I am a porcupine.

On Saturday I ran into A in the subway. I was struck by how ordinary our encounter seemed. I was walking down the length of the train and there he was.  I saw him first. I nudged his foot with mine and sat next to him.  After we said goodbye, he called. And then he called again, he emailed, he called, he emailed. It started to piss me off. Last night, I answered. I couldn’t stand his questions about what I’d been doing, I didn’t want to tell him anything. I started off slow and cold. Then something broke and I wanted to tell him everything.

Two objects cannot occupy the same space – this is what I have realized. If A is around, there is no hope for anything with anyone because there is no one I like talking to more, no one who annoys me so much, no one I love, no one who loves me more than he.  No one else I almost had a baby with. That’s a lot to say – even I can see that. None of it is enough to change anything. And there’s no one who replaced me faster than he did. That last sentence is a hypocritical statement. I tried the same thing – I tried to replace him.  The only difference is that he succeeded in finding someone else and I did not.

All these words and those men I fucked are just different ways of missing A. If only we had been brave enough.

I think this time we are going to do it – this is the parting that will stick. I could keep telling myself I’m getting over it and that might even be true. Some days, it is.  As long as he’s around, I’ll keep hoping (though I will probably never admit it to anyone) that he will wake up one day and realize that he loves me enough to take a leap of faith. Intellectually, it’s pretty obvious to me that that’s not going to happen.

As we talked, four and a half hours according to my phone, I realized that we are still very much attached.  It felt good – banter and tenderness. Then I felt demoralized and rather desperate.  That’s when I told him he had to leave me alone. “Help me get over this,” I said.

This is hard for me to write.  It’s an admission of failure in many ways. But it’s my fetus anniversary again.  11 months.  March might find me in worse shape. It took an hour to start typing – I will be embarrassed about this as soon as I post it.

How is it that I can write all this about A and then think about M and hope - naively, sincerely, foolishly - that something will happen between us? Why am I not smarter than this?

The Ramble

Frigid weather again. I have so many items of clothes on that I have a hard time moving.  This must be what it feels like to be terribly fat.

I need to stop talking to strangers.  Today a street vendor asked me to remove the scarf I was wearing and wanted to take a photo of  it. Then he asked me to wear it again and took another photo. I suppose he is going to go back to some sweatshop now and copy the design.  He gave me a pair of gloves for my trouble and as I was leaving, I heard him telling someone, “that scarf was expensive!” True, but no one's business but mine. I went from being amused by this man to being terribly offended. No mood swing if I could have just kept to myself.

·

Friday night, a pedestrian was struck and killed by a car on Broadway and 90^th Street.  M and I had just finished having dinner at some Belgian brasserie in the Upper West Side and were on our way to Riverside Park to have a walk when we happened upon the “crime scene”.

M was not prepared for the weather.  I gave him one of my scarves – a swath of magenta cashmere with gold and silver sequins.  I wrapped the length of it around his head and neck and then we forced his had down his head—a ridiculous look for anyone (including me, but I sometimes love ridiculous things). For someone as uptight as M, it was pee-in-my-pants hysterical.  I tried to take a photo but he yelled at me and demanded that I just “enjoy” our time together.  I told him he was cranky pants and he bitched even more but in the end ended up laughing at himself. 

I am not sure what is going on with us now.  I keep thinking this is all in my head but we have our nice times (really, these times are not so grand, but it feels, to me, just right). It seems impossible to me that I would be the only one who feels something.  Then again, stranger things happened.  We come very close to moving toward each other BUT we don’t. 

This is all in my head isn’t it?

He is moving six blocks away from me in a few weeks. I suppose we will continue our strange friendship and nothing will change but there is some part of me that hopes for clarity.  The only problem is that I don’t want to lose him. Wendy suggested I jump his bones.  I don't see this happening -- it's not my style.  But a funny thing to contemplate.

·

Saturday morning I ran into A in the R train on my way to the bookstore.  He was on his way to see a flick at The Film Forum, a Kurosawa.  Probably with his girlfriend and her friends.  Seeing him was not as bad as I have imagined it would be.  After we said goodbye, he called to tell me I looked great (really he is a bottomless pit of compliments, it bugs me) and that we should get together for a drink soon.

I’m not sure how I feel about seeing him on purpose.  I do know that I’ve been quite fine without him in the last few months.  So maybe a meeting would just set me back. This is not making me run to my calendar to schedule a get-together. 

Could it be true that I might actually be a little bit over him? Could it?

What does he want from me? It’s kind of weird.  I’m rather unpleasant when I don’t know how to act around a person. I imagine I must have been awkward this morning.  Mean, even?

