On love that makes us what we are.

An open letter to a lost love: I haven’t spoken to you in years — we’re not friends anymore — but I know where to find you if I need to. The Internet is a vast, open file cabinet of information, so maybe once a year, I search for you just to see how you are. You look really happy. And she looks like she’s a wonderful girl. She looks like one of those artsy, hipster, earthy girls I’m always perplexed by; I just don’t know how they pull it off day in and day out. She looks smart, and she looks kind. And she looks like someone who fits better with you and your family than I ever could. I don’t know if you search for me, too (but in my world, you would). Know that I’m happy, and that I wasn’t the monster you thought I was toward the end. I was young and I was still very immature. Losing you hurt a lot, mostly because it should not have happened the way it did. I would never send this to you because it would prove I would still think of you. You might think I wasn’t happy with my new love (I am, and I promise, but nothing’s perfect). I just hate unfinished business — and as loose ends go, you’re one I wish had been tied neatly a long time ago. I just want you to be happy — and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wish a tiny, miniscule part of me wished you were still happy being with me.

Losing game

Sometimes I
really think I’m going crazy.
It takes almost nothing
to trip
me
up.

I know I’m not ready
for love
or even like
when I’m kept tossing
and turning
thinking about losing
and hating what’s going.

I guess I wanted to feel
and touch and
remember what
this
felt
like

once.

I don’t know if you’re it
But it doesn’t matter
because I’m not able
right now
I’m not stable
I’m not really here.

Burning it down.

I made it three days without a cigarette, and gave in today.

I’m sorry. I can go without drinking, without sex, without everything else … just give me one vice, so I can flick away ashes in 90-degree heat. Give me something to burn while I wonder how I got here.

Match.com

Today, at work, I found my fingers plucking out “match.com” into Firefox’s browser while I was supposed to be writing a story.

Okay, time to be honest: I registered once before, but only on a lark. I don’t know my user name or password, and I didn’t complete the profile with a picture. This time, I don’t know why, but it felt a little different.

People use the Internet every day to find love. Could I be one of them? Once, I responded to a stranger’s message on MySpace, and we ended up hanging out a few times. It wasn’t love, but Chicago is a big place, and it was nice to meet someone in a different way than the usual booze-filled rampage.

But Match.com? Actually paying for people looking for the same thing I am? That’s all a bit different. I only just completed my profile (and I submitted a picture this time), so it isn’t quite ready for broadcast yet.

So now, I’m wondering if I said the right things to get me noticed, like clicking the right Interest boxes.

I didn’t want to lie and say my body wasn’t curvy, so I didn’t, even though I’m sure it would’ve gotten me more responses to select “athletic” or “average.” I guess I could squeeze into either of those categories, but I’m a big fan of my boobs and hips [my favorite part about me] and ass. That’s who I am, and in no way do I think that’s less appealing than someone who clicks “slender.” If someone doesn’t want curves, well, that seems sort of boring.

Under Smoking, I selected “Trying to Quit.” I’m on day three of no nicotine, and so far I’m doing fine. I stick a piece of gum in my mouth when I start to crave a smoke, and it’s going alright. Who knows what will happen when I drink or am around smokers, but so far, I’ve lived another day.

When it came time to write about who I wanted, I just tried to be honest. I want someone who doesn’t make me feel like my heart is gonna break and I’m gonna die alone. Most of the people I meet are fucking painful. Most of the guys I meet are jokes. I hope, I hope, I HOPE that someone is out there who doesn’t make me want to rip my hair out at the dinner table. Here’s hoping. I want someone like Ant, my first love who I still need to tell you about, before he broke the snowglobe and changed who I was for good.

But anyway … Match.com? What the FUCK am I thinking?

Shock of love, part one.

I’m a pretty firm believer that you only fall in love head-first once. Unless you’ve got some weird personality disorder, perpetual immaturity or obvious issues with the opposite sex, people just aren’t capable of opening up that completely, that unabashedly, after being stripped clean by their first love.

