Something ended recently, and I wasn't even going to write about it, I was trying so hard to make it not be a thing. And I've come to the conclusion that everything is a thing with me. This is a smaller thing, but it's still some...thing I need to deal with. It was not unexpected. I saw it coming from really far away, actually, and that cushioned the blow a little. I met someone during the Word X Word Festival last summer, and we were kind of seeing each other, until he met someone he wants to get serious with, and now it's just not happening anymore. It's not what I want, obviously, but like I told him when he let me know, it's not up to me.
I am a worse actress than even I thought I was. Two days after I had this exchange with him, I was talking to my friend Carrie about it, trying, as always, to explain my way out of it so that I didn't look ridiculous. I failed. Carrie interrupted me and said, "Oh, you're heart-broken!"
After that, I think I might have tried to laugh and walked away. I will get emotional if no one can see it, but only then. He was back in town this week, for this year's Word X Word, and I felt like a glass of water that was about to spill half the time. And I did spill. I spilled like five buckets of water being upended at the same time. I made my friends form a human screen around me while very quietly breaking down in the middle of a crowded room. I did finally have to tell him, on the second-to-last night, that this week was harder for me than I thought it would be, and then waited while he figured out what that meant. When he finally did, he offered to go throw himself in traffic if that would make me feel better. I told him, no thanks, that's not what I want, you dingus. Then, trying to make me feel better, he told me I smelled good and looked nice. "Thanks, I know, " I said, thinking, are we just listing obviously true things now?
What made it even stickier was that I still looked forward to seeing him, even after he told me that this was the way it was going to be. In the midst of the educational, athletic sex in hotel rooms and, occasionally, my apartment, we became good friends. A friendship that grows around a hook-up is like that tree that grew around a bicycle-eventually, the tree got so much bigger that it picked up the bicycle into it. I can't tell, with this metaphor, if the friendship is the tree or the bicycle. I've always been a shitty gardener.
The only reason that we were even seeing each other, albeit casually as fuck and despite him living in New York, for nearly a year is because I made it happen. I'm flexible, and I don't think of it as being a huge inconvenience to travel to see someone. It worked out pretty great, actually. I would visit my friend Gill, who also lived in Queens, and squeeze in a visit with my brother, then wait until the end of the day to make him meet me for dinner. It was easy for me. My pussy is fucking magical. Not Move-To-Another-State-Magical, not even Come-Visit-Me-Magical, but it is Walk-Through-Two-Feet-Of-Snow-Several-Blocks-Magical. We were friends. It was affectionate, it was supportive, and aside from text messages, it was completely contained in twelve-hour periods every few months.
I didn't try to change it because it was amorphous-it had no framework, no shape. I never found the right motive for asking him where it was going. I knew he was dating other people, or at least trying to, and honestly, despite the fact that I know that my pussy is fucking magic, I never thought it was enough when held up against someone he could see more than once a month at most. I'm not even sure what, if anything, I wanted it to be, but I tried to grow it like a seed in a cup, forgetting, again, that I'm a shitty gardener.
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