Boyfriends

My comforts this week that have kept my head above water have been finding old stuff I forgot I owned and my "boyfriends". I started referring to my two guy friends, Mike and Liam, who I spend the most time with lately, as my boyfriends because when I was getting ready to go over to Mike's house last night (after seeing The Dark Knight Rises with them the night before), Tony asked me, "Are you dating them?".
I am not dating two men simultaneously. I leave that kind of thing to people who are better at multi-tasking. I am not dating anyone, in fact. I just find it funny that he had to ask, and even funnier that he had zero disapproval in his tone when he did. In Tony's book, it would be a good sign if I did anything with anyone right now. He would probably approve of it if I told him I was about to let 10 guys run a train on me. He might tell me to use protection, but that would probably be his only input.
I like pretending that I have two boyfriends. It makes it seem, to myself only, that I am winning. I know there is no winning in a break-up, that we're both losers and I'm the bigger one because Gino ended it. Still, pretending I could win gives me back the little bit of confidence I have been lacking for so long. I was never confident in myself while I was married to Gino. I always considered him to be above my station in terms of attractiveness, a fact I told him more than a few times. He did not do much to boost the little bit of confidence I had when his response was, "Yeah, but I've never been with any girl who was really good-looking."
He reminded me often that I was the opposite of his type, and for a while I did try to resemble girls he was attracted to, with darker hair and the closest approximation I could get to a tan. I did this willingly, of course, to try to pique his interest, not because he asked. He did not treat me poorly, exactly, but he neither did he treat me like I was anything special. It hurt later on when I was talking to Liam and Mike about it, explaining that I was still so into Gino, even after seven years together. It pains me still to know that not only was he just not attracted to me anymore, but that he doesn't even like me. It is unfair like an unrequited crush is unfair in that you cannot argue with what someone feels.
Tony remarked a few times, when I was still married, that he didn't know me anymore, that marriage had changed me into someone who apologized all the time and was needlessly subservient. I denied it, thinking he couldn't possibly know what my marriage was really like, but of course he knew. I am the only one who didn't know. My subservience, my need to please, was totally unnecessary. I tried so hard to be a great wife that I failed to notice, for the past few years, at least, that he couldn't care less what kind of wife I was because he didn't want a wife anymore.
Now that I am preparing to move into my tiny bachelorette apartment, I have started to really attack the storage unit I share with my ex and make sure I have all of things I will need. I found most of what I thought I would, and was surprised to feel so much attachment to such commonplace items as a wooden spoon or a pair of sneakers. It is overwhelming to see so many items that I can attach significance to collected in one place. In a huge pile of clothes, I found the shirt Gino was wearing the first night we hooked up. We never had a proper first date, but we did have drinks before we went to his place, so I suppose it counts. In the same pile, I found the suit he wore in our wedding, a navy, pinstriped Calvin Klein that made him look like he was born in a suit. Under the pile was a plastic bin containing his and my costumes from three Halloweens ago. He was the Joker and I was Harley Quinn. I will miss being with someone who was such a kid with me, who had no qualms about dressing up as a comic book character unironically. We were both kids, I see now. We never grew up because we were caught in limbo and never had to be serious about anything. One of the good things about being single now is that I never have to worry again about how mature, or immature, he is. He can be exactly the way he wants to be, whomever that is, and I can be whomever I am.

