organization of the past.
one of the things that confronts me in trying to write is organization. how to separate and filter the important information from the superfluous. what stories i want to tell, which ones have many parts and which ones are only one entry. im constantly struck by how to organize it all.
they say that women gauge their happiness and judge their success on their relationships and that men’s happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments. i've always hated this. i suppose its true. when i look around at the last 10 years and think about what was important to me, it had a lot to do with who i was into and how to get them to like me back. who i was with, and how to balance the relationship. who could match me, and why no one seemed to be able to handle me. things like this.
relationship, vs career. relationship, vs accomplishment. how i feel vs who i am. what can i be for you. how you relate to me. it just makes me mad, looking at this. i've been upset because i've always been ambitious. but this being female thing has really put a cramp in my style. instead of just focusing on my goals, i've been distracted along the way by a cesspool of broken possibilities, chances wanderings, feel good trysts. none of that seems worth the struggles that i am undergoing now in working to establish myself as a productive standard in my career. its a matter of priorities, i know that if i had done it differently i may still be looking back with this wry bitter half smile about how i should have done it differently. and the cycle continues.
so that said, i've always said that i've experienced the things i have so that i could write stories about them. let me attempt to categorize the periods of time i've had over the last 10 years, and the outline of stories that go with them. if only for the exercise of it, to serve as a starting point.
college started with the idea of freedom. i was highly sheltered. when i got out, i sorta exploded. i started smoking cigarettes, and before my freshman year of college was up, i had a girlfriend. my parents didn't know how to deal with their well behaved prodigal daughter who was suddenly combative and rebellious. dating women? my mother nearly lost it.
i moved back home after a year because i realized that biology was hardly my calling. back home, i continued my long time crush on this poker faced guy named adam. i didn't know what he did, over the time that i knew him, sometimes i thought he was a criminal, sometimes i thought he was an undercover cop, he kept it all ambiguous, and my imagination would fly. he was a drunk, he played the guitar, he spent a lot of time in bars playing pool, and i think i started smoking because of him, actually. he wasn't particularly talented, or beautiful or kind. he was actually to the contrary, pretty silent, a man of few words, but of a seemingly extreme intensity. i adored him, beyond hope, for a very long time. i'd met him when i was 17, in our local smoke filled coffee house, and continued to like him through college, till i met my ex boyfriend around the age of 22.
he was just crazy. i remember once i woke up to find him in my room, i'd moved back out again by then, and had a room in a two story house. he had shimmied up the banister to my balcony area and into my place that way. my door wasn't locked because frankly, it was a pretty unconventional way to enter. he'd do crazy things like this all the time, but i never slept with him. except once. finally toward the end of the obsession, i'd spent the night at his place, and nonchalantly suggested that we have sex. he agreed and we had a stupid sloppy 2 minute attempt at it. but fuck me, i have to count it. it never happened again. it was so poetically tragic given the fact that for many years i wanted to loose my virginity to him.
i lost my virginity to a very short very kind guy named butch. he was a carpenter. he had rebounded, just out of a long relationship and we had a good 2 or 3 months together. with him i learned to have an orgasm with someone for the first time, and learned how to have sex, i guess. it was a good way to learn these things, a good person to do it with. he was light, funny, and extremely caring. it ended one day when he told me he was going back to his ex. i think i wrote a letter, and i remember it hurt a lot for a little while, but then i just moved on... the begining of all sorts of short love affairs. is it me, or is it them? i never can tell..
then came a few others. an asian pastry chef who had the body of a greek god, i met him in a dirty bar on my birthday. we had a sexual relationship then i had a pregnancy scare and that just evaporated. he hardly acted like he cared. i may have been dramatic about it as well, but it scared the mess out of me. then an air force guy id met on yahoo. then nothing. with him i had a bad experience that shut down on men all together. i just remember it was a dark year, that one. alone.
through out, i was aggressively bisexual. that was my identity, i didn't apologise for it, and i didn't hide it. in fact, i made sure that men i got involved with understood that this was a big part of who i was. 19-24, there were lots of episodes over the course. 3 main women i was involved with. the first, a little funny ham of a tomboy at unc ch, who quit school to be an actress. she didn't become one, and she never finished school. a blonde angel who was married at the time. i always thought she was the light to my dark, she was so thin, a waify, frail body that housed a seering fire of a woman, she had this agile power to her body that felt like the brink of an explosion. i think i loved her. it was a complicated time though, she was confused, and i didn't know how to handle her, i couldn't jump through all the impossible hoops. sometimes, i just didn't know what she wanted, or else i was just oblivious to it at times. i moved to dc, and she came with me to apt hunt, to spend one last time with me, to sleep with me one last time. but i didn't even realise that, i thought she was just doing the friend thing, and we ended up going out and doing something completely ridiculous with some persian kids that i knew. we just always missed each other, me and her. the last time i saw her was a year ago, last april. i went and it took hardly half a day for me to say the wrong thing and her to go into hysterics on me, lost, both of us lost to what we both wanted. and i didn't know anymore, what to do or think, other than to just let it go.
