I woke up this morning and looked at the text messages I sent out last night, kind of fearing that they were too much, and fears proved correct, proved prescient. I don't know what happened. I went to go have a couple of drinks at Eastern Bloc after getting off work and I consumed them quite quickly, leaving shortly thereafter to go home. I am now Facebook boyfriends with Matt. I sent a text to a co-worker I had been flirting with all night at work and who I was supposed to have drinks with but who had to stay at work later, flirting back and forth via text, eventually me suggesting he come over to my house. I sent out another invite to some person I have been flirting with on Grindr forever, suggesting he come over and get stoned with me. And all of those are a bit much, but the real kicker is the text I sent to Diego. It's long and self-pitying and in which I declare my love for him, lament its lack of return, and say that I am going to seek out new loves.
Things have been working themselves up to this text for a while. We have been hanging out often, sleeping together often, being quite affectionate, and I have become attached or think I have, and regardless there has been me making more and more pronounced the extent to which I like him and there has been him stepping away emotionally from me, trying to make distance from these comments that try to step closer. I just finished reading this book, A Vindication of Love, essentially a defense of crazy, impassioned love in an age that the author, Cristina Nehring, believes is too focused on concepts of "healthy" relationships, of neutered affections, of equal and reciprocal feelings. She argues, using the canon of Western literature as her examples, that for most of time love has been something that has made people crazy, that it will leave you scars, perhaps kill you, and that all of that if fine, great even, that that is what makes a life a life. And the book is all right, flawed in many ways, but still that is the thing I had been reading and surely that had some effect on me, caused me to become a bit more crazy about this boy I dated a while ago and who now at this point in time I am supposed to be friends with.
The intensity of my affection and regard for this person move it into some realm other than friendship. We saw Brighton Beach Memoirs on Monday night and it was sentimental Americana, but I loved it regardless, nearly cried a few times thinking of my own family and of my own relationships with people. Watching Laurie Metcalfe act on stage was a great pleasure. A greater pleasure though was watching it next to this boy, his leg pressed against mine and him continually falling asleep throughout the first act. After the play, we went to Metropolitan and had some drinks and we talked about things, about emotional distance, about how I am in love with him, and we also didn't talk. It was awkward and I was sad and unable to express things and hurt that things weren't what I wanted them to be, that I wasn't sure if they would be. The thing I have with him is great and yet it also falls short of something I want. I find myself even here unable to properly say things, there are pauses in between each of these sentences, and I am sure the thing reads terribly - that I don't know how to go about saying it, perhaps don't want to.
The implication of what I have been told though comes down to this: he is still hung-up on his ex-boyfriend, cannot be the person I am looking for, that I should probably be trying to find these things in someone else, and yet I don't want to, don't see these qualities in other people. So, a problem. But we'll see. I guess I should step back, read books not about passionate love, and start to seek out new faces, new eyes to flirt with. The weather is amazing. Fall’s onset has really invigorated me in just about every sense and I feel well poised for change, for things I want to happen, things I don’t want to, and things I am going to make happen, things I want to do with myself, goals, and dreams.
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