serious end to a not serious relationship

February is officially the month of lost lovers. Or something, I don't know. As if the sudden, dramatic appearance of My New Best Friend wasn't enough, or the funny text message I got from John at the drunken hour, I also got a letter from Love Affair this week, and word on the street is that Tyler is in town.

Tomorrow Joe is leaving, and what feels like The World's Longest Goodbye to the Relationship That Never Was can finally end. I feel like I have been holding my breath forever. I don't know how to say goodbye. I hate goodbyes. I tried to say goodbye to Joe so many times, and it never worked out. I think all the lost lovers cropping up is just evidence of how bad I am at ending things. I always leave the door wide open for reunions.

I am really going to miss Joe. I can't help but hate myself for it. This whole time I've been so blase about him because I've always known it wasn't going to last, but for what? I am hurt in the end anyway. I might as well have had a balls-in relationship...I was going to say...that might actually have meant something...but it did mean something in the end.

I still haven't decided whether to see him tonight or not, because true to the very end, I cannot make it appear as if I give a fuck. Also, I am so stressed I feel like I might implode. The first draft of my thesis is due in 11 days, the day before I leave for the desert, and all I want to do is...I'm not even going to say it.

Sobriety is a bitch.

I should see him. I should call Love Affair and ask him, how did we do this before? How did we live out our doomed relationship to the end? I don't remember. I was a different person then. I think men are better at it than women. And I think men are like, "Mmm, sex. Good."

I wonder when I'll have sex like this again.

...and unhealthy obsessions

Yesterday I spent a significant amount of time ducking people in uniforms, jumping fences, and getting snagged on razor wire for some photos and adrenaline. It started last week and has just escalated where all I look forward to is being places where I shouldn't be, all alone. I don't know how I went from shooting pictures of trees and rocks to shooting abandoned construction sites, but...there it is.

Oh wait, yes, I do know: Roosevelt Island.


















I allowed Joe to come over so I could say goodbye to him (in theory) but instead he spent the night and went with me to Roosevelt Island at 5 a.m. the next day. On the southern end of the island there is an abandoned hospital that takes some...maneuvering...to get to. Let's just say that you have to be somewhat desperate to get there, and I had to return Saturday morning to get the photos I needed without being arrested. This is the view of the south-facing facade. It's like a magical fairy tale, with the Queensboro bridge in the background, and this grassy expanse of uninhabited island, all alone, but sandwiched between the UN and Long Island City. The sensation of that, the serenity and beauty and history and triumph of not dying and being caught...yes, I acknowledge that it's completely juvenile and it's something I did back in San Francisco when I was craving attention from boys and all souped up on drugs and booze, and it's something I am doing now when I am completely by myself and sober. But I told you!!!! I can get addicted to just about anything. Fucken try me.

Yesterday after doing sunrise and sunset shoots, I got a surprise meetup call from My New Best Friend, the guy I was desperately in love with back in San Franny, only he had a girlfriend, so I tried to just be friends with him...right. I haven't seen him or spoken to him since leaving SF, though I have gotten some random texts and emails from him. It was crazy to see him. What was even crazier was how amazingly attracted I still was to him. I think it was because of some comment he made about something dark I had once said to him that he still remembered. That always gets to me, when men think that my dark side is somehow attractive and/or tolerable. I began to overheat immediately so I continued my sneaking around trend and led us to smoke a cigarette in the bowels of the club and I thought I was going to lose my mind so I did the thing where I just talked really fast and hoped that I didn't accidentally have sex with him. It was lovely yet horrible. What was even worse was that as soon as I realized how badly I wanted him, I decided to leave and then he asked me very nicely if I wanted to hang out later this week because he's in town until Sunday, which is, incidentally, the day that Joe leaves for San Diego.

I longed for his cocktail more than anything else.

New Crush(ed)

FUCK THIS DAY. 

Hardly slept last night, cried to my detox counselor, totally stressed because of school and sobriety and the crushing crushing abyss of sobriety is TWEAKING me out lately. 

Yesterday New Crush made my day by coming to the weekly lecture and sitting next to me, and I got to steal glances at him for an hour and a half, and then we had a nice smoke break together. Then not five minutes ago I ran into him outside and we talked about hanging out in suburban Chicago--where his folks live, be still my heart!--over the winter vacation, and then he dropped the g-bomb:

Girlfriend.

That horrible noise in my head: is that my teeth grinding, my soul crumbling, my heart breaking, or some wrenching combination of all three, made all the more poignant and unbearable by FUCKING SOBRIETY?!!!!

Focus, focus, focus, on unsurmountable amount of work I have to accomplish, and the light feeling that I had up until five minutes ago, before the explosion of the g-bomb. Let's harken back to December 31, 2006, close encounters with spastic crush-turned-My New Best Friend, when I decided to embark upon 2007: Love without Fear or Expectation, and recapture that kind of gusto, that is more about FUCK THE ALTERNATIVE than embracing reality.

Thank you. 

We booze, we boozed, we will booze

Yesterday was a day to reflect on. It started with my exciting purchase of plane tickets to Alaska and ended, predictably, with my head in the toilet. I was so plastered that I first threw up next to the toilet, and I still haven't cleaned it up because...well, that shit is gross and I can't yet handle it.

