiated me from my straight friend at the time who thought my new friend had turned me gay. It is what I made of it. It’s something all of us do, we make narratives out of experiences, out of things that we believe are intrinsic to our identities. Being gay is inherently a part of me. What I have become because of it is not inherent, but constructed. My identity is forever shaped by the narratives I made of my life experiences. I wasn’t hurt by my straight friend’s ignorance, my narrative was already constructed. “I am gay. This is who I am. And I am normal.” Eventually, my actions gave legitimacy to my statements, and his ignorance lost. His narrative had to change.

The friend that I made at that time, however, pointed out the importance of discovering whether I am strong enough to be myself. I am strong enough to be gay. To endure the trials that come with it. But “I am gay” is not equal to “this is who I am”. Who I am is a construct of past experiences, a constant negotiation and re-negotiation of events and people and actions. Was my mom too distant and too preoccupied to give the attention and affection a momma’s boy needed? Has my dad’s tacit disappointment and disinterest in me caused my yearning for validation? Did realizing I was gay override those issues, since I didn’t need my mom’s affection or have to care about my father’s feelings towards me anymore? Since there was suddenly something special about me, a part of me that was hidden from everyone else, I found comfort in that, instead of my parents. But does any of this matter when identity is constantly shifting through reconstitution of past events? Yes and no. Yes, identity is certainly fluid, but it is also constructed around repetition, as Butler stated. In your repetitive behavior you can notice, if you look hard enough and consult some Psychology 101, the underlying effects of your parents actions.

Am I strong enough to be myself? I think that question is rendered irrelevant by what I’ve said. Who is this “I” that I need to be strong enough to be? Politically, sure, be proud that you’re gay. But shouldn’t we be evolved enough to not be affected by other people’s ignorance about sexuality? I’m over it, honestly. I’m an introvert. I am reserved. But I’ve come to realize I have no issues kissing my date in public or holding his hand, and that is simply because I am not acknowledging the world around me. My behavior is not politically driven. But an inner conflict begins with a self-awareness regarding my repetitive behavior right as I’m conducting myself, especially with the person I’m dating, since interacting with someone you deeply like is an incentive towards a reevaluation of yourself. So, would self-awareness be enough to change repetitive behavior? Can I shift my identity from a reliance on future possibilities, an inescapable facet of my personality engendered by myself as a teenager needing to survive in the wake of the dissociation from the people around me, and towards a reliance on allowing comfort from the present moment? Could the moments of joy spent with someone alleviate the intolerable burden of being?

Part II.

I hesitated. My reaction time is usually rather slow, and that is due to an uncertainty engendered by my severe lack of drive. Decisions are not made on the spur of the moment, since I constantly reassess where my interest in something lies. Needless to say, it is usually meager. Why should I go downstairs with him? Where does that fall within my parameters of desire? Why did he have to signal me to follow instead of saying something, anything? Probably because that would have ruined the sensual atmosphere that he thought us kissing and rubbing up against each other had created. Also, it was rather authoritative. Without figuring out where my interest lied, I got up and followed. Yet while he was going down the stairs, he turned his head briefly. Where’s your authoritative confidence now?

We entered the bedroom and then he pushed me on the bed.  His piercing eyes and playfully mischievous smile made me disgusted. I remembered that look from other very nice guys I went to bed with. On two separate occasions I felt like a prey, when nothing from their prior behavior signaled that any such thing would occur.

I was lying on my back, then on top of him; we were making out. This went on for a bit. I was already growing tired of it. He took off my jumper and I felt compelled to take off his. He took off my pants and threw them away on the floor. I felt that was an unnecessary display of passion. I suppose I wasn’t feeling quite comfortable. Then as he pulled my hair hard and slapped me on the ass, all I could think of was, “Oh, ’cause you’re short…” Meaning he was releasing his frustrations about his height and exerting dominance over me. Eventually, I realized where my interest lied. And I told him, “I don’t think I want to go any further.” He suddenly changed back to his warm-hearted nature, reassuring me that he understands perfectly. That everything is alright.