Anthony is his name. I won’t use a pseudonym, since I’m not really capable of making up a name for someone so important to me. We were both 18 when it happened. How we met is sort of strange, complicated and fitting when you explain our relationship over the long-term:

Ant and I are from the same town, but went to different high schools and didn’t know of each other. While he holed up in dorm rooms and cafeteria corners at Indiana University, I was clinking glasses and grasping the arms of strangers in easy-carding Loyola Chicago bars. One of my friends, Nate, ended up moving into the same dorm as Ant. Nate ended up becoming fast friends with him and his circle of high-school-turned-college friends, including a guy named Matt.

Nate ended up giving my Instant Messenger screen name to Matt because Nate thought Matt and I would be a good match. So, Matt and I casually chatted between classes while I was five hours away in Chicago. Ant got my screen name from Matt, because he, too, was curious about this girl Nate kept talking about. Ant and I ended up talking online more often as Matt and I did. I started to come home early from parties or leave late for class to catch him at his computer.

Fast forward, Ant asks Matt if he doesn’t mind if he, instead, goes after me. Matt gives his blessing, we all meet face-to-face over the Thanksgiving of 2003.

After this, I am a goner.

Ant and I immediately begin to fall in love.

That first weekend, I saw him twice. The first meeting was a whirlwind of hello’s, fast talking and nervous laughter. I remember exactly what I was wearing but can’t for the life of me remember much about Ant. Over the next few months I’d note his curly hair, his round, open face and these brown eyes that left me weak-kneed, bathing in the most tender, earnest gaze I’ll ever know. But that first night, my eyes were wild and unfocused, belonging to a ravenously open-hearted girl who needed a love like him.

We didn’t see each other until the next month, Christmas break. That’s when we exchanged homemade Christmas presents, mix CD’s and “I love yous.” Yeah, we were moving fast, but I don’t think either of us had ever met someone who we were able to talk for hours with, or laugh as loud with.

You never realize until after it’s over that you were just indulging each other, but at the time we didn’t know any better. As I said before, I was a goner, well on my way to the sort of heartbreak, accompanied by the sort of shock I’m not sure many people quite understand. If you don’t believe me, you’ll figure out why later. I just don’t have the energy to tell you now.

A decade-long crush I didn’t deserve.

A guy, I’ll call him Blue, confessed last weekend that he’s been in love with me for nine years.

Nine years?

That means I was 14. I was in ninth-grade and I actually remember Blue calling me at home after several weeks of flirting and after-school Internet chats. But I got so nervous that I just watched his parents’ listed number pop up again and again on my Caller ID, a flicker of green and black on the phone’s face.

Nine years later, I’m 23, and I still do the same thing when his name pops up on my BlackBerry. I blame poor reception every time, and he never seems to fully believe me.

Blue’s a nice guy, but not one I’d want to end up with. He’s smart, but he’s blue collar. He’s funny, but sometimes a racial slur slips out. He’s cute, but years of beer and pot have rounded his features into handsome doughish-ness.

But he’s always been so sweet to me and has never tried anything inappropriate, even when he could’ve. He’s the one who pushes me away when I’m drunk and sloppy. But still, when I get drunk I act cutesy and wonder to him why he never calls to ask me out, when I know damn well he’s tried really hard to do this before. He’ll remind me of specific dates we were supposed to hang out that I flaked out. And I’ll say, ‘Ok, for real, let’s go out next weekend.’

Then he calls, and I ignore. Nine years of this. I’m the girl he’ll never be good enough to get, but that doesn’t feel good in the least. What feels even worse is that he says he loved me before I had contacts, before I had boobs and before I had blond hair. He loved me when I was hugely awkward and ugly, and I’m not just saying that — I really was all sorts of not cute.

It feels bad, because no one ever looks at me now and sees what he says he was able to see when no one else was looking.

The case of the crotch grabber

I’m still casually responding to messages from Sean. This is someone tried to get me to extend our date a little longer by grabbing my hand and bumping it against his erection.

“See what you did to me?” He asked, “Why are you leaving now, just when we were getting friendly?”

The pleasantness of the past three hours, which included a cutesy date of “Gossip Girl” and Chinese takeout, flew out the window. Bile rose to my throat. It was my second time ever spending time with this guy, and apparently a kiss goodnight was not enough. So I say goodnight as quickly as possible, snatch my hand away from his crotch area and nearly hit a wall with my shoulder in the rush to get the fuck out of there.

