Author and Columnist
In some ways, small ways, I envy the young. Well, the younger, as I am not exactly shuffling off a wrinkled mortal coil any time soon.
I have no idea what this must be like.
I needed to give Stevehen blue shorts for his up coming job.
There is no way I can parse what sentence this means. What sort of a job would require blue shorts? Why did you have Stevehen's? Or were you lending him a pair of yours for some reason?
Inside the coffeehouse were numerous high school creatures. They seemed so blissfully ignorant. This is not an insult, please understand. They really did seem to have a lack of real problems or aggressively plaguing thoughts.
You are so little removed from high school, still licking your wounds from its lashes. How dare you pretend it doesn't often feel hellish from the inside?
Let the kiddies enjoy their chai and conversation.
I would like to have this experience, that of being a high school student, dating pretty and empty faces, and the like.
You tried to date a high school junior not *half a year* ago (who was pretty, yes, but far from empty).
There was a girl I was attracted to. Not in any romantic or sexual way.
Of course not. Who could accuse a twenty-year-old of finding a seventeen-year-old hot? Perish the very thought.
She just... I think she had a piece of me in her. A stem cell from my soul that could become almost anything. She had something inside of her.
Do you listen to yourself? (Or read what you write?)
Let's not talk about how you want to put a piece of yourself in a high schooler.
I think she had some experience that separated her from those around her. But she still had enough ignorance that she enjoyed what was going on but didn't actually appreciate.
You don't think this. You project.
How heavily you felt the weight of the world when you were her age and how dismissive you are of it now.
I could have hit on her, but that would be lying. I am not interested in flirting with pale lines of frenetic energy.
You will be a relentless flirt for at least five years after this night.
Does it matter that you have a girlfriend? It rarely does with you when it comes to flirting.
You lie so often (and awkwardly) here. You *ache* to flirt with the girl, though I am grateful that you kept that only to ruminating. You ramble about how trouble-free her life must be. Some college guy hitting on her wasn't going to make it easier.
I worry sometimes that my relationship with M restricts my movements in certain ways. Which, of course, it does.
Yes, it does indeed. You bring it up often and demonstrate it more.
I harped enough on how you should not cling to Kate. I will try not to do the same about Emily. It's not her fault that you shouldn't have been in this relationship, though she bears some responsibility for keeping you with her.
I could have very well intimated flirtation in the blonde thing, just to bait-and-switch her with friendship.
If you were single and she kissed you, you would have claimed she was some celestial being, far wiser than her years within a week.
If you were *not* single and she kissed you, you would have shifted your attention onto her after a few days of feeling horrible (and excited).
My relationship with M actually causes me to move in different ways that I ordinarily would not, so we cannot fault it or her for restriction in this stream.
Emily is why you have a weekend in Las Vegas and days at a Maine wedding. You live in three apartments with her. You sit on the sidelines of many taekwondo matches.
Yes, she changes the direction of your life. That's the nature of giving someone the reins.
I want people to find me wholly remarkable.
There are two ways to accomplish this: * Be wholly remarkable * Love people observant enough to find you remarkable
You are on your way, but you must get braver. When you shave off your best parts with silence, you inhibit both. When you allow people -- those whom you do not find remarkable or even pleasant -- to dictate your worth, you keep those who might love you at arm's length. There is only so much oxygen in the room. Boot out those who shouldn't be there.
I want someone to be so completely seduced by my company that they blush. I want innuendo and insinuation. Romance. I want people to have to change their worldview because they, in one way or another, fell in love with me.
I mean this sincerely: I cannot wait for you to meet your wife. She isn't the only person to feel this way, but she stands out.
(The woman before your wife is the first who could love you in your totality, even when she had a tough time and did not always behave her best. She was young, and the emotions were more significant than she should have been holding, but she is one of the most astounding people I have ever known -- and persist in knowing, fourteen years later.)
I think I have been ruined by too much Oscar Wilde.
No. When you are with your people, it is precisely like this.
You are not often in the presence of more than one of these people at a time. I can think of three in your life simultaneously who felt like soulmates and family.
You deserve this. You are an imperfect vessel of who you will become, but you should have this honest love. Don't let artificial friends ever make you think otherwise because their company does not nourish you.
Emily does love me... I think I just seek some different and intense reaction. Once she cried and told me that I was the most amazing person she ever met.
You seek to be in love. I could say you only want infatuation to get that chemical hit, but that isn't it in toto. You shouldn't be in love now, but it is what you want.
And you are not in love with Emily. You probably love her, but it isn't enough.