Maybe that’s why I don’t like nice people. And when I make that statement to others, they’re always so perplexed, or think that I believe the niceness is fake. But that’s not the case. This guy was so very nice, and so kind. But seeing him in this “intimate” light, all I could think of was, how are you the same person? Is that what intimacy is, performing a dynamic which you’re not able to in your day-to-day life, e.g. dominance over the prey, which is also coincidentally taller than you?

I’m proud of myself that I’m the same with everyone. A misanthrope, a cynic, an amateur psychologist… But does that mean I can’t be intimate with someone? Because I can’t shut off and be less of what I am in that moment? A friend said to me: “When we fuck, we fuck. And when we’re being psychologists, we’re being psychologists.” Maybe truer words were never spoken.

I worry that my entire life will be a struggle to get rid of my sexual inhibitions. London feels like the wrong place to succeed at that. It seems like nobody has time to wait to build something with another person. And I don’t think I’ll get anything out of being a whore, since I’m not a very sexual person.

But, I masturbate. So, yeah. Such logic.

Part I.

The neighborhood proved exhilarating. In its history, yes, since apparently Earls Court district has been the home of such names as Freddie Mercury, Alfred Hitchcock and even Princess Diana at one point or another. Currently John Barrowman and Gary Barlow also reside there. Thanks, wikipedia. Yet, as I was walking towards the guy’s address, I wasn’t aware of these facts. But I was struck by such sophistication and style in the buildings. I could tell I was in the presence of greatness when a middle-aged woman walking one of those Chinese Crested hairless dogs passed by me. As I turned the corner and reached my destination, it was rather disappointing. A bland, square, apartment complex. It wasn’t the fact that I wished he lived in one of those expensive and refined houses I passed by, since he is just twenty-four, but it had to do rather with the architectural mismatch. A fleeting moment of disappointment, however. That should hardly matter to me at this point.

“God, this place looks horrible,” I thought, looking at the white hallways with the uncomfortably low ceiling. It seemed as though a hospital and college dorm were merged into one building. Not a good combination. I knocked at his door. A few seconds passed. “Didn’t he just open the door for me downstairs like a minute ago?”, I thought, feeling a bit uneasy suddenly with the idea of meeting someone for the first time at their place.

“Hey,” he said with a smile as he opened the door.

“Hi. Fuck, you’re short…” I think you can imagine which part was audible. Handsome, curly blond hair with blue eyes. But I already knew that. I didn’t know his height though, because Tinder doesn’t make you complete a profile. And it is rather weird to ask someone how tall they are. But, “oh my God, the place is bigger on the inside. This is my Doctor Who moment, ” I thought to myself as I followed him up the stairs to the open living room and kitchen. But he’s no Matt Smith. Obviously.

I remembered what he had written on his profile, which was “wine o’clock is my favorite time of the day”.”Oh, well. That should improve things,” I thought. I hesitated as to where to sit on the couch as he headed for the fridge and came back with a bottle of wine and a glass. A half empty glass was already on the table near the couch. I’m not sure if that should be viewed as sad or not.

“So much chanting today from the stadium. Did you hear it on your way here?,” he said to me after he sat down quite far away on the couch, but not noticeably far.

“There’s a stadium? I’ve never actually been to this area before.”

“Yeah, Chelsea. There was like a football game and all the fans were chanting on the way to the tube… How long have you been in London for?”

“About seven months. You?”

“Two years. How are you liking it?”

“Ah, the inescapable question. It’s a mixed bag, honestly.”

It has become so tiring explaining to everyone how London has failed me. Recounting the same ideas, that it is alienating, that it is quite difficult to find people to connect with, people that can become your friends and not merely acquaintances or classmates. And everyone nods approvingly while nothing from hearing their experiences proves they know how it feels. And with him I don’t believe it was very different. He went on to explain just how irritating winter in London can be. How he failed to see the sun for three months once because he had to leave for his job in finance quite early in the morning and left work too late. Now he goes skiing and sunbathing abroad in the winter, or back to Paris where he is so glad he kept his place, or across South America for two months. The struggle is real.

“I’ve heard that summer in London might make me fall in love with it,” I told him, believing that it is more in line with the discussion. He agreed, telling me of the barbecues every weekend and of how happy British people can become due to good weather. I think that neither the person that told me that initially, nor this guy really knew anything about what I find enjoyable.

