To Destroy is to Create
This has been an unexpected, eye-opening, life-adjusting week. It all started last Saturday when I openly admitted to my sister, while drunk, that I get so horny sometimes (I'm drunk everytime) that I'll sleep, or at least fool around with, people who I heretofore find unattractive. Though I was drunk, it was an alarmingly accurate introspective realization. Living here in the keys, living life post-Gary, has become a strange game of Dream Date. I lost my dream date, or at least lost a pretty good date and the despair over that put blinders on me, convincing me that every guy from then on out would be a lesser date (some lesser dates are fine for some girls!). And so began my dignity decline...I stopped caring about myself, I stopped searching for Mr. Right, or at least Mr. Hot for one Night and found myself settling for Mr. Right Now, quite a few of them, who apparently saw something hot in the blankness consuming my eyes.
My first thoughts waking up the next morning were not the socially ingrained feelings of guilt (politics of sexual shame) but, instead, I woke up thinking "I hope he looks as good as he must have last night." In all honesty, none of the guys have been that ugly, but few looked good enough to fit realistically at my side in a crowd, a.k.a not up to standard. Am I superficial? To an extent...but not many people ever thought Gary was hot and I loved him like no other. Anyways, I'm sidetracked now...So, living in the Keys has driven me to levels of desperation that I've only experienced during those dark months right after the break-up, and I finally realized this the other evening. It has been over two months now since I have had good sex (and it was great) and before that it had been another month, and before that a month (though Matt and I had some pretty good sex during the tenure of our psuedo-relationship from February until August). I guess it's really starting to sink in that, though its relieving, good sex isn't enough to sustain me anymore. I miss having a loving companion as much as I miss having great sex and meeting Josh made this fact resoundingly clear. The two separate weeks I spent with him were probably two of the happiest weeks I've experienced since Gary and I broke up. Being in the arms of someone who I could tell really liked me and cared about me was sweet medicine for this desolate cough in my chest.
Unfortunately, as great as Josh is, or seems to be, he was only temporary relief and that's all he really ever could have been. Not only because he lives so far away and has his own issues to get through, but also because I have my own issues that I have been ignoring, pushed aside, and gently stepped around. True, I have finally gotten over Gary, which was the biggest step, but now I'm left standing here on this bed of rock known as the Florida Keys and, though there's only one road out of here, I have no direction in life.
I've been living a hedonist's life and Monday night bore no shortage of dramatic evidentiary support. I have been living day to day, seeking out the most pleasure I can, and shirking almost every shred of responsibility I possibly could. After a weekend of heavy imbibing and seriously late-night good-times I had tried to command myself to have a quiet, responsible-ish night in on Monday. That was not to be however. When my dear sister showed up to my work at the end of the night I was enjoying my very stiff shift-drink and she convinced me that we should go out for the night because she didn't work the next day and had no plans; so why not let's spend it hungover.
Again, responsibility tossed like the rotting salads at work.
The night went by much like every other night out at the Dog and the Monkey do. I end up getting really drunk, we stay too late, the ugly-lights come on, we hop in the car heading to Dion's for some food, and end up home sometime around 4:30 or 5am. Except this night took a parallel course around 3am when the fiancee (or former fiancee) of a good friend of mine, who happens to have a vicious problem with alcohol, shows up at the bar and we consequently get into an argument. No fighting at the bar, I saved it for the car; my sister, in her normal obtuseness, decided to offer him a ride home since we were passing by. I was utterly drunk, beyond the point where you can talk reason into me, and my sister starts bitching at me for being a drunken ass to the fiancee...well, some choice words were directed at her and it set off her temper. After wrecklessly slamming her brakes more than a few times in the middle of the highway (causing me to go face first into the back of the seat in front of me several times while I was trying to eat my fried chicken) we finally got home and I was livid and was rough with her car seat trying to get out of the car. Well lil' miss crazypill decided to grab my nearest possession, like usual, (it was an ipod this time) and launch it 65 feet across the driveway and yard. Well, the scene on quiet little 4th street in the quiet and quaint KCB then took on that of a COPS episode on FOX: a bunch of screaming and hollering, hair pulling, clothes ripping, epithets flying EVERYWHERE, property damage etc. Then comes the intervention, and thankfully it wasn't brave men in blue, rather, the parents descending downstairs and wanting to know what the hell is going on. 30 minutes later after many a curse word, a broken mirror on my scooter, and her car door broken on its hinges and not able to shut, I had a bit of an emotional breakdown in front of my parents...a rage-tinged, caught-in-the-throat crackling vocal performance of something like this: "I'm so sick of it here" "you're a drunk loser, go to bed" "I'm not a loser, I'm just lost and sick of my life here, I've got to get out" but very flourishing and dramatic, perhaps Oscar-worthy if it had been Hilary Swank. It was a night from hell...the third time I'd ever lost control of myself and acted out violently to the point where I scared myself due to my lack of ability to halt the situation. It was nothing short of a wake-up call. Not a sign that I was or am a drunk, not a sign that I'm a loser, but a sign that I am indeed, a Hedonist, and that my life is seriously stalled.