Last week, I ran into that tall guy I briefly dated over the summer (6 foot 7 to my 5 feet). It happened at the bookstore.  I couldn’t stand the thought of talking to him so I actually hid from this perfectly nice man. 

Maybe I need to find somewhere else to spend my Saturday afternoons.

·

CC had a double mastectomy on Wednesday.  She seems to be doing fine.  I am so scared for her.  What happens when the pain medication and whatever dope they have her on wears off and she realizes, with a fully lucid mind, that her breasts are gone?

The other night at dinner, I said to M, “we are sitting here having dinner like nothing has happened, but just a few miles from here, my friend is sitting somewhere a totally different person.”

M is not the kind of person who can have such conversations. I didn’t elaborate on it. But I thought of CC all night.

·

On Thursday night, an unexpected trip to the opera house to see Turandot. The opera makes me wish I were rich and could see performances any time I want.  Oh well.

Tomorrow, I am going to see Carmen. I swear I live my life like an old lady. But that’s quite all right.

Next time, don't come.

A year after we moved to America, my mother, faced with the burden of supporting me and my sister and herself for the first time in her life, had a kind of nervous breakdown.  One day, she dropped us off at school and disappeared. 

Over time, I've begun to wonder if abandoning us was a strategic move or surrender. Make of it what you will.  I don't suppose I'll ever know and I have tried with all that is in me to make that time a minor episode rather than a pivotal event in my life (I've been to therapy, I know there's damage). 

No one wanted me or my sister.  We got shuttled from one relative to another.  Years after my mom came back and life got better, I refused to see the relatives because seeing them made me hate my mother and reminded me of being unwanted. 

For three months or so, my sister and I stayed with my cousin CB in the Bay Area.  She couldn't keep us for reasons I didn't understand when I was 13.  Who could blame a person for not wanting to take on two adolescents? She never knew what to say to us, me especially. She watched us do our homework, she picked up my textbooks and my dictionary and studied my vocabulary words. Cousin CB began to study the dictionary the way I did. This probably sounds silly to Americans but to immigrants, learning new words is a big deal. 

One day she said, "Do you know what vex means?" Yep. 

"Do you know what ejaculate means?" She meant the other definition -- to exclaim, to yell. 

And so CB and I developed a way of talking to each other by using malapropisms and hyperbole. She used every opportunity to use the words vex and ejaculate. And even though it stopped being funny, I laughed every time.

Then one day in June after the school year was over, CB apologetically announced that my sister and I were moving to L.A. to live with other relatives.  My sister and I were driven down in the (covered) flatbed of a pickup truck to Carson, CA where another cousin's ex wife lived.  She wanted to take us in.

I avoided CB for years.  I eventually moved to the Bay Area as an adult and she called me repeatedly to ask me to visit.  At first I said no and then eventually stopped taking her calls altogether.  It was not until I moved to New York that I became comfortable around her again.  Each time we talked, she talked about those words and I faked a laugh.  No fail.  

This year, my cousin Danny's family moved to L.A.  His wife F is much older than him, religious and conservative and uncomfortable with my family's kind of excess.  His children are awkward and shy.

One day over the holidays, my brother asked me, "What does finagle mean?" So I told him. He tried to use it in a sentence, incorrectly.  So I corrected him.  He tried again. Bingo.  Then I told him about Finagle a Bagel in Boston.  My mother started laughing and making up stupid things just so she could use the word finagle.  My other brothers joined in and so did my dad.  After we wore the word out, I told them about CB, how she used to say vex and ejaculate all the time. 

This made everyone hysterical.  Cousin's wife F sat there staring in disgust while we laughed when one of my brothers said "F., you look so mad. We're just joking around. Please don't ejaculate."

Our mother, out of politeness, said, "Don't talk to your cousin like that.  She's not used to us." And then she started laughing again.

A few days later, we all drove to the Bay Area to CB's house.  CB looked at me (we had not seen each other in at least four years) and said, "You never visit even though I know you come to San Francisco every year. I am vexed." 

My mother and my brother said in unison "Don't ejaculate!"

F walked right out of the room and CB said "what's wrong with her?" 

That was the end of that.

This entry is about to get overlong and repetitive.  It's been a trying day.  A emailed wanting to get together.  I said no but I felt like shit about it.  M called and I didn't answer.  Instead I went home and tried to cry.  I was unsuccessful.  

I wonder now if my sadness is more intense than it was six months ago. I keep saying it hurts less but I realize I'm working too hard to not feel bad. The hurt is not so visceral anymore. Now I feel humiliated and reproachful and rational. Bitterness coexists rather peacefully with the longing.