Blind Mole-Rat

I posted a question yesterday on Facebook, asking my friends about which tattoo artists are doing good work in the area. I have plans for my "freedom tattoo" of a squid fighting a whale, and I do not want to entrust it to a hack. It's a tattoo I have wanted to get for a while, but something held me back from actually committing to it. I know that a contributing factor was that the ex did not like girls who had "lots of tattoos", but also because I never felt like I really needed it. I am feeling a need to mark this time in a unique way, to do something just for me that will be with me forever. Roughly an hour after I posted the question, I received a text from my friend Mike telling me that he was going to Boston the following day. I assumed, as I usually do, that he was telling me this to let me know that he wouldn't be able to hang out with me this week, so I responded with "Boo you whore!".
It took several hours and two more explanatory texts from Mike for me to see that he was asking me if I wanted to go with him because he was going to make an appointment with a great tattoo artist. I am seeing more and more that I tend to do this- I assume wrong and miss what is right in front of my face. I have a lack of presumption that has become a flaw in my character, to the point where I seem as imperceptive as a blind mole rat. I knew, for example, that my ex-husband was unhappy, but I assumed it was because of our finances or his desires to further his education that kept getting sidetracked. The week before he told me he wanted a divorce, he handed me his wedding band and told me he didn't need it anymore. I responded by telling him to quit fucking around and put it back on. The day we had the conversation that ended it all, I had just made him cupcakes. It took him beating me over the head with the truth- that he was not in love with me anymore- to get me to see what his problem was. I float along, not picking up what's being laid down, and I have a feeling this has lead to a few missed opportunities in my life. How many times have I told myself that I am misreading signals when I have actually been on the right track?
I don't think I was always like this. I was more of a risk-taker when I was younger, queen of the "I like you, do you like me?" note in middle school and always creating a flirtation between myself and some male friend of mine that was entirely imagined on my part. It had to be the constant flow of rejection that made me a little more conservative in my approach to people. The problem with this is that no one ever says what they want or need from you anymore, unless they are your closest friends. My closest friends are crystal-clear with me. If I am pissing them off, they tell me, and if they need a favor, they ask. There is not a lot of beating around the bush. This is all part-in-parcel with my inability to recognize flirting when it happens. Flirting is all about subtlety, and I am neither subtle, nor am I good at picking up on subtlety. When I flirt, I am about as subtle as a flying brick. The fact that I like someone is written all over my face, and not just because my ears turn bright red. I send out all of that energy hard and aggressive, because life is just too short to half-ass it, but when someone sends it back I don't see it. I am a daredevil when it comes to saying how I feel, but a Republican when someone hints around at how they feel. Unless someone comes right out and says, "I would like to make out now," I have no idea what they are driving at.
I have been trying and trying to get back on the horse, but being a total pussy about it at the same time. Instead of exploring a flirtation I know is real and feels like it could lead to something, I string myself along on another dude who seems to have zero interest in anything other than a parking-lot make-out. I love a parking lot make-out, and who doesn't, but I am not in my early twenties anymore and I would like to have sex before I forget what it is. I am now worried that my lack of astuteness is going to lead me to my own destruction, that I am going to pursue this physical relationship until he has to stare me in the face and say, "I do not wish to fuck you. Stop trying, please."
For now I will just keep waiting around, take the make-outs where I can get them, and try to keep it light. And try to recognize what the hell a friend is doing when they suggest I go with them to meet one of the best tattooists in the state.

Cooking For Men

I was baking a homemade peach pie the other day, rolling out pie crust in 90-degree heat like a moron and getting flour all over my yoga pants. I love making food, have since I was tall enough to use an oven, but I cannot pinpoint what possessed me to bake a pie in the first place. I do this alot, I see now. I get an idea in my head that some dish needs to be cooked today, not based on any tactile craving I am having for it, but more out of a feeling that I need to make it. When I was cooking for my ex, this made a little more sense, because I was in charge of food and I had to come up with our meals every day. I didn't search for food based on what was on sale or what was seasonal, which is really how it should be done. I based my selections on what excited me or what I imagined would make either of us feel happy. I cooked Gino rabbit and polenta when he talked about his grandmother because she used to make that for him. I cooked Thai chicken-coconut soup for myself and for him when either of us felt sick. I made sauteed kale with every meal for two straight weeks when I read that it was the most nutritious vegetable because I was determined to make sure both of us were healthy.
When we first moved in together, Gino told me he was really happy to have found a girl who could cook. He does not cook, beyond boiling spaghetti. He was raised by a family of great cooks, but he never learned to cook because he just didn't enjoy it. I was raised by great cooks as well, but I went the other way with it because working with food always felt natural to me. It also helped that Gino has the metabolism of a hummingbird and could eat anything, in any portion size, and not gain weight. I cooked things for him he had never eaten and reintroduced him to food he thought he hated simply by changing a few elements of it. He had never eaten anything with roasted garlic in it, or lemon zest, or homemade ricotta cheese. I painstakingly recreated his mother's sauce recipe because he loved it so much, but I could never make it exactly right. When I made him the Caesar salad recipe my father had perfected and passed on to me, that was the end of it. He wanted to eat it twice a week. For his 30th birthday, I made a four-layer lemon cake with mascarpone filling, plus Rice Krispie treats because I wanted him to feel special. There were several things one has to do repetitively in a marriage that feel like chores- the laundry you have to do for two people and the dishes that need to be washed, and the sex that can feel like an obligation when you just don't feel that sexy, but cooking never really felt like a chore to me. I am sure that I must have complained about having to be home to make dinner more than a few times, but that was usually only if it meant I was missing out on some social engagement I would rather be at, or if I went through all the trouble of creating something I thought was spectacular and Gino was not that wowed by it. I put all of my love into cooking for him, and I really do wish I still had that.
Now that I do not have a husband to cook for, I have found myself missing this, missing the challenge of coming up with something that will impress him. I cook for my best friend and his boyfriend a little and they enjoy it, but I feel strange at the same time, as if I am forcing food on them that they didn't ask for like the Italian-Irish mother I know I truly am. The only way I can get my culinary ya-yas out is by feeding my straight dude friends. I go to my friend Mike's house loaded up with pineapple upside-down cake, goat cheese tartlets, peach pie, and anything else I arbitrarily decide needs to be prepared from week to week. I decided that this week is the week for fried chicken just because I found my meat cleaver in storage and missed breaking down a whole fryer with it, so I am bringing fried chicken when I see them next. I have an inborn need, passed down from my father, to feed people. Food is what we use to show that we care in my family, and it was what I used to show Gino that I was always thinking of him.
When I was packing my things the day that I left, Gino asked me if he could call me in the future for cooking tips. This is the only part of me, I thought,  that he will miss. I was crying and sweating and trying not to kiss him, not to cling to him because I knew he didn't want me to. Still, I said he could call me for anything because I have not stopped wanting to please him. I can feel my heart hardening toward him, but I have not, despite all of my efforts, stopped feeling the need to take care of him. I am worried that all of the energy I channeled into caring for him will only get redirected toward caring for some other man, which is why I know I cannot date anyone until I learn to care for myself. I miss cooking for two, but I know the best thing I can do for for myself right now is cook for one.