I cannot tell you she thought that you were amazing. I can't discount that she meant it. However, I can speak to the power of mental illness and the desire to say the right things to satisfy the scene. I know well saying things I did not entirely mean in hopes they would push a situation in my favor. It isn't as conniving as that sounds.
I do not think you are the most amazing person I have ever met, but they say familiarity breeds contempt. Is there a point in detailing what I think about you at this moment in your life? I'm not sure it wouldn't come off as an attack, and I do not want to attack you. I love you. I simply think you are dishonest and cowardly (and you are dishonest partly because you are not brave enough to tell others and yourself the truth for fear that they will abandon you).
At this point, I was so confused that I was about to leave her. A mistake, to be sure. And her words, telling me that I was that amazing... it touched me very deeply.
So, she told you that she thought you were amazing, which fed into your neuroses enough that you postponed finding the confidence to break up with her?
As I said.
Gods, I sound like such an egotistical jerk. I hope you know me better than that.
You aren't egotistical. You have a multitude of flaws, but that is not among them, or you wouldn't be so hungry for people to like you.
You may have a slightly inflated self-perception -- or a self-perception I do not feel you have yet earned -- and have acted arrogantly out of insecurity, but you are far from egotistical. You think most people you know are leagues cooler than you (even as you assume you are more intelligent than them when it comes to writing).
I think I would trade one hundred casual I love yous for one sincere you are amazing.
Yes, you would. To you, one of those sounds like genuine love.
You were too easy with your "I love yous" when you were younger. You didn't know what the words meant and didn't see how it harmed anything much to spend them on girls you briefly adored until the hormones ebbed. Perhaps that cheapened it to you, but I cannot guarantee this.
For months after moving in with the woman who would become my wife, she was free with her "I love yous." It tore at me. She was so remarkable and sweet, and I was not acknowledging that I had issues and mental illness. I hated the idea I was wasting her time, that I could not return the love she offered. I said it back because it was cruel not to. I loved her, but hers felt so much more significant.
I had been loved. I had been engulfed by it, given myself utterly to it. I was no less engulfed when it ended (as it was bound to). I would never be her romantic partner again, but I could not love her any less. It was not in the way of Kate's lingering or Emily's eventual gutting.
When my future wife offered her love, every part but my intellect wanted it. I have never felt more pushed toward someone, more eager to believe people are destined to come together. I craved her and added "despite myself" a few times too many.
She allows me to feel amazing with her. She is my biggest fan and believes in what I find essential. She accepts me and has from the beginning, an openness I wanted to mistrust at first. She helped me become who I am, who is incidentally someone who can look you in the eye, regret some things you have done and will do, pity your missteps and how they will stab at you, and want to give you the longest hug. I wish you could have her in your life right now, but you are not close to being ready to be the man she deserves. (Also, she will be thirteen in a little over a week from your writing this, so it's better we let that cookie bake a bit longer.)
I am no hypocrite. I make sure to reward those I find amazing with the affirmation of such a status. And, well, I love them.
It is my obligation to interrogate these statements.
Some of your friends astound and intimidate you, but you tend to fawn when they may not merit it. I disagree with your use of "reward" here, as though your fondness is some medal they have won.
I also take objection to your comparing yourself against people whose flaws you only believe to be quirky, as though they are characters in a novel rather than people struggling as much as you are.
It comes to my mind that Sarah most often amazes me. She speaks in such a way as to completely startle me. Her syntax and word choice is completely original. As though she never heard anyone speak until she was very old and learned every word entirely though elegant novels. Few speak like her and I instantly hold a fondness for those who do.
Ah, see. "Novels."
Also, we must remember that you would sleep with her and that colors your phrasing.
I do not believe that her manner of speech is an affectation, as it might have been from others. She had that same level of "repressed gifted kid" energy that all but defined you.
Of all your friends, you could least understand why she wasn't doing more with her life. She had the loveliest voice and clever lyrics -- I remember only the song she wrote, as it was about almost kissing you, so I may be biased -- but she wasn't interested in making that the core of her identity.
This idea of being a writer has always fixated you. You began naturally gifted and had to devote yourself to making yourself worthy of it. I have just about done this through hundreds of thousands of hours of practice, chunks of my life spent in front of notebooks and keyboards when my peers were living story-worthy lives.
You did not believe any of your other friends were naturally talented. You appreciated what they did, but it didn't matter if they never did anything.