Why am I still talking to him? I don’t know. I suppose it was inappropriate and gross and could very well be a deal-breaking kind of thing to do. I haven’t seen him since then, and I know before I decide to hang out with him again we’ll have to have the “Do Not Ever Put Your Hands On Me (Or My Hands On You) Without Being Absolutely Respectful First”-talk. If I don’t have the balls to bring his offense up, I certainly won’t have the balls to ever see him again. At least that’s what I’ve promised myself.

Or at least we’ll have to hang out in a group. Hopefully there will be minimal crotch grabbing when my friends are around.

Can’t do it.

I feel like a huge piece of me is missing and I don’t know exactly what part of me is gone. I just know that something is wrong. The anti-depressant doesn’t change my life like I thought it would. If anything, the Cymbalta just makes things a little lighter, and drags my emotions off into the distance where I can’t quite reach them. I can’t seem to cry when I want to, or laugh when I need to. Maybe I should try just talking to someone. Maybe I should sit down for an hour and talk about how I’m completely fucked up about men, how I’ll never be able to make anyone happy for more than a few short months. There are guys who have tried to love me and have left me because I went ahead and destroyed them. There’s one right now who asked me to come watch a movie with him tonight, but I won’t go because I don’t want him touching me. I am sick of fighting it. Fighting it off, fighting it right, fighting myself fine. I want to lie limp in my bed and leave my hair unwashed. I want to drift off into a stupor in my living room of this silly house I inherited, the sunny 1960’s ski lodge that reminds me every day that the ones I love die and will continue to be gone. I want to shrivel into nothing, want my skin to turn grey and my eyes to go from blue to black huge pupils that don’t see anything, unfocused.

I don’t want to die. I want to check out for awhile. I want to come back a better person, someone who deserves the things I want so badly.

A open letter to an asshole.

Dear X,

Since I drunkenly decided to sleep with you, I’ve noticed our texts and our conversations are a lot more one-sided. I wish I could say I’m digging the one-word answers and the unavailable behavior that came out of nowhere as soon as we woke up. 

I can only figure that I’ve been pitched into a pile of those girls, disposable sluts that obviously give it up too soon and aren’t worth getting to know beyond a quick hit. And it’s not like I can blame you. A lot of girls think we’re empowered and owning our sexuality by putting a lower value on the act of sex, but it seems that even if we loosen our morals up a little, the judgement is still there. You can’t have progress if the act of easy sex is still seen by one side as whorish and uninteresting. 

I guess, in my defense, I have to say that I’m still worth knowing. I’m not one of those girls. In fact, I’m not really part of any club but my own. Just because I decided to sleep with you doesn’t mean I lose my good qualities in the process. I happen to be really smart, really cute, really funny and really sexy. I’m sorry if you don’t feel the same, but you deciding to treat me as someone less than I am is your choice, not mine. It’s clear I’m writing this to feel better, yeah, but only because it’s natural to want to be accepted if you do the most intimate thing you can do with another person. It’s astonishing to me that you could care less about how I see you — it’ll never cease to amaze me that guys like you don’t care about what I’ll think about you after the act. You take what you get and really don’t care if I think you’re cool or funny or handsome. I guess it’s good that you don’t care, because your behavior proves that you’ve got a lot of growing up to do.

The fact that you are rejecting me stings and is a bruise to my ego, but you don’t get to take anything of significance away from me. If anything, you’re a lesson in judgement, a notch in the bedpost, a night that slips from my memory.

 

Fuck you.

/k

 

The art of the booty call …

Since I intend to cut Sean off, I want to contact of Brad for some no-strings-attached sex. I realize my last post was about making some guy wait until I was ready, and I still plan to do that. When I meet someone I could like, I’m not going to give it up just because that’s what is expected. I’m promising to myself to hold out for romance.

However, I’ve already gone ahead and slept with Brad, and it was good, so I need to figure out the art of booty calling/fuck buddyism. I can tell he can match me in bed — I don’t get that vibe often — and I’m not sure I could see myself getting attached to him. He’s really sort of bland beyond his physical attractiveness. Everybody wins.

Brad’s left me a message but I haven’t returned it. So when I resurface, I want to be flirty in an “I don’t want you, I don’t need you, I’m just being cute [but I really wanna get laid]” sort of way.

These situations never turn out well, do they?