“Last summer I didn’t spend the weekends here, however,” he went on. “I went to Nice to my parents’ beach house.”

“I’ve heard Nice is quite crowded.”

“Yes, but the house is more secluded. It has a pool and it was quite a lot of fun.”

As he was telling me this, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between his experience and a few chapters in the book The Line of Beauty, especially because it was standing on a shelf behind him. In the book, a politician and his family spent quite a lot of time in the summers in a mansion in France, lounging by the pool and so on. I commented on this comparison, but I don’t believe he understood that in the book this upper class family is not depicted in a very positive light.

We went on talking about books. The conversation was very harmonious. As a matter of fact, it had been this way from the beginning of the night. He proved to be educated, receptive, intelligent. There were a few moments, however, where I was unsure whether he was aware of the pretentiousness of his life stories. I was talking about LA as one of my possible dream cities to live in, and he was quite indignant at the thought: “Why would you want to live there? I was there once on my way to Japan to visit my dad when I was sixteen, and it was awful. Only three days and I wanted to go back to Paris so bad.”

Huh.

He got up to bring the bottle and filled up the empty glasses. When he came back, he sat down closer to me. “Subtle,” I thought. I was still talking about The Hours, I think, when he put his hand on my knee. As he was looking at me quite intently, having also brought his face closer to mine, I was still very interested in what I was talking about that I didn’t want to stop. Yet I felt I had to, and so he leaned in and kissed me. He lifted me and laid me on the couch, continuing to kiss me. For a half-French guy, he wasn’t very good at it. I was a bit bothered by his stubble irritating my skin so I couldn’t really get into it either.

He got up and signaled me to follow. It felt a bit odd and unnerving. As if responding well to the conversation was a sign that “the subject is ready.”

To be continued…

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Me: I met the actor tonight. We had a nice time. But we didn’t do anything, we didn’t even kiss. Although that may be because he’s in rehearsals and I have a cold. At least I hope so. I was my usual melancholic, intelligent, but depressive self.  Maybe not overtly depressive, but I feel there’s so much pain in the way I compose myself these days.

I’m very sad right now. I don’t know what the reason is anymore. Postmodernism, maybe. It’s fucked me up a bit.

A: You shouldn’t take it so seriously.

Me: It’s very serious to me right now. Forget about postmodernism, the things about identity and different selves. That I don’t know who I am anymore is something else. But London is really bad for me at this point. I hate everything and everyone. And, at the same time, I can’t hide behind that anymore. I know very well know that the city is not at fault, the people are not at fault for my hatred of them. I am. I am the common denominator. When I went to Hyde Park with those girls that afternoon, they were genuinely happy about everything around them, and I couldn’t stand it. I can’t put the blame on other people anymore for my dislike of them.

I can’t take this city much longer.

A: You’re coming home soon.

Me: And I feel rejected by everyone, even as I try to pretend I don’t, even to myself. Even this guy kicked me out. And while he may have done it quite nicely, and I understand why given his profession… I don’t know.

A: This thing with the actor, don’t take it too seriously, really. Don’t transpose it into something bigger than it is.

Me: I am not. It’s about the fact that I want someone’s embrace. Someone that counts.

A: Aww… Well, there are times like these.

Me: And he hugged me at the beginning, and as I left. But that’s not what I wanted. Well, not as a curteousy.

There was this scene on Shameless recently. I watched the episode today. The main character, this girl, has been through fucking hell this season. And it all started because of this one guy. After all of it, destroyed as she was, the girl went to his place and started punching him and crying and saying how she should’ve told the cops his name and things would’ve been better.

And as she was crying so much and holding her hands around her, she took a step towards the guy. Then she covered her eyes with her hand because she realized there’s nothing he can do to comfort her.

I cried so much.

A: First of all, stop watching shows that mess you up, it’s not good for you.

Me: I don’t have what to hang onto anymore, that is me. To say: oh, I am this, I am that.

A: You do. You are still yourself. You just can’t find people to make connections with. But sometimes that’s hard for everyone. And you are still you, with your periodical sadness, as if it just takes over you at certain times. You haven’t felt like this in a while. It’s hard, and I understand, loneliness can be terrifying. But don’t let it forget who you are. And, well, this thing with the actor, it is what it is. Don’t make more of it.

