Leaving

I think it's time to close this chapter. I'll be making a new blog soon.

If I don't know you, email me and I'll send you the link.

-L

Wilting

"Just because I don't always vocalize it, doesn't mean it's not always there."

He told me this, and it was a thought that kept him smoldering like a coal inside my belly. It would fade, then he would say something like this again and it would reignite, tickling me into a giddy, giggling school-girl mess.

But then the day comes when you can feel it, like a switch has flipped off and it's not there - just a lump of coal that won't catch, a stomachache.

It's hard watching something fade, a slow burn that dims little by little and you're not really sure what you did wrong. It's a more intense version of how I'd feel whenever I got a houseplant. I would follow my grandmother's instructions to a T - water it, aerate the soil, put it on the windowsill, move it away from the windowsill, prune it - but still I'd watch helplessly as the leaves wilted and yellowed and I'd wonder what I could do to fix it, to somehow reverse whatever I had done and bring it back to life.

But once certain wheels are set it motion, there are no brakes.

So I've been left for the past two weeks watching this die. Sitting with my hands crossed, trying to be patient, trying not to drive myself crazy reassessing everything I've done to find the spot where I made the nick that became infected into a necrotizing wound.

Another little blip, a tidbit that stopped short before it even had the chance to become a story like so many notes I have written on the backs of receipts and cocktail napkins collected into piles where they'll never find homes.

I'm trying hard not to be sad, or care. "Oh, it was nothing. Just a minor flirtation, crush, thing. You know me. I'll be over it soon." But I'm only explaining it to myself because it was mine. And now it's not anymore.

Quitting

I want to write something. I want to write a lot of things.

But I can't.

Most of them are too personal for me to put up here. Or, maybe "personal" is the wrong word. They would test my pride. What would be a good word to describe that? "Shameful" sounds too dramatic, but it's something along those lines. A few people still read this site and I just can't admit certain things. I can't let them know that I'm doing and thinking certain things.

It's just too sad (in a pathetic sad kind of way, which is the saddest thing, really).

I used to be a strong advocate of "out of sight, out of mind." I'd talk and talk about something that upset me and then I'd set a day and just stop. The things that made me sad were like any addiction and I'd cut myself off cold turkey and a week, a month, a year later, I was washed of it.

I try to employ this same technique now, but I can't help the conversations I have with myself in my head.

Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough.

Hello?

Hello?

Anyone there?

Have I lost you all?

Does this mean that now it's okay for me to finally start writing everything that I want to write for a change?

I'm high right now. Probably not in the way I wish I was or the way you would assume I was. I went to a birthday "thing," had more fun than I thought I might, but still came home feeling...wrong. So I took a shot of NyQuil hoping sleep would swallow me faster than my thoughts would. But somehow I ended up here. I guess my thoughts won.

Am I making any sense?

Is anyone listening?

I'm going to bed.

Affair

An acquaintance of mine has started an affair with a married coworker. It hasn't escalated to what would be considered an affair in the traditional sense because there has been no exchange of bodily fluids, but it seems even deeper. They talk and they connect in a way that I'm sure will hurt his wife more than if she discovered he was screwing hookers. I know this only because she writes about it on her anonymous blog, and I read these stories and I don't judge because I wonder if that is something that is foreseeable in my future.

I was propositioned once by a married man. A coworker from London, who had only been married for a little over a year when he came to New York for a business trip. We met for a drink. A drink became dinner and more drinks. Soon we were buzzed and he was stroking my arm, telling me how sexy I was. "Come back to my hotel with me, L. We'll have some fun."

I shook my head and told him that infidelity disgusts me. But it still didn't hinder him from sending me text messages throughout my train ride home asking me to reconsider.

BSquared and I have progressed to email messages via Gmail instead of instant messenger to exchange our overtly sexual talk. The messages grow more dangerous every day, but today I don't write because I'm thinking too much and feeling unhappy and jaded with all these bad dates, unwanted propositions and dangling carrots.

Maybe if we didn't work together this would all be fine. He would be another Chef. And we'd be able to carry on a "relationship" based on fondness that never grows into something bigger. But, forced to see him every day--lonelier than I can ever remember being in my entire life--I know that I'll create something in my head that isn't there. I'll become jealous. And if, or when, he does enter into a relationship with someone else, I'll know that his excuse that he can't be in a relationship right now isn't true. That it is me. And that's what scares me most.

Exist

Yes, I know that last entry was all over the place. Yes, I know the little I write lately is all over the place, vague, nonsensical. It all reads like some sort of inside joke that no one is a part of except for me. Even the people who know me, those who know enough about my personal life to understand what I'm referencing, would draw conclusions that would all be wrong.

So don't bother.

But this is how it is now. This is how my life makes sense to me. This is how I experience things. How my planet operates. All in relation to these moments that exist the way I see them in my head. Sitting at my desk and jerking my head up at a coworker who taps my desk as they walk by, catching a stranger's eye on the street, standing in the cold smoking a cigarette, sipping wine on another bad date, getting another tattoo, checking my profile on some social networking site, refreshing my email waiting for a message that doesn't come, making coffee, drinking coffee, having that conversation I promise I won't have ever again.

It's a far cry from the things I used to write when I tried so hard to amuse everyone with straightforward observations, witty jokes, words. But I spend so much of my energy on a daily basis trying to amuse and I've decided that this is now a place where I can tell my version of the truth--as arcane as it may be.

So, for those who might be interested in the black and white part of me: I have a new job. I still drink a lot. I started smoking again. I am addicted to body art. I started going to the gym a lot. I stopped going to the gym a lot. I'm still an insomniac. I never have any time even though I don't know what fills all that space. I'm still sad all the time and I'm still not sure why.

