Desire Diary, pt II

10/30—

The day after a hangover can be amazing if endless sleep is available. Fortunately for me it was. Today, the day after that big hangover rest, I wake up rejuvenated and get avocado toast and smoke the last two cigarettes in my pack in my car and yell out my window: Two months! Two months since I last spoke to R, this is victory. I spend $50 on an Iggy Pop vinyl and walk everywhere—north shore, south shore, a park by my house. The world is a sparkling expanse stretched out before me, bursting with infinite possibility. Last night, everything appeared so small and bleak—transformation at my fingertips!

10/31—

I get a pack of cigarettes and tell myself it’s allowed because it’s still October—a month for microdosing death. I’m driving through winding roads, disillusioned by my “love” for you, enchanted by the enveloping yellow trees. Very rarely does human love suffice. I don’t want the indulgent, calculated appreciation and affection you give me—I want to be loved and neglected. In this way, I am more enraptured by R who I haven’t talked to in two months (and one day!) than I am by you. 

Avocado toast—like a cigarette it’s a reprieve from life for just a few minutes. I used to not be able to eat a meal in public alone. Now I wield my plastic knife and fork with a charming clumsiness. Not that anyone can tell. Though I feel everyone’s eyes on me, I know I’m just a flash of motion in their peripheral vision. 

We talked pretty much all day yesterday. How can I not be disillusioned? No mystique. No longing. Just reciprocation. How dull. A few times I fantasized about committing to you just so I can cheat on you and see what it feels like. What an awful admission—no one knows how cruel I can really be. But am I actually that cruel? 

It’s not your fault. I gave up on love before I met you. 

At least I will feel love on Friday when we meet at the small shoegaze show. You asked if we should make it just us, but I’d already invited Sam. I didn’t mention that we had sex once because it was sincerely nothing. We are great friends and I love him as a friend. After, I invited Andie as well. I like the idea of being alone with you but not as much as the idea of being surrounded by friends and chainsmoking and drinking, all of our voices overlapping. 

You text me and suddenly I want to cry. Something about a Halloween without R. Something about the way the ‘you’ in this is not him. It feels wrong for him to not be the ‘you.’ You are not mysterious enough to be the ‘you’; it just doesn’t fit. You don’t have enough power over me, though I wish you did. I put on a song that always triggers tears in my eyes. Like it’s never natural anymore when I cry—I do it on command. I can’t tell if I am sad or if I just want to be. Or if I am sad because I find it hard to feel genuinely sad, like there is a thin veil between me and my familiar heartbreak. It saturated me for so long, and then it burst, emptied out, I have none more left in me. But I think of him fondly. I will never love anyone else. 

I cannot be consoled sitting on a bench overlooking the water and watching a divine swan. A family takes a bench nearby and their noise crashes into my world and reminds me of my own foolishness. I go home and sprawl myself out on bed to finish an Audre Lorde book. I think: I can never be as empowering and strong as her. I take a drive to Barnes & Noble to steal an Annie Ernaux paperback. When I get there, I realize how much of a jaded adult I am, totally uninterested in shoplifting, which used to give me such an immense thrill. I don’t even smoke cigarettes as a way to chase the head rush anymore—I just relish the depressing texture of it, the familiar taste of the smoke, the softness of it against my lips. A kind of sedation.

11/1—

November. No excuse for smoking, but I do it anyway. At 1 PM the buzz of my vibrator blends in with the clamor of the construction across the street. They spent months tearing down a perfectly fine house just to build a bigger, uglier one. 

A couple nights ago I sent you the poem I wrote after our first night together. You lamented that you did not have one for me in return. It reminded me of when guys confessed to having trouble keeping up with me when it came to alcohol. lol no one should try to match me when it comes to writing or drinking, I replied, i do both too much. 

Sometimes it feels like life can be sliced into three simple sections: Waiting to drink, finally drinking, recovering from drinking. 

I do not want a poem from you in return. In fact, there’s nothing I want less. I want you to admire my words, marvel at what a thoughtful, good person I am.

11/2— 

Right now you’re a collage of everyone I’ve loved—sometimes you have the wit of R, the tenderness of J, the charisma of J#2, the awkwardness of J#3 (what a relief you’re not a J yourself). I wonder when you will become a full person to me, detached from what I’ve known, just someone new I know.