The Model Divorcee

I received a text message last night from my best friend, Tony, whose spare bedroom I am currently squatting in, informing me that I have two weeks to move out. I know this is something he needs to do for himself, and I was prepared for him to let me know if I was close to overstaying my welcome. I agree with him. Two months and change is long enough for me to live in his spare bedroom. What I disagree with is what I perceive to be his opinion about me. For the first month after the breakup, I was still financially extricating myself from my ex-husband, a process that is far more complicated than it needs to be, as well as working full time, taking on side projects to boost my income, and all the while feeling like my insides had been scraped out. I admit that I did put off calling the landlord he referred me to simply because I was worried I wouldn't have my finances in order in time, a problem I just figured out this week. Tony holds everyone to a very high standard, and I know I am failing in his eyes because right now, I have almost zero ambition and can't move forward because I don't feel ready to.
Getting divorced is complicated. Anything that involves human emotions is complicated. There are so many practical things that need to be seen to, so many loose ends to tie up, and the rest of your energy evaporates after you have taken care of all of that. My tying up loose ends has taken a longer time than I would have liked, and I know I've become a drain on Tony's energy as well, despite my best efforts to be a considerate house guest. A continuing theme in my life this week is my best efforts not being adequate. I realized this in an unfortunate interaction with a guest of the health spa I work in, that my best efforts to be friendly and accommodating were viewed by this couple as the opposite. My further hyper-vigilance toward them, in my attempt to turn the dynamic they had set up around also failed, as nothing I did seemed to be recognized. I also finally saw, this week, how very little it mattered that I tried my hardest to be a good wife to Gino, and that even trying my hardest did not work.
I did something I haven't done in over a month today- I sat in my car and cried. It started as a frustrated cry over my own failings as a good friend, my inaction that has led to being informed that I have overstayed my welcome, but then it started to swell and take on all the other corners of my life where I have failed. I have failed as a wife, I failed as an employee this week, and now I have failed as a friend. When I came back to my desk, I had tear tracks going from my eyes to my chin and sweat trails from my temples all the way down my face. The blood vessels in my eyes had made my corneas appear pink, and my nose and lips were swollen. I'm an ugly crier. I can't hide it easily when I've been crying, so I have a feeling my co-workers could see it, but thankfully, none of them asked. Crying today, however, made me realize I haven't cried over my divorce in weeks, although I feel as though I have been crying all the time. I have been holding back, crab-walking away from any thought that is too painful, and then diverting my attention toward something mundane and distracting. Everyone keeps praising me for how well I am handling my divorce, and while it is nice to have them acknowledge this, I also feel I might be missing my opportunity to really let loose, to completely unravel for once and show the world how much this hurts. I could just go running down the street, barefoot, screaming, letting the tears and snot stream out of my head until I collapse in a heap by the side of the road with a face full of burst capillaries from crying too hard. I could be call my ex-husband and screaming at him as a daily reminder to him that he let our marriage die, not me. I could drink every drop of alcohol I can get my hands on and stop being so responsible about indulging, just soak my wounded heart in a sea of whiskey and let it float away. It's not my style, though, to show the whole world, so I do my emoting quietly, in a boiling-hot car in the parking lot where no one will notice, and then when it's over, I go back to being the model divorcee.