there were actually two more, one a butchy dyke that lived upstairs from me when i first moved here. the only lover i've ever lived with. im actually against cohabitation, but that was an interesting experience. eventually, i think i became too challenging for her, and she left, to move back to ohio near her parents, as a closeted lesbian. the last, most recent was this past winter. a czech beauty, who i think i ruined it with. another story for another time, but she was just here temporarily, and about a month before she went my jealousy got to a point that she didnt want to deal with and she and i just stopped, in anger. i came back around, but she never did. a part of me hurt at it, i never understood how people can just cut and run like that, and another part of me just shrugged and let it go. i couldnt tell if it was a matter of principles or pride.
my many soirees with craigslist. meeting people for dates, for platonic activities, for casual dirty encounters. if i wrote about every one of those episodes, i would have a book. i would have to publish it anonymously. i don't know if i remember all of them, but it would make for good reading. i've thought about it alot.
then theres the story of the tiger, which someday i'd like to tell, in every vivid detail, as it occured. ive never been so in love with a man. i've never met someone in such an awful space in their life. i've never wanted to help someone come back to life with every fiber of my body as i did with him. i've never been so destroyed as i was when he wasn't there with me. the idea was that he was so wrecked that he couldn't let himself near anyone, especially not me. he was the perfect byronic hero. he was dark and tortured and honorable, and strong and so fucked up. i nearly died when i was with him, and was even worse when i wasn't. i spent more time waiting than with him, in love with this presence always with me but never here, i waited for a year, long months of no word, he would come for a week and then disappear again. i played the role of the angel for him, which seemed to touch him vividly, but it never ended up working in the end. its a passionate wild story, that would make a good screenplay. i started painting again because of him. i grew a lot because of him. i felt more deeply than i ever have before, for knowing him. but it never came to the place where i could be his, and he mine. he too, i only slept with once. finally, after months of torture, after a long time wanting nothing but him, only him, i spent an evening seducing him, throwing physical lure after physical lure, and finally later that night got what i wanted. you know how they say careful what you wish for... because the fuck i got was like that of a tiger. anamalistic, barbaric, concerned not at all for me. fast. violent. and when it was over he got up and took a shower, hardly saying a word. and shaking i followed, not long after him, getting in as he was getting out. trying to stay calm, and deal with what i got. it ended one evening in december when he asked me not to call him any longer, because he needed sometime to sort out what he is doing with himself. so then i didn't. it was the first time in a year he actually told me not to come around. before that it was never yes or no, there was never a good bye, or an explaination, or anything. just this vapid silence. this pregnant waiting. most recently, i painted this painting of he and i. im talking in it, ethereal, sketched almost, and he, is gravely staring at me. the way he used to always look at me. its pink that painting. the color of bubble gum, the color of teenage dreams. its my way of saying that love is a farce, that its just this big stupid idea that brings nothing beautiful but a memory of what could have been... when i think of him, i think of that. love, never to be manifested. and because of that, i think that i've got this association of what love is. in my self depricating humor i imagine one day ill meet someone incredible, and get married, only to run into him again, and as a matter of the ironic course of things, he'll remember how much he loved me, and how much of a mistake he made, he'll come back but not till then, and i'll have to say no. i wonder if ill have the strength to, because no one has ever touched me like that, just by sheer virtue of who he was. i hope i will. i hope it doesn't happen that way.
the seduction of aurora jade, the story of a man who stood tall on the outside so that he could hide how small he was on the inside. the beacon i stretched between dc and boston, hoping for a distraction to my unhealthy obsession, looking for the answer of me in a boy. i saw a mirror, then i saw a black hole. i saw freedom and then i saw that it held a particularly ugly kind of entrapment.
and they just continue to unfold. i have all these stories. and no idea what to do with them.
it makes me nervous about the future, because i still have all these things left to experience, despite all the places i have been. theres still so much over the horizon. is it real? can i believe in it? did all this really happen, or is it like this swirling nebulous day to day illusion of reality?
can i really like somone and have them like me at the same time?
