Linguistic cartwheels in the stylings of a rant, these are the thoughts that keep me up at night.
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I am a 20 year old female writer residing in Central New Jersey. My influences include the great Dave Barry, Neil Gaiman, George Carlin, and the two greatest editors in the world, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. My webpage can be found at www.homestead.com/foxfyresden and I can be reached at Foxfyre33@aol.com. Happy reading!
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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
How do I love thee? I don't.
This weekend, reeling from a bad pseudo-breakup with a guy I had been seeing for awhile, I called up one of my exes as a "bandaid guy" - a momentary companion to help me forget I was rejected. Jay, my ex, and I were on good terms, and he invited me to spend the weekend at his dorm. Jay's college, Rowan, is a very nice school with decent seeming facilities, but the dorms leave a bit to be desired. Maybe it's just cause I was staying in one with five guys who didn't own a vaccum. That was kind of icky to the neat female somewhere inside me.
The only real romantic contact I had with him was at my house, and not the dorms - once before we left and once after he brought me home. At the dorm, we hugged and slept in the same bed, and had a few perfunctory kisses now and then, but that was the extent of it. Strangely enough, I fixed one part of me, the part that felt I was becoming unattractive and that men didn't desire me, while the other part, the side that longed for the love I seemed to lose with all my lost….boyfriends… remained in stasis and perhaps got a little worse. I felt powerful again, like a strong and capable woman, but there was a curious and mournful sense of emptiness that resonates, even despite my recovery elsewhere. Two of Jay's roommates had girlfriends, and they would call their boysfriends while I watched TV in the living room. I listened to the way (no, not evesdropping, the phone was about a foot from the couch..) they spoke to their girls, and I felt a soft twinge of regret that I didn't have that. No one ever told me they miss me, or they love me. Even when I was with Jon (my most recent ex of eight months, we lived together) and Marco (my first "real" boyfriend, and by that I mean we lived together) it was never said unbidden. It was always a parroted answer to something I said first. Behind the complacent visage I couldn't banish the thoughs of "Do men truly love? Do they feel the way I do? Is it possible that I will find a man someday who will say to me unprompted that he loves me with all his heart?" Even despite seeing it happen in front of my face, I still doubt it could happen to me. The closest I ever came was Roger (my ex husband), who would make frustrated admonishments that we should have had things easier, in the tone of a man trying to bail out the ocean. His declarations would be heavily tinged with futility, as one admitting their feelings when it is far too late to act on them. They never seemed real, more like a sotto voce murmur in a play that never quite made it to production.
I realize that I was right, in time, about Jay. I had entertained notions about maybe going out with him, but I don't love him, and I never could. We're very different people...I had fun with him, but I can't engage in entertainment that furthers my own emotional injuries. I felt far away this weekend, as someone watching her own life through a dusty and scratched window. And though I smiled, and sat in Jay's lap, flirting, and quietly I kept thinking, "I can't do this again, and I need to settle and try and get along with my own life."
7:19 AM
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