cross your fingers, I'm going to knock it all down

Somewhere I'm still so insecure about this re-lay-tion-ship. I know this because when I have a few drinks the INFAMOUS comes out and I lose it and either (a) retreat into being a little sulkier than anyone wants to admit when he's not announcing to everyone we meet that he is madly in love with me, or (b) if he's absent, start scanning the room like there's about to be a testosterone shortage and I need to start collecting specimens. Which horrifies my girl friends who feel like I don't appreciate the gem of a boy I've mined from some undefined secret dating quarry.

But the funny, rational, likeable part of me knows that this is ridiculous. I'm his it the same way he is mine, he does the things I wish he would do - like show up at my door when I all I want is him, or make me breakfast. And if he were to suddenly shove me forward into the uncomfortable girlfriend nomenclature spotlight, if we were to start having Sunday dinners with his family, I would lose it in an attempt to preserve my single life.

It's like I need to make a tape recording of sane-me giving a Dr. Phil style speech for intox-me, reminding me that there are more productive ways to self destruct on my weekend nights.

*

The Ex asks my roommate about me when I blow off a party this weekend. I don't think I was expecting this, given the he-she pictures that permeate his life and my assumption that he's living some kind of mid twenties relationship fairy tale. It's funny because over the weekend I helped another ex with a writing project and the way he smells, the way he smiles, will always be attractive to me even though we are so non-functional together that eventually everything but the friendship had to end. The Ex stopped being attractive to me a year ago and since then I've had no compulsion to revisit any kind of intimacy with him.

Did it really end? Do things really end, just like that; as January decisions that are the line between existing and not existing, but really just a small action, getting out of a car, not answering a call.

It's confusing because until this year I believed in the poetry version of love, my own warped 'forever' minus the happy ending. I believed that feelings never died, they just dulled, and that caring about people, even the worst ones, was inevitable. I thought I would always want to look in on the lives of people who had made me feel a certain way, rubbing the snow off the window of "wish you well"s.

If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.
-Lord Byron, When We Two Parted

Lord Byron has led me astray.
There are no tears.

*

Last night I was out and suddenly belonged to the people who travel club. The people who travel club is not as ubiquitous as the People Who Have Taken A Trip club. Maybe I would better call the people who travel club something like the rootless wanderers society, but that doesn't capture it either. Without knowing it, I became something different that I can't explain but recognize in other people.

I think being part of the people who travel club has a lot to do with where you place your role in the story. People Who Took A Trip tell stories and anecdotes that center around themselves because they were the most important part of the trip. Their resilience/stupidity/ingenuity. People who travel tell stories about places, about others, about ideas, but they reserve the stories about themselves for some other time, some lost document. People who travel realize that they are not the center of any place, or any world, though at best they are present in it.

*

The third world does not like how we refer to 'worlds' and actually finds it kind of offensive. Now you know.