is any of this important, at all, in the first place?
won't it come when i stop wondering?
and thats the rub, isn't it.
they say that women gauge their happiness and judge their success on their relationships and that men’s happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments. i've always hated this. i suppose its true. when i look around at the last 10 years and think about what was important to me, it had a lot to do with who i was into and how to get them to like me back. who i was with, and how to balance the relationship. who could match me, and why no one seemed to be able to handle me. things like this.
relationship, vs career. relationship, vs accomplishment. how i feel vs who i am. what can i be for you. how you relate to me. it just makes me mad, looking at this. i've been upset because i've always been ambitious. but this being female thing has really put a cramp in my style. instead of just focusing on my goals, i've been distracted along the way by a cesspool of broken possibilities, chances wanderings, feel good trysts. none of that seems worth the struggles that i am undergoing now in working to establish myself as a productive standard in my career. its a matter of priorities, i know that if i had done it differently i may still be looking back with this wry bitter half smile about how i should have done it differently. and the cycle continues.
so that said, i've always said that i've experienced the things i have so that i could write stories about them. let me attempt to categorize the periods of time i've had over the last 10 years, and the outline of stories that go with them. if only for the exercise of it, to serve as a starting point.
college started with the idea of freedom. i was highly sheltered. when i got out, i sorta exploded. i started smoking cigarettes, and before my freshman year of college was up, i had a girlfriend. my parents didn't know how to deal with their well behaved prodigal daughter who was suddenly combative and rebellious. dating women? my mother nearly lost it.
i moved back home after a year because i realized that biology was hardly my calling. back home, i continued my long time crush on this poker faced guy named adam. i didn't know what he did, over the time that i knew him, sometimes i thought he was a criminal, sometimes i thought he was an undercover cop, he kept it all ambiguous, and my imagination would fly. he was a drunk, he played the guitar, he spent a lot of time in bars playing pool, and i think i started smoking because of him, actually. he wasn't particularly talented, or beautiful or kind. he was actually to the contrary, pretty silent, a man of few words, but of a seemingly extreme intensity. i adored him, beyond hope, for a very long time. i'd met him when i was 17, in our local smoke filled coffee house, and continued to like him through college, till i met my ex boyfriend around the age of 22.
he was just crazy. i remember once i woke up to find him in my room, i'd moved back out again by then, and had a room in a two story house. he had shimmied up the banister to my balcony area and into my place that way. my door wasn't locked because frankly, it was a pretty unconventional way to enter. he'd do crazy things like this all the time, but i never slept with him. except once. finally toward the end of the obsession, i'd spent the night at his place, and nonchalantly suggested that we have sex. he agreed and we had a stupid sloppy 2 minute attempt at it. but fuck me, i have to count it. it never happened again. it was so poetically tragic given the fact that for many years i wanted to loose my virginity to him.
i lost my virginity to a very short very kind guy named butch. he was a carpenter. he had rebounded, just out of a long relationship and we had a good 2 or 3 months together. with him i learned to have an orgasm with someone for the first time, and learned how to have sex, i guess. it was a good way to learn these things, a good person to do it with. he was light, funny, and extremely caring. it ended one day when he told me he was going back to his ex. i think i wrote a letter, and i remember it hurt a lot for a little while, but then i just moved on... the begining of all sorts of short love affairs. is it me, or is it them? i never can tell..
then came a few others. an asian pastry chef who had the body of a greek god, i met him in a dirty bar on my birthday. we had a sexual relationship then i had a pregnancy scare and that just evaporated. he hardly acted like he cared. i may have been dramatic about it as well, but it scared the mess out of me. then an air force guy id met on yahoo. then nothing. with him i had a bad experience that shut down on men all together. i just remember it was a dark year, that one. alone.
through out, i was aggressively bisexual. that was my identity, i didn't apologise for it, and i didn't hide it. in fact, i made sure that men i got involved with understood that this was a big part of who i was. 19-24, there were lots of episodes over the course. 3 main women i was involved with. the first, a little funny ham of a tomboy at unc ch, who quit school to be an actress. she didn't become one, and she never finished school. a blonde angel who was married at the time. i always thought she was the light to my dark, she was so thin, a waify, frail body that housed a seering fire of a woman, she had this agile power to her body that felt like the brink of an explosion. i think i loved her. it was a complicated time though, she was confused, and i didn't know how to handle her, i couldn't jump through all the impossible hoops. sometimes, i just didn't know what she wanted, or else i was just oblivious to it at times. i moved to dc, and she came with me to apt hunt, to spend one last time with me, to sleep with me one last time. but i didn't even realise that, i thought she was just doing the friend thing, and we ended up going out and doing something completely ridiculous with some persian kids that i knew. we just always missed each other, me and her. the last time i saw her was a year ago, last april. i went and it took hardly half a day for me to say the wrong thing and her to go into hysterics on me, lost, both of us lost to what we both wanted. and i didn't know anymore, what to do or think, other than to just let it go.