Just Friends

I was sitting on the couch in my temporary home last night, rewatching Breaking Bad in preparation for the new season and working on the never-ending baby blanket I am knitting for my brother's first child. Tony and Colin were out of town, and it was the first night I had been alone since I moved away from my ex-husband. I looked at the clock and realized it was close to 9 pm- almost time for True Blood to start. I usually watch the show with Tony, Colin, and Shauna, but tonight I would be watching it by myself. I didn't change the channel, either because I was far too invested in meth-cooking to deal with vampires or because of a whole other reason that keeps nagging at me today: this is a show I used to watch with Gino and it makes me sad to watch it without him. This is not the first time this has come up, and each time it does, it stings.
I was driving the other day, listening to Outkast, and missing Gino next to me, dancing in his seat like a goofball. I am starting to see just how much I am going to miss him, forever, not just for now, and how much I can feel is missing from my life now that I no longer have him as a friend. I'm calling to mind a strange conversation we had months ago, when he brought up the fact that I am the only woman he could picture wanting to still be friends with after a break-up. I dismissed this as one of his idle musings, but still taking it as a twisted sort of compliment that he would still want me in his life even if I wasn't married to him. He also gave me the whole song-and-dance of "let's be friends" when we first parted ways, but I can see just how false and hollow that is. If I speak to him now, he doesn't see a friend, he sees an enemy, someone he cut out of his life for a reason, and I don't think we can ever get back to a place where I am not that person. I don't hate him yet, and he is the one who ended the marriage, but that is only because I miss him too much to hate him.
I am not sure if I have truly been dealing with the loss of his friendship because I have been so distracted by the loss my marriage. I have been sending flirty texts that lead to nowhere to prove to myself that I am still desirable and counting my friends to prove to myself that I am not unloveable. These are distractions, and while they have been working so far, but I can feel them losing their power. At first, I missed all of the couple things, the sleeping next to each other and having his hand to hold. Now, I miss all the other parts of his personality that had nothing to do with our marriage. I miss how funny he can be and I miss how he would react to things. I see something now and wish he was there to comment on it, or I make a cup of coffee and picture him doing something dumb like starting the Keurig without putting a cup underneath it.
I don't think I have fully grasped one true thing about all of this- that Gino does not miss me the way that I miss him. I have been telling myself what everyone tells someone who has been dumped- that it is impossible that he doesn't love me. Now, I am seeing that not only is it possible, but that it must be true. One of the things that is hard to admit to yourself is that sometimes, your best is just not enough because the person you are doing your best for doesn't want what you're offering. I know I was a good wife, and also a good friend to him, but in the end, it didn't matter. The night before he told me he wanted this, I came home around ten and was surprised to find him already in bed. He looked depressed, deflated, like a huge weight was pressing down on him. I sat on the bed, next to him, and I don't know why I said this, but I told him, "I know you're unhappy, but I can't do anything more to try to make you happy. I can't make myself more beautiful and I can't make myself more interesting."
I see now that what I was doing with that sentence was push him toward his final decision. I admitted to him in that statement that all my efforts were worth nothing, and that he would never be happy with me, despite the fact that I was doing my very best. It is hard to recognize that where you have failed is through being yourself, and not the person they are looking for.