(Dezi was the exception, an intuitive comic artist. This destiny was so plain that one needed not to hope for it, only wait. This is not to suggest he did not work for it, only that he committed to cultivating his gift.)
Emily [...] is by far the funniest human being of either gender I have ever encountered. While I erstwhile have enjoyed those who make me laugh, her humor exists on an almost divine level. A few well-chosen words can reduce me to tears laughing.
One of my favorite memories with her is when you spent time with Dave, bantering as usual. He asked what that was from, and it took you a second to realize that he thought the two of you were acting out a scene from a movie. But, no, you were two quick-witted twentysomethings who excelled at joking.
Last night, Emily and I paid a visit to Applebee's. She felt the need to tell the waitstaff that it was my birthday in hope they would embarrass me with the birthday song.
She did this several times.
Any prank that can result in a free dessert is a good one.
If nothing else, spending time with Emily outside tended to be a blast.
And despite the fact that the food genuinely made Emily sick, I kissed her. That, I think, is deeply significant.
"Made Emily sick" meaning "triggered her eating disorder."
I think you know this, but I cannot be sure.
Stevehen and Tina were kind of faux fighting when I was hanging out with them. It was nothing real, in the strictest sense, but there was a tension.
They were an odd couple, but it might be that I find any pairing that included Stevehen to be odd.
I couldn't tell you how they ended up together, except through the proximity that eventually brought most people in the Hudson Valley near one another. I don't know what they saw in one another. I can state what *you* liked about them, but not what they liked about one another.
Their relationship will also spell the end of your friendship with Tina. She credits you as a causal factor, but we will get there. (I do not think you caused it, particularly as you cautioned against it repeatedly and were ignored.)
Katie and I would occasionally have these sorts of pinprick arguments and no good ever came of it except that one of us would eventually end up crying and we would talk out the issues.
I like the phrase "pinprick arguments." See what happens when you don't try so hard to be literary?
Your mental illness contributed to these arguments, though you won't believe you have one of those for a decade. You have rejection-sensitive dysphoria -- a term I do not know existed in your day -- so any negative emotion feels like a sword to the throat. It's challenging to converse with someone groping for their sucking neck wound, even if someone is sublime at emotional intelligence. A late adolescent Kate was not.
I called Venessa up today in hopes that I could hang out with her when I saw Tina and Stevehen.
Venessa is another sacrifice to your mental illness, as far as I am concerned. You had plans to hang out with her one day, but you couldn't force yourself to leave your apartment over an hour away. You wanted to. You were dressed and ready. However, the idea of stepping out your door filled you with anxiety for reasons that defy logic. She kept checking in, asking where you were, and you kept trying to tell her you would be there soon.
Were you embarrassed by the life you were living? You worked at Maplebrook then, your boarding school that took advantage. You were in a dying relationship with Emily.
Eventually, Venessa gave up on seeing you, then and since. You had wasted her time. I remember how sad you were that you missed a chance to reconnect with her.
This is not the last time you refused to leave your apartment when you have a social invitation. Why this didn't seem pathological to you is a mystery.
An anxious creature answered her phone and informed me that she was in the hospital and couldn't give me any further information.
Venessa's life and mental health were not placid. You assumed she exaggerated and fabricated things, so much so that you were shocked to find out her parents were actually wealthy.
She was tiny and seemed to shrink even more during your friendship. Given that I know her only as someone who infrequently likes one of my status updates, I cannot assure you how whole she is now, but she is still here.
My mother was distressed over this as well, as she has been present and aware of numerous hospital visits to my various friends.
You ought to find it more curious than you do that your friends could have punch cards at the psych center, granting them their eleventh stay free
I confessed that my throat hurt a bit (she claimed it was because I was screaming periodically because it deeply amused me to do so in some context. What a foolish conjecture!).
Why are you like this?
Somehow Emily got on a very long, breathe-taking scenario of a five-year-old version of me inquiring about joining the Hell's Angels. [...] Emily exclaiming in a small boy voice, "but I don't have a Harley... I have a Huffy... Can I join your gang? Can My Buddy join too? He has a tricycle!"
I still reference this, though I am the only person who knows the antecedent.
One can't have an inside joke only with oneself, but I've tried.
As we lacked a guided activity for our last weekend of freedom before the Renaissance Faire began, we took this to be the fates telling us we needed to go to a zoo.
Yet another point where I envy your freedom. I struggle to imagine a scenario where my beloved wife and I would visit a zoo on the advice of a fortune-telling machine in an Italian restaurant. She needs to know plans in advance, and we have responsibilities to keep our cats fed.