It's probably fair to say that everything I wrote above has always been in me but it's only now that I can face it.  

First Star of the Night

On West 23rd Street in Chelsea, there is a strange little house/performance space called The Cell Theater.  I went there early this evening to listen to my friend W read.  Simon Van Booy and another writer whose name escapes me at the moment were also there to read.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I thought Van Booy's book, Love Begins in Winter, was too sentimental.  It is.  But it is good.  What is it about certain stories and certain words that make me, the rather jaded and overcritical reader, eat my words? And he is an excellent reader.  He was sitting on an old loveseat, legs crossed.  His voice was mesmerizing, his Irish accent not bad.  He signed my book: "To Z----, the first star of the night." He'd asked me what my name meant and so I told him.

After the reading, W and I, along with a few other people, ogled the arrival of movie stars for the premiere of the movie Brothers.  A man in a black suit approached us and handed us tickets to the screening.  So off we went.

The movie was good though not one I would choose if I had to pay.  

On Friday night (and this afternoon), I saw the Maelstrom sculpture and the Vermeers at the Met.  Then M called and he picked me up on the bike. We rode in the cold down to the Lower East Side.  M and I are friends again, I guess.  I am probably too nice by tolerating his weirdness. But he is what he is and sometimes what he is is stupid.  

Here is Maelstrom in the late afternoon:

I expected to spend the whole weekend alone, save for the Sunday dinner with W.  But it turned out that the last couple of days have been all about finding people. I may never see any of them again, but there is something good in knowing that there is still a whole world out there and that I am not incapable of seeing it and taking from it and hopefully, in my way, giving to it. 

Anhedonia is not one of my problems. Whatever weeping I do and wherever I may choose to give in to it, I am still present.

My friend JV is back in my life.  I don't know how long she will stay. But no matter.  More on her later. Professor Dick is back.  Maybe he never left. One of these days, I hope he will just leave me or not write me notes about missing me. Whatever his intentions, he creeps me out.

Digging around the family tree

Feels like a mighty long time since I last wrote anything.  But two days is not long.

Again, I feel my interest in blogging wane. This means I am doing fine mental health-wise.

My body, on the other hand, not so great.  I am sick sick sick.  Well, actually I am not that sick.  But I am not a good patient.  I get cranky, self-pitying and gluttonous.

For the last seven years or so, my friend W and I have had a standing date on Sundays.  We take walks, we sit in the park, we eat dinner, we do whatever.  But we always see each other on Sunday. There was a period of two years where we met at five in the afternoon and ate at the same restaurant and each ordered the same dish. We joke that we are two old women trapped in our youngish bodies.

Yesterday we went to a crappy Chinese restaurant in the Upper West Side and laughed so hard I felt like my eyes were going to fall out of my head. If I were to retell what made us both lose it, it wouldn't be funny so I won't even try. I just wanted to say that I laughed so hard that it felt like my eyeballs were going to fall out.

My big week:  my funny friend Larry and his friend, the guy Larry described as the one with a radioactive pellet up his ass (prostate cancer). Another A man, only this one is young and gay who sometimes surprises me with his mature insight and then flattens me with his youthful arrogance. I think that's all that's happening.

A link about abortion: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/11/23/091123taco_talk_toobin

There is a lot of talk about abortion lately.  I sometimes want to join in, just among my acquaintances. But I stop myself. I steer the conversations toward other things. Not that my view has changed on the matter but now I understand the ramifications.  I see it as something more than a political issue and lately I have become a firm believer that emotions should be left out of these debates. Tears somehow lighten the gravity of a situation.  Is that the wrong thing to say?

Turn on Oprah, Barbara Walters (is she even on the air anymore?), watch chicks cry. No one takes that seriously.  I don't take it all that seriously because it seems exploitive and calculated. Even though when I'm doing the crying, I take myself pretty fucking seriously.

A and I paid for my abortion. I don't know why I felt the need to say that. But we did.  We split it down the middle. Maybe the one time in our relationship we went dutch.

Ironic, no?

I believe that is the right way to use the word.  But if anyone is reading this and recognizes that I made an error, speak up and correct me.