Impractical Magic

A song came on my iPod today that sent me reeling back, back to when my relationship with my ex-husband was still fresh and new and uncomplicated. It reminded me of how magical things can be when it first hits, when everything clicks into place and you realize that you have met that person. It was a song by The Used called "Blue and Yellow".
On the Fourth of July, 2005, Gino and I had been together only three days, and we were in the living room of his scuzzy apartment in Pittsfield. He asked me if I liked The Used, and as if on cue, my sister called me. The ringtone I had assigned to her number, coincidentally, was "Blue and Yellow". Gino fell onto me, kissing me and laughing along with me, both of us amazed that we had found that person.
When something so perfectly timed like that happens, it is hard to overlook the fact that it is a coincidence and not magic. I realize how little care I took in managing myself over the course of my relationship with Gino because I had no idea that the ties we had wrapped around each other could disintegrate. I was naive, and I think I still have some naiveté inside me that I cannot shake. I breezed through everything that should have been awkward and ungainly because I didn't see why I should tread lightly. When his mother introduced me to her sister as "Gino's girlfriend" and Gino groaned quietly in a please-Mom-play-it-cool manner, I turned to him and asked, "Well, what would you call me?" and he answered back, "No, it's cool. You're my girlfriend."
He said "I love you" first, and of course it seemed completely natural and not at all rushed, but looking back I realize how crazy that is. When he said it, we were walking home from the bar he worked in at roughly 2 in the morning, and we had only been seeing each other for a week. It didn't matter that we were so young, that we had, essentially, just met, that he was so poor that he ate spaghetti with oil almost every day. Nothing makes sense when you fall in love, and everything is magical.
I had never met a man who had so many things I was looking for in another person. He was good-looking, he got almost all of my nerdy movie references, he liked the same music I did, and his family was from the same part of Italy that my family was. Our first real conversation was about olives, of all things, when he noticed I was drinking a martini without an olive because the bar had run out. "I love olives. My favorite olives are kalamata olives," he said.
"Have you ever had olives Calabrese?" I asked.
"No. I am Calabrese, though."
"Me too, that's funny."
It's silly, but growing up with an Italian grandmother as sweet as mine is makes you want to please her, tell her that you are going to give her more great-grandchildren, and that they will be Calabrese. Every Italian guy you meet looks a little more attractive if his ancestors probably waved to your ancestors in town. We had so much in common and we just liked each other so much and I wasn't scared or ill-at-ease around him. Everything happened with so little negotiating, with none of the push-and-pull I had heard my girlfriends complain about, and I convinced myself that it was simply because we were both looking for the same thing and we had found it in each other. The buyer's remorse Gino is experiencing now cannot erase everything I learned while I was with him, and how unreasonably we both loved each other for a long time.
I was driving around the Berkshires with my good friend Kiki the other day and I asked her if she wanted to her the song that was playing on my iPod when I got into the car on the night Gino told me he wanted a divorce. The iPod was on shuffle and I was not even paying attention to it- flicking the music button on the touchscreen was just a reflex, something I always did in the car after my seatbelt was buckled and I had turned the key in the ignition. It was so perfect, it seemed almost unfair- "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver. The only song that could have been more perfect would have been our wedding song, which was "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" by Death Cab For Cutie, but thank god it was not that. Naturally, I sobbed and screamed all the way to Tony's house while this perfect, melancholy voice wrapped me up in its sadness. Even at the end, at the conclusion of the marriage, horribly magical things were still happening.

Thinner

My body is starting to return to the shape it had before, when I was in my early twenties and barely ate just because I was always anxious. It's not good, and it's derailing the goals I had in mind for myself. I was working toward being a fit and sexy warrior, someone who could fight off zombies if it came to that and not get winded after a five-mile run. I was working out five days a week, filling up my lunch breaks with squats and lunges and spinning and yoga and other things I can't stand right now. All of that encouragement being barked at me from a fitness instructor is too overwhelming, and my enthusiasm for it has a brittle feeling, as if all it could take to send me into an emotional tailspin is one criticism. After my near-cry in Pilates, I have not been back to one class. I'm too raw for physical exertion like that and I can tell that people can see it. Something about feeling like your entire emotional landscape is written on your face makes you not want to sweat.