I've not gone out since that night, and I've only had two glasses of wine with dinner. I've spent my time amongst myself and this computer and working: a bit of introspective solitude. I yearn for the day when I once again have a companion, a lover, someone who is special and brings out the best in me and I realized over the course of this week that I will never have that until I have climbed back out of my hole, taken on responsibility, risk even, and find harmony and balance within myself. I need to put the pieces of my puzzle back together, leaving just the one that will complete it, that way I know what the piece looks like and I won't prematurely try and fit wrongly shaped pieces into my puzzle under the false notion that they fit due to the open space left by other missing pieces. To do this, I definitely must leave the Keys; I must step out from under the welcoming roof of my parent's hospitality and situate myself in a place where light reaches upturned leaf, water to my roots, and my face can glow with self-reliance and pride.
I've been planning on leaving here for a while now, and I may have left earlier had my car never been totaled and traded in for a Geico insurance check. It isn't very easy to even consider a move without having a vehicle to rely on and thus I've been biding my time, saving more money, and hoping for a summons from somewhere extricating me from my sun-scorched and salt-lashed binding. That summons came on Saturday, shortly after being let-down because an offer I made on a desired car was rejected, when I opened my email and found a job offer from New Mexico. Does it matter that it is only a seasonal summer employment? Or that the pay is only nominal in comparison to the cheese I forage here? Not at all. I have, heretofore, been trapped here, not really having a prime opportunity to escape and this seasonal employment opportunity is not just an opportunity to go out West and get my hiking legs back under me, it is an opportunity to uproot myself from the Keys, to sever ties, say bon voyage, merry sailing, and to literally drive off into the sunset.
Exercise thy hands
I was going to do a lot today...at least that's what I told myself when I finally went outside to walk Danny at noon. It was a nice day out and I didn't have to be in to work until 5 today. Alas, after eating a healthier meal than I've had in a long time, I got caught up in the internet for too long while letting my food settle. When I finally went outside at 3:30 to put air in my tires and fill my water bottle up I found myself staring at a palm tree with all its fronds waving and bent in one direction and a sky luminous with dark gray clouds. I guess it has finally become summertime and if I really want to keep a regular exercise regime up on the bike, then I need to wake earlier and get it out of the way before lunchtime.
This is how my days are lately. I wake up sometime around 10:30 or 11:30 in the morning, turn on my computer and read the news for the day, finally emerge into sunlight around noon or soon thereafter and lethargically get through the next three hours before I have to start getting ready for work. I normally would look at this pattern in life as the result of depression but I'm not quite sure that is the case here. Living in the keys has its drawbacks. The few friends I have here generally work during the day when I have freetime and I work in the evenings when they have free. Therefore I am generally left to entertain myself during the day in a place with little to entertain me.
Books, beach, bars. I've been reading a lot more lately than I have since college and I just finished a book earlier today, one week after finishing the 1200 page book I completed last week after having it consume my life for nearly a month. Sometimes I go to the beach to read, or lay out, or I'll go to the pool to swim and read and lay out or I'll go somewhere for a bite to eat. That's how I pass the days before work.
Can I really handle living like this for one more year? I ask myself this question at least once a week and I can never answer it. Instead, I create lists in my mind...things I could do, things I want to do, to improve my time here in the keys, to live a healthier life, to prepare myself for life after the thru-hike. I want to write more, hence this sudden revival of Consummated Randomness. I want to delve back into the world of poetry, reading familiar poems and new poems, escaping in the pages of Justice, Olds, and Bishop. I want to write constantly. Revisit old poems, edit, chop, refine, re-birth forgotten lines, polish the gems and bury the shit. Re-write, re-write, and discard. I want to live my life again as if I was back in college, running home from class with my mind racing of new thoughts, a contrived conversation shared at Krishna lunch, animated classmates arguing the importance of a nearly forgettable line in a novel. I want to be able to create here in the keys an environment ripe with creativity, a mood which I can place myself in and let thoughts flow from hand to keyboard or from hand to paper, the more romantic means.
Update 101
I moved back to the keys. More on that later.
I dreamed a dream and decided to pursue it...that's how I ended up here in Marathon again. Believe it or not, after 5 months, I'm still pursuing that dream...maybe this one has holding power.
Wow...so it has been a year
...but this will not be the "Lemme recap everything thats happened in a year" entry. To give the short gist of it...Gary broke up with me in May of 2006, the pain and despair I was in threw the whole balance of my life off and I ended up spending my last semester in Gville partying too hard, focusing on just getting out of Gville, and being distraught even more over Gary. Because of these things, I lost sight of graduate school, hardly finished my thesis, and had no general idea of what I was going to do with my life. Not wanting to be stuck with no direction, I decided to apply to the NYC Teaching Fellows program and attempt to move to New York to become a teacher for students with special needs. Guess where I am at right now? Yes, New York. I got accepted into the program, and after working through the spring at a restaurant in the Keys and living with my parents, I saved enough money to move up here and live like a poor college person all over again. I began working about 5 or 6 weeks ago, with students arriving four weeks ago. Teaching has turned out to be so much more work than I thought it would be. I'm putting in 12 hour days and still never feel caught up with the work. I'm constantly exhausted because I haven't slept a full 8 hours in a night in weeks and I spend my weekends sitting on my ass in my apartment just relaxing and doing nothing and getting frustrated and worried because I'm not tending to the work that I should be.
