stranger

This isn't really the best time to write.  I'm tipsy from a kickball playoff loss - same as every year - and a  trip to Bull's Tavern to drink all manners of interesting and Imperial beers (because what else could possibly assuage a playoff loss?).  And I'm sitting at home, all manners of tipsy, listening to Noah & the Whale, wanting to write because it seems like the kind of thing I should do when I can afford to make time for it.  So I guess I will.

It seems unnatural that I still feel strange about Leslie.  I'm afraid that, six months after we've broken up, I've attached some mythical importance to her.  I'm afraid of losing her (from what?).  I notice her absence (from what was?).  I fear, internally, that she'll meet someone else and leave me behind (she will!  you broke up with her!).  I keep tabs on her intermittently through text and facebook and snapchat.  I really just want to hear from her.  I really just want to see that she's home alone, under the covers, with Phoebe and Fiona, same as when I left her.  And I never really explained to her how much of a mistake that was.  How when I called her I really just meant other things.  How when she said, "we're breaking up, aren't we?" that it isn't really what I wanted but that when she uttered those words, I didn't exactly know what else it could be?  And so here we are.

There's a discrepancy between how I feel about her in absentia and in persona (are those even words?). When she's missing and when I'm missing her, a text means a lot.  A snapchat photo of her alone at night or babysitting means a lot.  I remember feeling so broke up at home, months ago, when she'd been out with guys, and I was raking grass in the dog yard with my parents and sister the next morning.  She told me that she hated how NO OTHER GUYS WERE ME but it still stung that she'd even been out with them.  And this after we'd broken up.  I still feel that feeling sometimes when I hear from her, that feeling of love that I can't really understand or place.  I don't think it's love exactly - more of a comfort or a warmth in that I haven't lost it quite yet - or is that love (I'm reading Kundera's The Incredible Lightness of Being now and it shocks me how much of this that novel understands)?  It will torture me forever that I don't know what love means.  Or else I'll just learn someday and then know for sure.  This feeling that I have when reading her texts, when knowing she's responding to only me and is focusing on me solely, I don't know that that's love.  It feels like home though.  It feels exactly like home.  I'll still feel such heartbreak and jealousy and loneliness and emptiness when she finds someone else.  I'll feel like that guy from the reality survival show who goes out into Alaska and survives for a week until his helicopter rescues him.  I don't have a helicopter queued up, though.  It's just me and Alaska and no one to keep me warm.

Of course, in person, it's different.   I can go on and appreciate those times on the couch as Good Times, when her head's on my chest and her breaths are routine and it's all loveliness and tenderness and happiness.  Still, her attitude isn't on par with mine.  We aren't as often on the same wavelength.  It's still true that I'm a middling thing, a body in need of influence.  Where that influence comes from matters.  Will it be from a happy, positive person or Leslie, who seems to always be embroiled in something painful or stressful, whether it's her fault or not?   I can't be someone's bobber or buoy, their life jacket.  I'm not floaty enough.  Whenever she visits I'm both reminded of how nice it once was and how I know it would never work out between us.  And when she left the last time, I cried.  And now that she's gone again, I tend to only remember the tender things and feel that warmth therein.  This is the curse, I suppose, of the lonely man.  As Damien Rice wrote, forever ago, "I can't keep my mind off of you until I find someone new."

(even then, I can't attach quite the same baggage to her that I do to Margaret.  then again, what a fucked up situation that was.  I even brought it up tonight, in conversation, if only to highlight that she ended up fucking a guy from the backup band of FUN.  fuck that.  I shouldn't do that.  she's as long gone as anyone ever has been.  fuck me for thinking October was the month when she contacts me out of nowhere every year.  christ, get over it.)

"This is the last song that I write while you're even on my mind."