I know when things started to go wrong for Gino, when I began to let him down. It was when I got fat. When we met, I was a sick little puppy, barely eating, only weighing in at 120. Healthy for me is 130-135. During the last year of our marriage, I fluctuated, reaching 164 at my highest. I was always good about portion control, but what I have never been good at is resisting. I chose my food with abandon, I realized, because I thought that even if I was so fat he couldn't find my vagina, he would still love me. I realized quickly that I had assumed wrong. He started to tease me about my weight soon after I knew how far I had let myself go and suggested that I work out more, when I was working out on my lunch break every day. I could barely keep up. I was cooking two meals every night- what he wanted, since he never gained weight, and then what I could have, since weight was clinging to me like fossilized moss. If I told him I was too tired and only wanted to cook for myself, he would eat nothing and seeth over it. Still, we started boxing together on Friday afternoons in a further effort to get me fit, and I tried and tried again to get him to go to yoga or running with me. I tried to look at it as an optimist would- he was trying to get me in fighting shape in case I ever needed to defend myself. It was not about his desire for me, or his lack thereof. He was only looking out for my safety, I told myself, and I loved being around him so much that I could ignore the sting that came with being insulted for being overweight.

In the beginning I assumed, like an idiot, that Gino would continue to love me no matter what happened, how much I aged or gained weight, or how my body changed to accommodate the children we most certainly were going to have. A love like ours was rare, so rare that it did not even exist as I thought it did, I realize now. I had made these assumptions foolishly, measuring his love against my own because I had no other stick to measure with, and I never lost that feeling I got when I saw him. That bubbles in your spine, first opening beats of Super Bass feeling, that made the sun shine a little more brilliantly because it was reflecting off of him. The thing I hated the most was how dingy those feelings have become in hindsight. My love for him seemed like walking straight off a cliff because I was too distracted to notice that the ground was about to disappear. This feels like grade school, realizing that the popular girls are saying horrible things about me behind my back. The factor that makes this so much worse, however, was that I have no idea how long this betrayal has been going on, or how many people he has been sharing these feelings of his with. It is worse than cheating. If he had cheated, I could have understood it. Physical urges are chemical, they come and go, and are usually regretted after the fact. His talking to other people, a number of women probably being in their numbers, about how I had disappointed him as a spouse makes me want to bury my head in sand. It makes me think of the ice cream.

A few months before we split up, in March, he came home from work one night and when I asked him what his day was like, he told me he had gone out for ice cream with one of the girls who worked in the Laundry department. I was so annoyed by this, my ears blazed red and I was speechless. I was jealous and hurt, not because I perceived this as cheating, but because he had done something I was always asking him to do, and he had done it for someone else. He cared more about her feelings, I thought, than he did about mine. -You went out for ice cream with her, I said, -You might as well have just fucked her, because this feels worse.

He didn't understand. He never understood, and now he never has to. In the end, I made him promise to take me out for a movie and then go with me for ice cream. We went to see the Hunger Games together, on the day before his 31st birthday, but he still didn't want to go for ice cream after because it was, in his words, "too cold for ice cream". I let it go. We had dinner out for his birthday the following night, at his favorite restaurant, a Peruvian place. He liked it there because all of his friends ate there and the waiter was another friend of his. I wished him a happy birthday, we held hands across the table, and drank a bottle of red wine with our beef heart skewers and fried seafood. I made him stop at Ben and Jerry's so I could buy myself an ice cream cone. The following week was my birthday, celebrated at Najwa and Gabe's house with some friends. I wore a dress I had picked out as my gift. Gino spent the whole night playing caroms, a strange game that involves flicking a tiny disc across a board to move other tiny disks. I have one picture of us standing together that night. Gino's face fills up the frame, and he looks as if he is covering up a wince with a reluctant smile. Only the lower half of my face is visible, my mouth open and smiling behind his. I looked at this picture later, and I realized that this was the last picture anyone would ever take of us together. He looks handsome, but strained, as if being present for his wife's birthday is more than he can take. I just look happy to be near him.

The irony of this is that now I am getting back the shape I used to have, the body that first caught Gino's attention, but it is the misery of being alone that is allowing me to attain it again. This need to control how much I eat is my bad habit, along with smoking, that I had given up while I was happy but now need again. I ran into a former friend at a party recently, who knew nothing of my recent trials and said, -I see you haven't gotten fat, so, no kids?

I smirked at his dumb little face and answered back, -I'm the thinnest I've been in years.

Why I am the thinnest I've been in years is none of his business.