Un-resolved

BSquared strolls by my desk, shoots me that disgusting star athlete Midwestern smile that I find so irresistibly alluring and asks me how my new years was and I say, "Good. Yours?"

He tells me about his. His was actually good.

He sends me an instant message later: "I really don't want to be here."

"Seriously," I respond. I'm happy he's initiated contact for a change but at the same time I'm feeling tired and done with it all.

"So your new year was good?"

I groan internally, "Actually, it sucked. But no one wants to hear about that so I just say 'good' when they ask." I see no point in lying to him. I don't need to impress him.

"Are you still chaste-ing?" he jokes with me. I've told him my new policy. No more hookups. I am a nun until further notice.

I tell him I am.

"No new year make-out then?"

I want to lie now. I know he definitely indulged in a new year kiss and I don't want to give him the smug satisfaction of knowing that I had sat out the ball drop alone, sipping champagne, crossing my legs, forcing smiles and clinking my plastic glass of champagne against anyone who stretched theirs towards me, while his tongue wrestled with some herpes-infected Lower East Side whore. But I tell the truth. It would be too sad to lie. "Nah."

I'm picturing him now, lips pressed against some curly-haired brunette and I'm jealous. Like I was when he had shown a picture of his friend to a coworker who, not realizing that I was harboring a crush on him, had passed his phone along to me. "Who's that?" I had asked.

"BSquared's girlfriend," he replied, slightly sarcastic. He's fucking her for sure.

"Oh, she's cute," I said, the heat rising in my cheeks.

"Nah, she's just my friend," BSquared had said, snatching the phone from me. "She's the girl whose party I'm going to later," his eyes met mine briefly but I refused to let him see any indication of my already hatred for this nameless slut.

And now I had given him the upper hand. Again. I had never even let him kiss me. But I let him see too much of the weak side of myself. He had never touched me further than the tip of his finger brushing the inside of my thigh, whispering that it was the softest thing he had ever felt. I wouldn't let him come any closer. But I had inadvertently let my guard down and let him into something deeper.

Now we exchanged our overtly sexual banter at work. And now, ever since he had been straightforward to me and told me that he couldn't do that relationship thing again, not after his last one, the one that shook him, turned his world on its ass, we did this waltz. Sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. Sometimes I led, sometimes he led. We dipped and parried. Sometimes I misstepped, sometimes it was he.

And I welcomed his honestly. And I wished I hadn't started this new celibacy thing. Or, I wished that my mental state hadn't deteriorated so far that I couldn't do anything other than this celibacy thing. That was what I couldn't really tell anyone. Leaving that detail out, it sounded like a show of solidarity instead of an unfortunate consequence of the steady atrophy of my cranial well-being. I deleted his phone number so I wouldn't be tempted to seek solace in his warm East Village apartment one drunken lonely night.

And now I think of dinner with K a few weeks ago when he confessed that he had harbored a crush on me the entire time we were working together. How it had taken a good amount of effort on his part to resist the urge to pursue me so as not to complicate our work situation. And I'm glad because I have evolved past him. So much so that when he tells me I should come to his place for a glass of wine, I decline and trudge through the cold to the train station.

And now I think of that date I had gone on with JM who had seemed sweet. Slightly off, but who was I to judge? Who had, after failed attempts to woo me back to his apartment, kissed me on both cheeks at the entrance to the F train and told me to call him when I got home.

I texted him later, "I'm on the train now. No need to worry."

"Call me when you get home anyway."

And I did.

"What are you wearing? Are you playing with yourself?"

I sighed, told him I would call him tomorrow, rolled over, and went to bed. I deleted his number.

And now I think of P, who I barely know but feel wouldn't try to lure me to his apartment with the promise of wine or call me after a first date and try to lull me into phone sex. Maybe I am being naïve. Maybe he would. Maybe everyone would.

But I want to be naïve. As long as I don't know any better, I want to believe that there is still someone out there that I could have a little faith in.

"Any resolutions?" I ask BSquared.

"It's the year of the six-pack. I joined NYSC again," he says. "What's yours?"

Abandon all hope.

"Me too," I say. "I'll race you."

"Deal."

P

I want to grab P and slap him and shake him. "Do you know how lucky you are that I want you? Do you know how many men would love to be in your shoes?"

I'm feeling childish and selfish and cruel. But mostly lonely.

His eyes were very kind. They looked honest. Not like The Mistake--his had a glint in them that, then, I naively took as charm but am mature enough now to recognize as deception.

When P looked at me, I could tell that he wanted me. Not in the animalistic way that most men do. They softened, slightly. I felt like he wanted to hug me and nothing else. I didn't fantasize him naked. I fantasized holding his hand.

I wanted to know him.

He entertained this whim for a little while, but that was all it turned out to be--a whimsy. A silly girl with a silly crush and he ultimately chose a redhead instead. I think they were friends for a long time.

Best Friend tells me, "You are way hotter than her," and I know it's meant as comfort but she might as well have told me that my nail polish is redder or my ears are more ear-like.

I tilt my head to the side, "She has a bit of a horse-face."

"She does," Best Friend nods.

But she also has him. She is probably funny and kind--not embattled, bitter, oozing resentment and ill will, manifesting depression and insecurity into disgust towards everyone else. She probably paints things that remind her of him, and the mornings when she leaves for work early she leaves him witty notes to wake up to. She's silly and positive. He misses her on the days they can't spend the night together and he devours her on the nights they can. And when he looks at her, that moment right before he brings his lips to meet her's, she is beautiful.