Me: Forget about him, he’s not the reason for this.

A: Was he the trigger?

Me: No, it’s how I act with these people. I have such a defeated attitude all the time. I am intelligent, but its only use at this point is to explain how everything about me is joyless. How am I supposed to make anyone like me?

A: Well, you’re not supposed to make people like you. I mean, when have you ever done that? You know how it is, the people that are great are those who appreciate this part of you.

The thing with the depression, though, that’s not good. I’m not being very coherent, I know.

Me: I understand that I’m not supposed to make people like me.

A: I realize that you need someone, with whom you can have some sort of connection. Right?

Me: Yeah.

A: It’s just that you can’t force these things, either they come naturally or they don’t.

Me: I will say that, in all of it, I am proud of myself that I am still the same with everyone.

A: Yeah, it is really important to be true to yourself.

Me: I am not performing anything.

I texted him:

‘I hope at the end of the day I’m not an uncomfortable presence or one that brings others down. It was nice to see you again. Good night.’

A: Did he reply?

Me: No.

A: Well, just get some sleep. Don’t think about it anymore, it’s nighttime, our brains are predisposed to these sort of ideas. Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning.

We miss you here a lot.

Me: You don’t even know how much I miss you two.

A: Well, just a bit longer, and it’ll be okay.

Me: Good night.

A: Night.

Jaded

My life is in a whirl, all kinds of stuff and I don’t know if I could offer anything to you (I don’t want to not offer anything). Why can’t you just show up on the bus, sit next to me and dazzle me with your sophisticated English? If it starts on the bus, it can be just a good memory, a cute encounter on the bus. It doesn’t have to be a disappointment in the end, while the internet thing always is.

I met him about a week after we started talking. Before the actual encounter, there was a disconnect in our exchange of thoughts and remarks, partly because the conversations were carried out by email, but also because he was one of those people who avoided answering certain things for God knows what reason and there was a sense of mystery that went along with it. He was interesting. Irritating at times, but he piqued my curiosity and excited me. Even this paragraph at the beginning, which he wrote to me in a fragmented way in a few emails, seems rather sweet, if dubious. But why the fuck would I want a memory of a cute encounter on the bus that would never lead to anything anyway? Such an outdated view of modern communication and romance. And the way he mentioned to me that he’s ‘the only human being without Facebook’ because he loathes it, should have set off some real hipster alarm bells for me. No one cares about Facebook anymore, really. It’s simply a way to keep up with the people you know. To which he replied: ‘certainly while slyly fucking up, blemishing, destroying your relations, connections that spring from the colorfulness of human nature.’ Because a cute encounter on the bus will certainly be more powerful than maintaining a friendship on Facebook after perhaps moving away. Such logic.

My preconceived idea of him prior to meeting reminds of David Shields’ post-structuralist idea that ‘the perceiver by his very presence changes what’s perceived’. I wanted him to be interesting, so I linked my perception of him with ideas that create excitement in me. Then I met him. And from the instant I laid eyes on him from across the street, the excitement vanished. I had gone on one or two dates in the weeks leading up to this, but they never amounted to much. I didn’t think much of them before, it became worse once I saw them, and I tolerated their presence for the duration of consuming one beverage. But with him it was a disappointment, because I did think something of him. And I saw this scrawny guy, just a bit shorter than me, with ears sticking out and blue pants with a rope belt. That last detail was quite a lot to handle. Physical appearance aside, he had no presence. There was no complexity that I felt in his struggle to make sense of where he was in his life. Plus, he was a vegetarian. He was right, he was a disappointment, but I doubt the internet had much to do with it.

Very often I find myself comparing the connection I expect to have with someone, romantically, with how I felt in the moments spent with the person I talked about in an earlier post. I think about him sometimes. There was something magnetic that drew me to him, and it was the combination of a seemingly troubled soul, aloofness and beauty. Nothing before or ever since made me feel that way. Not even my ex-boyfriend of a year and a half sparked such overwhelming emotion. His kiss, his embrace, they meant the world. Now I am constantly pretentiously callous and in a state of disinterest that ‘sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever gonna feel’ (Spike Jonze, Her).