Bad Music

Heartbreak makes a person, or me, at least, want to listen to a shit-ton of bad music. I have been listening to lots of good music, music that has a rich history and meaningful lyrics expressing heartache, but also alot of pop songs that oversimplify pain to the point where it is no longer a feeling. I have moved past the wallowing ballads that are so full of emotional resonance that they provoke tears even from the happiest of people. I have moved past the throbbing blues music that makes sadness sound cool. I have moved past the sensitive males who weep while they sing.
An experience like this shows us who we really are, and sometimes, that person is not someone we would associate with in public. Sometimes, that person is a moody, crying, superficial girly-girl with piss-poor taste in music who dresses like a WAG. My inner self is not the caring, loving young woman I had grown to know, but a post-adolescent who just wants to rage-dance and make out with cute boys. I had no idea this person could lay dormant inside me for so long, that I could surprise myself by being as unsurprising as this.
Most of my newly single behavior has been harmless and immature, but a small percentage has been slightly reckless. I did a dumb thing this week by trying to be cute, and trying to give someone what they wanted. My good guy friend asked if he could see my boobs for his birthday and I texted him a picture of my left one, but only the half of it that peeks out of my pink bra. This opening salvo lead to a whole evening of negotiating, but my hard line was that I would not send a picture of both boobs because I couldn't be sure of what he might end up doing with a picture like that. This didn't stop  me, however, from attempting for twenty minutes to photograph my boobs with my cellphone and being unable to get a good shot. Now I am wondering how many times I have done just this, masquerading as something else. I don't like to disappoint people, so I have said yes to things I would rather not do or don't feel adequately prepared for. I have shut my eyes and endured so many blow jobs for my ex that I still feel a phantom cock in my mouth when I think about him. I have taken on projects with barely any experience simply for the virtue of the fact that there was no one else to take care of them.

I can feel the weight of my loneliness dragging me down, making me want to lay down on the floor and stay there for at least three days. I miss the confusing, terrifying feeling of being so in love with one person that nothing feels comfortable. I miss the feeling of being tied up by an emotion, whipped and tortured and utterly destroyed. I want that again. The only emotion that is torturing me right now is impatience. I have the rapid heart rate, the restless legs, and the hot, itching skin of someone possessed. I can't sit still and when I sleep, I have horrible dreams that feel like walking through a funhouse and seeing my own ugly self reflected at me from a thousand slanting angles. I have the instincts and lack of impulse-control of a twenty-two-year-old because the last time I was single I was twenty-two. I know how to be married to someone, how to care for someone and make them feel that they are the center of the universe, but I do not yet know how to be an adult female who is alone. 

I spent some time with my guy friends over the past few weeks, and each time felt like an audition for something. I have known these boys for several years, but nearly the whole time, I was attached. Mike asked me why I used to hate him and I told him I never hated him, I was just really uncomfortable around men when I was 20. I spend alot of time lately figuring out where I have missed a step or flubbed my lines, and I find it unnavigable and strange. It doesn't make any sense to me why we even do this, why it has to be this neverending game of poker in which all players are bluffing. I don't want to bluff my way through life, seeing what I can gain by pretending I have something better. I want to play with someone who shows their hand.

I was watching Girls this week- a show that is so rife with controversy, you would think they regularly burn flags and slaughter endangered animals, not just show people fucking and talking about Brooklyn. It speaks to me now in a way it did not when I was in a relationship. One plot point in an episode actually did involve the central character, Hannah, texting a photo of her tits to the guy she is hooking up with. I watched it when I was married and thought, -Being single does not look fun at all and thank god I am in a relationship. Now, I watch it and think, -Been there.
Sexting is all about self-flattery. I sent the picture not hoping he would send one back to me, but because I wanted him to say something nice about me, or, more specifically, my breasts. I have a conflicted relationship with my breasts. They grew early, so I had full C-cups before I was in middle school. I have always gotten too much attention for two things that, essentially, don't even belong to me. I didn't pick them out, and if I could have, I would have picked a different shape. Gino always paid the most attention to my tits, of course, and eventually I think they were the only part of me he still liked. He could not deal with the rest of my body, my short legs and my wide hips, and my stomach that just refuses to be totally flat, but he could still appreciate grabbing a handful of my stupid tits. Now, I feel the attention starting to go toward them again, and I am drinking it up simply because I know it won't be like this forever, that they are already changing along with the rest of me, and I should be flattered by whatever attention they get.

I don't like myself very much this week, but I hope this girl who has taken to wearing my skin and speaking with my voice figures out her uselessness soon and leaves me, so that I can maybe figure out who I actually am.