“She likes you.”
The words in the window came from two thousand miles away, but I could just as easily imagine Abstract saying it, her voice as breezy and calm even as the determination and furious energy coursed through every word she said. We’d conversed offhandedly on the subject a bit before I left, before everything changed and before I realized exactly what was going on, and I felt rather stupid waiting until today to explain it to her, with what had happened and what had occurred to me.
It’s easier to think about it specifically, for once, which I think is the surest sign that what I’m feeling is real, that the revelation-that-wasn’t (or wasn’t supposed to be) is something that sneaked up on me and completely waylaid me. The emptiness comes and goes–coming only when I remember where I am, going as the complete rapture of realizing I was where I was actually sets in, and to think it happened in fucking Portland, fucking Portland, completely destroys me all over again.
And yet the thought of destruction reminds me of exactly where I’m at, walking the edge of the knife’s blade as it is, entirely too present and there when I really should try to be nonchalant. That affectation has gotten so much easier the older I’ve gotten.
I ran into a brother in the showers at the gym today; he mistook me for someone else at first, someone who apparently went to Iowa State, because that’s what he asked me. He was a nice kid, probably ten or so years younger than I, who’d dropped out of school for whatever reason in the middle of the year but was realizing he had to get back into the swing of things for him to be able to ever leave Iowa. I explained why I was there at the gym so often, detailing my (flagging but still determined) plan to avoid dating in any serious way by adhering to a strict gym regimen. As we were leaving, he looked at me with the sincerity of youth, and asked:
“so, like, not even sex or anything?”
I grinned. “Well, I get mine,” I said, “but I’m thirty-two now, so it’s not really something I have to have.” But there’s that something else, my brain muttered, that thing you know you felt, that thing that gets you in more and worse trouble than anything your dick does, and you’re letting it happen again, you stupid little boy, you will never learn, will you?
time’s up.
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