But in the 14 hours between the beginning and end of my day, I had a lovely post-birthday walkabout with Papa. I was feeling the loopy high of 8 hours of drinking the previous night, and we took advantage of the lovely weather to walk from Chambers Street over the Brooklyn Bridge. We meandered through Dumbo for a while, went up the Brooklyn Heights promenade, and then traversed the Gowanus Canal on our way to the Brooklyn Museum. We did this all on foot. I'm actually sore today. The whole day long we were just giggling and chatting and pointing at dogs. Papa is such a great ambling companion, and we were definitely moving at the same speed yesterday.

I can't stop talking about how ecstatic I am that winter is over. I honestly didn't realize how much the winter got me down. And I bet that if you did a study, you would discover that blogging decreases significantly in the spring and summer months. We're all too busy having fun outside to pause, reflect, and gripe online.

But now that spring has sprung, we can turn our attention to love love love again, and the confounding state of relationships today. Let us pray:

Before omelettes with my lovely neighboroommate, I got a message from a former lover, a guy I used to call My New Best Friend, because I was trying not to sleep with him. (It didn't work.) It's the second time MNBF has messaged me this week, which is a little strange, but that's beside the point. The first message was a photo of him wearing this hat that I'd given him. And the second message was a photo of Love Affair. No words, just the photo. I don't really know what that's all about, but I had this vision of them talking at a party, fishing for some common thing to talk about, and that common thing being a common lover. Brrr. I usually try to avoid thinking about shared bed partners.

Seeing Love Affair last week was a mixed bag. I think I used every possible excuse to touch him and kiss him. I got him to help me with some cooking and it really made me miss My Former Life, where we would cook together, eat together, sleep together...I told myself I wouldn't allow myself to miss him. But it just felt good to be next to him. Baw!

Anyhow Papa and my day transitioned into this very entertaining situation when we decided to go meet up with the kid I met in Chicago, the night that I Crown-Royaled myself into sleeping in my car. Let's call him Crown Royale Companion (CRC). I'm not attracted to him at all, but he'd invited me to meet up with him for the Murakami opening at the Brooklyn Museum, and I said yes. From the text message, it seemed like he was going with people, and I should meet up for a drink if I was around. Let me add a disclaimer here that one of our friends was "sure" that CRC was "gayer than a picnic basket," and didn't believe me when I said that CRC was hitting on me, and so I kind of was seeing this as a playdate with new friends.

Text messages have brought communicative ambiguity to an entirely new level.

Anyhow, Papa and I started to wonder if I was going on a date, so I made sure to mention in my next text that I was bringing a friend. I think this caused him to hustle to bring someone with him as well. It ended up being me and Papa, and CRC and CRCroommate.

So the four of us are strolling around the museum, and the dynamic was just funny because Papa and CRC and CRCroommate don't know each other at all, and I don't really know why we're there, because I'm not into CRC really. I thought CRCroommate was gay, so I was trying to give Papa and CRCroommate some space. I was also trying to give me some space so as not to make CRC think I was all into him, but I also didn't want to lose anyone. It was a little challenging because it was such a scene last night, with the collision of opening night and free first Saturday. The ambiguity of the arrangement was very funny to me. CRCroommate (not gay in the end) was probably disappointed that Papa isn't a hot chick, but was being a tremendously good sport about it all, and we had a nice time.

After the museum we went to the boys' apartment in Williamsburg and had beers. I started acting like a dipshit, just chattering to keep the energy up, but also to avoid thinking about the funny social dynamic. I was entertaining myself by rotating us about methodically so I wasn't just walking with CRC and such, and I was a little disconcerted to discover that I liked CRCroommate more than CRC. That kind of stuff amuses me. We then went to Barcade, which was great fun. It was just as crowded and noisy as the museum. We played a bunch of video games and then got crunched into a corner of the bar, where I connected with CRCroommate about architecture and urban planning. I decided I liked him a lot more. Then CRC came to break us up, and in response I went outside to smoke a cigarette and exchanged phone numbers with two boys who I got to talking to about pinball.

Anyhow, CRCroommate left after 3 drinks (smart guy) and we went off to a fancy bar where we somehow dropped more than a $100 drinking wine and eating prosciutto. What the fuck. I was so la-la by then I probably would have agreed to anything. Over the first bottle of wine, we got into a heated discussion about capitalism and the role of the financial markets in New York City specifically, and I found myself hating CRC because of the way he was arguing. He kept saying, "Wait, let me finish," as though we were just taking turns talking. To me that's such a power play in a conversation amongst peers. Part of the conversation is negotiating points and delimiting your own speech in the interest of participation. Again I went outside to smoke cigarettes and demanded to sit with these three guys who were talking about black holes. When I went back into the bar I ended up making out with CRC.

Now that I write this all down, it seems far less amusing. But now I'm stuck with wanting to see CRCroommate again, but not really CRC. Is it possible to make this switch? I didn't get CRCroommate's number. If I want to see CRCroommate again, I'm going to have to set things straight with CRC.

Then this morning I got this weird text (fucken text messages--although they are a hangover's best friend) from him that says:

"All the passionate talk of politics and social reform. Yet I sleep here alone. A man not of capitalist greed or liberal anarchy. But of loneliness."

Does this message give anyone else the creeps? And does anyone have advice for me on making the switch?

Do you think this will work?