11/3— 

Soaring through a green landscape. Cigarette after cigarette, I’m immersed in my own misery, I’m Morrissey except I won’t live long enough to the point where people are begging me to die. A poster child for depression yet he’s still kicking it in his 60s. What a fake! I won’t make it that far.

11/5— 

I leave your house at eight in the morning, quiet in my movements as to not wake you up. Around five we finally fell asleep after hours and hours of passionate fucking. Shivering all over, coming more than I have ever before—or is that how coming always feels, better than the times before? Otherwise what’s the point…

I tell my friends I’m thinking of dumping you. At the first bar last night, a man said: Ketamine, coke, molly? All of a sudden you were sniffing powder off of a key. I don’t even know this guy, I joked about you to the dealer, this is our first date. He said, I don’t believe that. When we left, he said: Have a nice night with your girlfriend. No, no, no, I said. But there were truth in my jokes, as there always is. I don’t know you. That was not a normal thing to do on our third encounter. More evidence that what I consider to be a date you don’t consider to be a date. 

At the second bar, I felt embarrassed to be with you. You were visibly on edge, saying weird things. You asked my friends where I was and I was sitting right there. You reacted passively aggressively when I said I didn’t want to go to the show yet because I wanted to keep smoking and talking to people. So I drank more and more and was overcome with a wave of relief whenever you were out of my presence. I smoked two packs of cigarettes. You wanted to leave around midnight and I wanted to stay but I had no choice as if we were married. We spent an hour on your roof. I liked talking to you. Or at least I didn’t hate it. In your bed, I liked you actually, fully, wholly, sex from two in the morning to five. We ordered Dunkin before the sun was up.

11/8— 

Desire dissipated. All in one moment. Though there was obviously a lot leading up to it. In the crowd at the show, you asked why I didn’t want to kiss you. I said I didn’t like PDA. What a lie—one stolen from R, who told me that when I asked him for a kiss in the smoking section of Interpol. How disgusting it is that I remember that scene so vividly before the night became a blur. I resented him for his disinterest in showing me affection in public. When I told you I didn’t like PDA, I wondered what it was within me that made me not want that. Isn’t that the whole reason I was with you? So I can flaunt my new relationship to everyone around me, having something solid to prove to others that I am in fact lovable?

You took out your pack of Blue American Spirits and said you were going to smoke one. We were in a big venue, the kind that charges $15 for a White Claw. Don’t do that, I begged you, that’s so rude and gross. You persisted. I persisted in my begging. We fought as the band played in front of us, dream pop speckled with our arguing voices. I said it would make me uncomfortable if you did that. Andie said, Dude, she said it’ll make her uncomfortable. And you paused as if you’d just been punched; like my friend intervening was worse than the fight itself. I’m gonna go smoke, you said, and stomped off to go outside. You never came back. Andie and I danced, jumping up and down and pushing each other and headbanging and I was filled with pure euphoria in your absence. The guy behind me let me hit his vape whenever I wanted. I kept turning my head to see if you were returning—not because I wanted it, but because I was scared. I looked at my phone and saw a text from you about being across the street at the bar. Two separate people came up to me and Andie to tell us we “passed the vibe check” for our unrestrained passion in a jaded, boring crowd. Andie’s friend whipped her hair viciously on mushrooms and people gave her a mix of impressed and annoyed looks. When we left and walked to my car, I ducked to make sure you wouldn’t see me.

11/9— 

The day I realize you unfollowed me online, I spend hours watching a police chase. The news anchors are invigorated, blurting words like amazing and incredible, and then trying to balance it out with dangerous and scary. I see that the Brooklyn poetry reading has pay-what-you-can botox. I haven’t opened a book in a week. I’m watching the sun set from my bedroom behind closed blinds. A former child star was found dead in a bathtub. You’re going to a show to start confrontation with me but I won’t be there. I’m using up my whole tissue box and my head is swimming. I’m relishing the sickness like it’s a high. I’m playing a game in my head thinking of R: it starts at 19 and 31, then it’s 22 and 33, then 29 and 40, 31 and 42, 33 44, 40 51. I’m tired of smoking and drinking but I’ll never stop.