there were actually two more, one a butchy dyke that lived upstairs from me when i first moved here. the only lover i've ever lived with. im actually against cohabitation, but that was an interesting experience. eventually, i think i became too challenging for her, and she left, to move back to ohio near her parents, as a closeted lesbian. the last, most recent was this past winter. a czech beauty, who i think i ruined it with. another story for another time, but she was just here temporarily, and about a month before she went my jealousy got to a point that she didnt want to deal with and she and i just stopped, in anger. i came back around, but she never did. a part of me hurt at it, i never understood how people can just cut and run like that, and another part of me just shrugged and let it go. i couldnt tell if it was a matter of principles or pride.
my many soirees with craigslist. meeting people for dates, for platonic activities, for casual dirty encounters. if i wrote about every one of those episodes, i would have a book. i would have to publish it anonymously. i don't know if i remember all of them, but it would make for good reading. i've thought about it alot.
then theres the story of the tiger, which someday i'd like to tell, in every vivid detail, as it occured. ive never been so in love with a man. i've never met someone in such an awful space in their life. i've never wanted to help someone come back to life with every fiber of my body as i did with him. i've never been so destroyed as i was when he wasn't there with me. the idea was that he was so wrecked that he couldn't let himself near anyone, especially not me. he was the perfect byronic hero. he was dark and tortured and honorable, and strong and so fucked up. i nearly died when i was with him, and was even worse when i wasn't. i spent more time waiting than with him, in love with this presence always with me but never here, i waited for a year, long months of no word, he would come for a week and then disappear again. i played the role of the angel for him, which seemed to touch him vividly, but it never ended up working in the end. its a passionate wild story, that would make a good screenplay. i started painting again because of him. i grew a lot because of him. i felt more deeply than i ever have before, for knowing him. but it never came to the place where i could be his, and he mine. he too, i only slept with once. finally, after months of torture, after a long time wanting nothing but him, only him, i spent an evening seducing him, throwing physical lure after physical lure, and finally later that night got what i wanted. you know how they say careful what you wish for... because the fuck i got was like that of a tiger. anamalistic, barbaric, concerned not at all for me. fast. violent. and when it was over he got up and took a shower, hardly saying a word. and shaking i followed, not long after him, getting in as he was getting out. trying to stay calm, and deal with what i got. it ended one evening in december when he asked me not to call him any longer, because he needed sometime to sort out what he is doing with himself. so then i didn't. it was the first time in a year he actually told me not to come around. before that it was never yes or no, there was never a good bye, or an explaination, or anything. just this vapid silence. this pregnant waiting. most recently, i painted this painting of he and i. im talking in it, ethereal, sketched almost, and he, is gravely staring at me. the way he used to always look at me. its pink that painting. the color of bubble gum, the color of teenage dreams. its my way of saying that love is a farce, that its just this big stupid idea that brings nothing beautiful but a memory of what could have been... when i think of him, i think of that. love, never to be manifested. and because of that, i think that i've got this association of what love is. in my self depricating humor i imagine one day ill meet someone incredible, and get married, only to run into him again, and as a matter of the ironic course of things, he'll remember how much he loved me, and how much of a mistake he made, he'll come back but not till then, and i'll have to say no. i wonder if ill have the strength to, because no one has ever touched me like that, just by sheer virtue of who he was. i hope i will. i hope it doesn't happen that way.
the seduction of aurora jade, the story of a man who stood tall on the outside so that he could hide how small he was on the inside. the beacon i stretched between dc and boston, hoping for a distraction to my unhealthy obsession, looking for the answer of me in a boy. i saw a mirror, then i saw a black hole. i saw freedom and then i saw that it held a particularly ugly kind of entrapment.
and they just continue to unfold. i have all these stories. and no idea what to do with them.
it makes me nervous about the future, because i still have all these things left to experience, despite all the places i have been. theres still so much over the horizon. is it real? can i believe in it? did all this really happen, or is it like this swirling nebulous day to day illusion of reality?
can i really like somone and have them like me at the same time?
is any of this important, at all, in the first place?
won't it come when i stop wondering?
and thats the rub, isn't it.
posted by sheloves at 11:18 AM
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