My sister and I talked over the weekend.  She told me more family stories, some new and some just confirmed:

• our mother's father is the husband of Aunt Lydia (this means granny had an affair with her son-in-law)
• the big old house my mother grew up in was lost to a gambling debt -- an uncle used the house as collateral
• someone molested my mom, that is why she seems to think it's okay when it happens to anyone else
• Aunt Lydia's companion Ellie told my sister that their relationship was platonic -- this makes me doubt everything Ellie has said, but maybe she doesn't want anyone to think Lydia was a lesbo
• gay people should have spousal rights everywhere -- poor Ellie deserves some acknowledgement as a widow
• Granny arranged the marriage between son-in-law and Aunt Lydia while already having an affair with him (my mother had already been born)
• there is one living relative named Milagros who knows most of these stories and I will never meet her

I used to think my family was so dysfunctional that those of us of child-bearing age should all be sterilized. But who am I to judge?  Seriously though, what is wrong with us? Was my grandmother evil? How did she meet the Muslim (my father's father, who she eventually "married")? 

How can so much fucked up-ness exist in one family, generation after generation?  I still want to have a baby someday. Someday. But I don't want to do it alone, I don't want to do it with someone who doesn't really want to be there.

This family history is one of the reasons I couldn't have the baby with A -- he didn't want it. The way I saw it, my forcing a baby on him would increase the chances that we would be raising a child in strife, be it emotional or financial.  A's reluctance to be a father also increased the chances that our relationship would not last when the baby arrived. And while there are no guarantees in life, I want/wanted to bring a life into the world with as much in the right place as possible, where everything is not so fraught with compromise and angst.

Well, that's all I have energy for now. 

I will say, even though my love life is not exactly filled with promise of romance at the moment, I am pretty certain that if I were to have a child, I would be a good mother. 

She's Got Personality

I am writing this entry on a Wednesday afternoon while at work. Makes me feel like I'm 21 again when I used to journal between customers. I worked in the Men's Shoes department at Sak's Fifth Avenue in San Francisco.

A little over a month ago that I had nothing left to say for this blog. I am amazed at my capacity to delude myself.

My friend Kevin is in town and we had dinner at Bar Bossa tonight. Kevin is gay and alone, doesn't know how to climb out of it. I told him what I'd been doing the last few months, and I could tell he couldn't quite understand how a girl like me could get around so much.

I am not a pretty woman.  I don't say that self pityingly.  I do have my charms, I can be sexy.  I am attractive to people who have talked to me a little, not necessarily by people who just look at me. She's got per-son-ality...I'm trying to quote a song. It's probably not working, is it?

Kevin is good looking but he doesn't pay attention. A lot of the time, he is looking at other things.  Maybe that's why I get more action than he does. He thinks my taking a break from men is a mistake.  He told me I'd be sorry I  pass up all these opportunities for "man sausage."

We were eating sausage. It was a wonderfully gross thing to say at the time.

On Tuesday I was on the phone with A for three hours. We talked about AL, his girlfriend, and all the other things we always talk about. We talk about how we aren't together anymore.

On Wednesday, I was on the phone with A for two hours. Soon A will be forced to commit to the girl who is a less attractive version of me.  I keep telling him how ugly she is and he laughs. Maybe she just takes bad pictures.

What would it have been like if I'd been working in the days and weeks that followed the abortion? Would I have managed to keep it together? I'm still a wreck sometimes. But I am a functional wreck. Working again marks a sort of rite of passage for me, I guess. It means I am cutting off the amount of time I can spend moping.

So three hours on the phone with A within a few days of breaking up with AL. This is a pretty clear sign that I need a bit more time to sort things out for myself. I actually don't believe that.  There is part of me that thinks that if AL liked me more, I would have less to sort out.  Could that be true?

I cannot count A as part of the equation because he has his own set of people to deal with. I told A that I wished he and I could be safe from one another, that he could look at me and say "nothing is going to happen here because I am with someone else."

But I seem to be the one in charge of saying no. It's easy when there's someone else in my life. Whatever my behavior as a single woman, I cannot be sexually involved with two men. It just isn't something I'm even tempted to do.

The odd thing is that I really like AL. I wish I wish I wish things were different. I want to say that I didn't screw up with AL too much -- he wasn't that into me either. Well, I guess I just said it. Is that my sincere believe or am I saying that to assuage the feeling that I was using him? I did like him. I don't even understand this. I like him.

Is it possible that I get into these ill-fated pseudorelationships as a respite from my grief and guilt and whatever else? A pseudoboyfriend means a few weeks of happy, sexy fun where love is possible and the future is not yet fixed. Then something in me snaps -- fun is not good enough all of a sudden when it was just the thing I wanted the day before. Is it when I realize that love is not possible with everyone?  Or is it when I am ready to face myself?

Whatever the reason, I find myself here, searching for different words to describe the same feelings I've had all year.

Hello again, Lucy.

