Breaking up is hard to do

How do you tell someone who loves you that it's over?

I'm not entirely sure, either, but I think it's going to go something like this:

I love you, but you're not the one. Follow through...

No sleep, no love

So I've been having trouble sleeping lately. Not sure why. I don't think it's because I miss him. I know I want to, I want to miss him desperately, so badly that I can hardly think or breathe. Or sleep.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I haven't attached myself to this gross notion that I can love someone because I want to, and not because I actually do. I write it, that I love him, (and rather well, if I do say so m'self) because maybe if I put it down on paper it will be real. Maybe, if I tell myself I do, if I write beautiful love letters, I will eventually convince myself that I love him, and I will. And isn't that what I want? To be in love?

But I am a passionate woman, and while I don't expect my partner to be just like me, I do need a man who is passionate about me, too. I told JP that I would need him to call me regularly while he is in Budapest. He does it. That's nice. But I want more than a hello, I ate a meter of sausage today, and I love you before hanging up.

Those words feel empty to me.

When I stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning to call him as he gets his day started, I want him to sound pleased to hear from me, not exasperated. When I send him a sensual photograph (where the power lies in suggestion and not in exposure), I want him to be happily surprised and aroused, not disgusted or disappointed.

He asked me how on earth I was planning on sleeping when he got back into town. I was mildly giddy, as he had just received my photo. He is not gonna let me sleep bc he has missed doing the dirty with me!

Wrong. He chastised me for staying up so late when I know full well that he likes to get to bed early, so when he gets back, if I can't reset my sleeping schedule to complement his, it's going to be a problem.

I get it. There are a lot of wonderful things about him. He accepts me for who I am, and I've always feared that it might be impossible to find someone who would, and so I cling to this ridiculous, precarious trapeze of a relationship and try and try to convince myself that it is love and that all of the things I have never liked about him are tolerable and that if he says he loves me I should try to love him back.

It's that old hat again, in love with being in love. That's me.

I don't think I can keep up the masquerade for much longer. It seems I'm onto me. Follow through...

Alone time

I was in something of a melancholy funk last night. Not melancholy as in "the world hates me and I want to die," but melancholy as in pensive and serious. In the mood for poetry. As luck would have it, the Helen Vendler reader from my Poetry 101 class in college happened to be sitting on my bookshelf.

I read poetry for several hours, something I haven't done in years. It made me want to write. I wanted to write about hope and love and loneliness and need, but mostly about hope.

For the first time in a long time, I thoroughly enjoyed occupying my tiny, sad excuse of a bedroom, laying naked as the day I was born, pen in hand (and sometimes in mouth), and alone with my thoughts, no sound but the gentle buzz of a fan and my mind's echo. Follow through...

Incomplete

I realize it's 4:40 am on a Sunday morning for you and there is absolutely no reason for you to be awake. But I miss you.
I went out last night with Sara from work and my friend Mike from school. It was his roommate's birthday so we checked out a couple of really cool new places by my house. Arlo and Esme's was part coffeeshop, part club, and the drinks weren't super-overpriced ($6 drafts and $7 whiskey gingers). The music was fun and it was a good crowd, but it felt like something was missing. Then we went to Boucarou, an unexpectedly sexy club playing hiphop, girls in dresses, packed to the gills. I would have loved this place, but still, something was missing. I went home and called you because all night, I had been thinking only of you, and how much more fun I would be having if you were there with me. And as I trudged home alone, the three blocks seemed painfully long, and all I wanted was to be going home with you, lying in bed with you, telling you that I love you. Today, I woke up around noon, dragged myself out of bed at 2 to make mac and cheese, then went to see the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum with Suki and Boki. They both say hi, by the way. It was a really cool exhibit, and I wish you had seen it. I think you would have actually liked it. It was a little crazy, even creepy, but cartoonish and quirky. And funny. We watched the Kanye West music video there, too. We had dinner in Koreatown and then went our separate ways: Suki to Michele's, Boki to some dental party, and me to my apt. There's another party at Happy Ending tonight and I seriously don't want to go. I just want to putz around and play Puzzle Fighter while snacking on pretzels. I have been fine without you until now, and I can't believe I have written a message this long on BB messenger... Sorry if I am turning into Ruth. But I started writing and couldn't stop and now my eyes are a little teary and I am getting that squeezing feeling in my chest that I get when my heart hurts. So... I just wanted to say that I miss you. My life is incomplete without you. I love you.


Sent to John just after 11 pm via Blackberry Messenger Follow through...

The perfect weekend

If I were a contestant on that dating show that Jenny McCarthy used to host on MTV, you remember that one, the one where the logo was Cupid smoking a cigar... what was it called again? Anyway, if I were one of the three contestants vying for the affections of the sexy single guy on that show (who was rarely all that sexy, but that's neither here nor there), and they asked me what my perfect weekend would be like, it'd be like the one that just passed.

JP's birthday weekend began with a day trip to the beach (even as sad a beach as Atlantic City's) with good friends, frolicking on the boardwalk, yelling at kamikaze seagulls, stuffing ourselves sideways with all-you-can-eat king crab legs, winning money on video blackjack, singing happy birthday to JP in front of everyone while waiting for the bus, shivering and cuddling our way through the impossibly cold bus ride, and finally making it home at 4 am. He said it was one of the best trips he's ever been on! Once the clock struck 4, which officially marked his birthday, I unveiled his birthday present: a gigantic variety of Asian snacks and goodies, and a bottle of soy sauce so big he would be able to pour it onto his rice with reckless abandon. He liked it, and expressed impressive enthusiasm for 4 in the morning.

On Sunday, JP and I strolled across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time to see the telectroscope installed at the bottom. It was a gorgeous day made up of blue skies and sunshine and as we looked out at Manhattan from Brooklyn, I thought, "Wow." I could feel something swelling up in my chest. I think it was pride. For the first time since moving to the city, I was actually kind of proud to live here. We then wandered through the Afro-Caribbean street fair near Atlantic Avenue, stopping to look at art, read menus, and watch as men in grass dresses on stilts passed us by. We reached the Brooklyn Flea Market and ate Mexican style corn: grilled on the cob, smothered in mayo, rolled in crumbled queso, sprinkled with chili powder, and squirted with lime. Followed by pupusas and organic ice cream, blueberry pomegranate for me and a tangerine sorbet for him. We wrapped up our day in Brooklyn with a stop at Target, where we stocked up on stuff that is marginally more expensive in Manhattan. Hey. It adds up.

Monday (Memorial Day) morning, JP dragged me out of bed so we could make the 11:30 am showing of the new Indiana Jones movie. To compensate for failing to feed me beforehand, he bought me a gigantic soda and some candy. We made chicken caesar pizza at home while watching Men In Black, then thought better of wasting the weather and laid out in the sun at Battery Park for a while. Thanks to his fair complexion, we had to turn in after 40 minutes because he was pinking up, though I hadn't even gotten started. Still, I had no complaints when we watched National Treasure II. I love archaeological fiction!

It should be noted that there was ZERO alcohol consumption all weekend. And I still had an awesome time.

Of course, it wasn't always this way.

In the days of Singled Out (yes! the name of the show returned to me!), my perfect weekend would have included a beach, a sexy stranger, and many frozen drinks with little umbrellas sticking out of the glasses. Plural. Throw in a Crisco-covered watermelon, a darkened pina colada stand, and dancing on tabletops in a nightclub where the drinking age was supposedly 18, and we've got my high school graduation trip to Cancun. While this is still all good and well in my book, the heart flutterings in the quiet moments of this weekend trumped it all. Many times over. Follow through...