My addition to the Internet is well-documented. I can’t go more than a few hours without checking my email, my google reader, the top headlines on Jezebel.com. I can give or take a TV in my living space, but that’s because I use my computer for almost everything there is. It’s my entertainment source, my preferred method of communication, my news source, the way that I prep for classes.
That being said, my addiction has its drawbacks. The immediacy of the Internet allows for a great deal of idiocy from its users, myself (often) included. Social networking sites allow users to post their statuses at the drop of a hat, mini-blogs like Twitter allow people to post their musings in 140 characters or less, people use blogs like this one to write post after post of navel-gazing pseudo-intellectual crap.
Crap that they might regret at a later date, when they’ve sobered up, calmed down, re-examined the situation in the harsh light of day.
It tends to be my biggest regret in life. Posting my most secret thoughts on the Internet is something I’ve been guilty of since I was sixteen years old and was dealing with the absolute pain of high school. When you’re a sixteen-year-old girl, life is absolutely excruciating. To be honest, it’s alarming that at 24, my outlook isn’t that different.
So I’m sitting here, listening to sad bastard music, my cell phone within arm’s reach for a phone call that was supposed to come over 20 minutes ago but in all probability won’t arrive at all, feeling the melancholic strings of nostalgia pull at my heart.
Christ. Did I really just write “feeling the melancholic strings of nostalgia pull at my heart?” I’m losing what little grip I have left.
Driving home tonight, after hanging up unsatisfied with how my conversation had ended with The Boy (who is out with friends and not me and who referred to me as “a friend” when someone at the house party he’s at asked who he was on the phone with), I willed myself not to cry because I’ve been doing too much of it lately and it doesn’t do me any good and then I turned up the music in my car really loud and I sang-shouted the lyrics to a sad song and it made me feel better and powerful if even for a moment because most of the time I feel like everything is so far out of my control and then I started thinking about whether I’m happy at all with how things are in general and how sad I am about the uncertainty of where my life is headed and also about how I feel like this relationship that I’m in yes I am in a relationship is at a standstill because he won’t acquiese to what was a lighthearted gesture that didn’t mean what he thought it meant and if I really admit it to myself, it still stings and then I started thinking about other nights when I would drive around in the dark and listen to music and think thoughts that I thought were so deep but were really shallow and are still shallow and I’m so SICK of thinking about The Boy and boys in general and then I randomly thought about the original BOY and I wondered if he ever thought about me and
my mind flashed back to this random night early in our relationship where we went to a show of a friend of his and we sat outside while the band loaded up their stuff afterwards and I remember sitting in the chill night air while He smoked an illicit cigarette and sulked about something but I can’t remember what it was.
I wish I remember more about certain things. My mind used to be so sharp, and even the most insignificant details stuck in my mind and I so confidently boasted that I had a photographic memory and I never forgot anything but now things are slipping away and I
can’t
hold on to them.
I’ll probably delete this in the morning.
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I’ll admit it. I like when things go my way. I don’t much care for things spinning out of my control. I like to get my way. I’m kind of spoiled that way.
When things don’t go my way, I get kind of pissy.
That being said, I’m super pissy this morning.
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The Boy and I have never gone about anything in a traditional way. In the five months that we’ve been not-dating, nothing has been what you’d call typical.
The epitome of this non-typical behavior is the way that we talk about things. We never talk about what we’re actually talking about. We never come out and say things if we can create elaborate metaphors or analogies for whatever it is we’re not saying.
In our attempt to keep things simple, we’ve actually made things much more complicated. Nothing is ever what it seems.
Because of all this, it makes sense that what happened Friday night happened the way it happened. (My sentences are clunky today.)
We wandered away from the bar where we’d been drinking with one of his oldest childhood friends. I was angry at him, my feet hurt, I was tired after a really long week. He was slightly intoxicated, but maybe not as much as he was letting on.
The Boy pointed at a nearby bench. “Let’s sit here for a minute.” A minute turned into close to an hour, and during that hour, we talked about a thousand different things, many of them at once. They were all connected but I was having trouble deciphering where each subject ended and another one began. The Boy railed on about my behavior toward another one of his friends. He told me that I need to let go of things, that I hold on too tightly to everything, that life is too short to be so in control, all of the time.
“I’m too scared,” I said tearfully. The whole conversation was surreal enough, but the fact that we were sitting in the middle of downtown Minneapolis at 11:30 at night was doing nothing to ground the situation in reality.
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” The Boy said, gesturing emphatically. “You’re too scared? Well, fuck. What a waste.”
I was quiet for a long time. Finally I looked up and met his eyes. “Do you love me, A.?”
“Do you love me?” The Boy asked me without missing a beat.
“I asked you first.”
“I won’t answer until you do,” he said, rather childishly.
“I’m completely head-over-heels in love with you,” I said, sighing with relief. I had done it. It had been building up in me for weeks, and I felt the rush of adrenaline at having finally spoken the words out loud.
“I love you,” The Boy said to me, and then he kissed me, right there in the middle of Nicollet Mall.
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“It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio, how we rolled the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces.”
–Richard Siken, “Scheherazade”
There are hundreds of things for me to say, but I can’t seem to find words for any of them. I’m trying to find the words inside of me, trying to figure out how to make my hands work, to press a pen to paper or press my fingers on the necessary keys, but it’s a process.
For now, I’ll have to be content with the fact that I can feel the words and thoughts and half-finished sentences welling up inside me. Eventually I’ll fill to the bursting point and the words will come spilling out of me.
Give me time.
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It didn’t go as I had hoped, and I’m scared that I’ve permanently altered things.
I don’t want to be invested in this, but I am.
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