Lucy Writes

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.          – E.M. Forster

Maybe I’ll start calling myself Lucy in honor of Miss Honeychurch, E.M. Forster’s heroine in A Room With a View.  This could be the Reticent Diarist’s pseudonym.  Reticent is not so catchy, is it?

I’m writing almost every day.  This is unusual for me but maybe not that surprising given the workless days. It occurred to me that I might write about things that happen that have nothing to do with heartache --is that even possible?  I toy with the idea of dividing each entry into sections: FUCKING SAD and NOT SO BAD and GREAT.

FUCKING SAD would have to be a major category because there is a lot of that in my life right now. But I don’t want to be a drip or seem like I sit around collecting sad stories.  I do believe that it is in the misery where our characters are formed. But in the midst of all that there is fun and hope and dirty jokes and weird/stupid stories that make a lot of things worthwhile.

Personally, I’m willing to put myself through an unusual degree of weirdness in the hopes of finding the good. I think this is a good character trait. It also shows that there is a part of me that is a gambler. And all gamblers are stupid. That is not a criticism, exactly.

But when I write to you, dear reader (well, when I write to myself), I find I turn away from what is almost happy.  Guilt perhaps?  There’s no perhaps – it is guilt, pure and simple. And fear. 

FUCKING SAD

•  My abortion
  
•  My dear friend has cancer
  
•  Ex/impregnator fell in love with my less cute doppelganger in a matter of weeks post break-up, causing me to question how much/how little he valued our relationship
•  My mother is nuts and regretful about her entire life
•  I am hung up on my ex even though I know it ain’t happening anymore
•  I had sex with a beautiful man who had the smallest penis I have ever met (and I’ve met a few)
  
•  Dating too much with little success
• Loneliness
• Having sex with my ex (the one now in love with the ugly version of me—I realize this is mean, but give me a break.)
  
• Not having money due to unemployment
  
•  DID I MENTION MY DEAD FETUS and my broken heart?  This occupies five bullet points each, just so I’m clear. FUCKING SUCKS.  I miss my A like a missing limb; I’ll miss my baby forever.

 NOT SO BAD

• I had sex with a beautiful man who had the smallest penis I have ever met (sic)
  
• Dating
  
•  Trying to be friends with my ex
  
• My attempts at dating have been met with little success -- but really, am I capable of having an honest relationship at this point?
• Unemployment
  
•  Having sex with my ex – it’s good for my ego
• Drinking
• Loneliness

GREAT

• Writing 
• A man in Boston who I might never meet who tries to help me with every dilemma I throw at him, including finding a person at Memorial Sloan Kettering who would be able to help my friend CC get better treatment
  
•  Interesting men that I’ve met who I'll never see again
•  The man with the small penis also came too fast. He could do it multiple times, each sex session lasting all of three minutes or so -- sorry for not being more accurate as I did not think to set a stopwatch before each encounter. After Round 2, I observed that he was quite sweaty and he replied, “It comes very fast.”  I died laughing, but I was the only one who got the joke.
• Meeting Michael, who I thought might turn out to be the greatest rebound boyfriend of all time. But it turned out all I wanted was to be his best friend and he wasn’t so pleased about that (this last bit makes this bullet point an eligible entry for FUCKING SAD but I have bigger fish to fry).
•  Making new friends in desperate attempt to distract myself from misery
•  Reconnecting with Jon in real life and remembering how much I love him – I have my doubts as to whether or not this would have happened if events in the FUCKING SAD category did not occur  
•  My ex and I stalking each other on OKCupid and sending each other stupid notes
•  Stealing the apartment/sex analogy from my friend DY and taking it to a whole new level of absurd with his sister LY. I will write about this later.
•  Making a kick ass apple pie for my sad sick friend – it is a stupid thing to do, but it was what she wanted and what I could give
•  Re-finding another Michael, my reluctant male friend.  He gives me rides on his motorcycle and drives us over the Brooklyn Bridge
•  Going to the beach with CC
• New York in the summer
• Loneliness
  

So does the categorization work?  Probably not.  Too pretentious.  A too-self conscious attempt to be funny.

But I'm keeping Lucy.

I'm going to gamble.

My Funny Friend Larry

I recently met up with my friend Larry. He invited a mutual friend along. 

 

Soon after we sat down, Mutual Friend leaned in close to me and said, "I had prostate cancer last year."

What do you say to that? Mutual Friend excused himself to go to the bathroom and as soon as he was out of earshot, I asked Larry why he didn't tell me that Mutual Friend had cancer.

"The guy has a radioactive pellet up his ass--how was I supposed to work that into a conversation?"

Larry is the patron saint of the suffering.  I love him.