In fact, here I am on Sunday evening with more shit to do than I even know and I can not settle my mind enough to do any of it. Everytime I attempt to look over lessons, or student's files, I get frustrated, upset, despondent even and throw it all down in exasperation. Am I cut out for this job? The last week was probably the worst week I have had so far, for multiple reasons. The first, I was sick/exhausted all week and never seemed to feel rested. On top of that, some of my co-teachers are making it seem as if I'm not doing enough work (yet I hardly ever have the foundations to work from) and at the same time they are cutting me entirely out of the classroom teaching environment by utilizing me as if I am a teacher's aide or paraprofessional. In fact, in one class, I had an experience where the subject teacher completely undermined my authority IN FRONT of the students. Half of the students already treat me and view me as not being the "real teacher" and it bugs me to no end. I'm there to help them, I give it my best (do I?) to make sure that they are understanding what is going on in class and I just never seem to get any respect from anyone.
For tomorrow I am supposed to establish "personalized plans" for each of my students but I don't really know what that means or what would be appropriate for each one. I guess I'm just frustrated as all hell and I really should just try and focus and get my work done. I can't help but have a wandering mind though...all I keep thinking is 'what if?' What if I hadn't gone through a rough break-up in a critical decision-making time in my life? What if I'd just stayed in the keys and worked my ass off more and more and lived at home all the time? What if I wasn't gay? What if I had focused on writing more? What if I get halfway through this life here and decide it is not for me? What if i don't even know what I'm saying right now? What if I just move back to the keys and work as a server in a restaurant for the rest of my life? What if I just stopped staring at the computer screen for now and got busy for the next hour of my life before I go to bed?
I Thank you...bitch!
Thank you. Thank you very fuckin' much for ruining my night. The night that I went out on in the first place to forget about you. Thank you very fuckin' much. If you want to tear me up, you can easily do it yourself, without the help of the new flavor of the shitty week. The flavor that looks like dog shit! You ranaway...how come you wouldn't runaway tonight? You make all your tomorrows harder for yourself than today. There is nothing more that I can do, it is now up to you. You'll never be able to love anyone else, if you first don't love yourself. When you find that you love yourself, come find me and we'll see if I'll have you back. The chemistry is definitely there...it's just gotta take effort on our parts. But thank you. Thank you very fuckin' much.
My heart is on my sleeve...ruining my favorite shirt!
So I went to the club tonight...for the first time without gary...the first time truly being single. I have no idea what I was expecting. But what I got was a big dose of how different I am from pretty much everyone there...and also a dreaded feeling of aloneness. No one even remotely close to worthwhile hit on me, and as usual I could not dance with someone for more than a minute or so without my hips getting bored. I conclude that either I am ugly (which I doubt is the case seeing as there were a fair share of people staring at me...although they could be staring at my patheticness) or I am intimidating. For shits and giggles I am going to assume it is the latter. Now I ask myself...how am I intimidating? Once I got to thinking about it I began to realize that I don't really socialize well with gays, and that my dancing by myself may lead people to think I am full of myself. It was pretty much the same way back at the Metro when I was 18 and going there every saturday just to dance my ass off and break up the monotony that was my closeted, high-school, football, Eagle scout driven life. :( I guess it just bums me out because I have no gay friends and I have no one to really take my mind off of gary. Sure, he found it easy to take his mind off of me...but he is easily pleased and there is something about him that makes people go up to him and talk to him...I guess it is the fact that he is quiet and not very threatening or intimidating to people. I do not try to be those things...but it would seem that that is exactly how I come across.
I'm going to bed tonight very exhausted...physically and emotionally. Fuck all the boys at the club...all they ended up doing was make me think more and more about how great Gary is and how great Gary and I were together. Unlike OJ's glove...Gary and I actually fit together. But I guess that is neither here nor there. So raise your glasses! Cuz here's a toast to another pathetic night in the life of Steven...a night weighed down by the immense sadness in my heart and my inner cries for help.
Dreams last for so long...even after you're gone
Yesterday was a very painful and draining day for me. I guess it was a few days ago now that I decided that Gary and I should not be speaking to each other for a while. It was a really difficult decision to make because he's such a part of my life--rather, was such a part of my life before we broke up...and even over the summer we still talked just about every single day. In fact, up until about a week ago I was still his final call for the night, the one person he talked to right before going to bed. Now everything has changed. I could not handle things emotionally when he was around, and when we tried to hang out this past weekend I pretty much could not control myself from throwing myself at him. I was really pathetic and it made both of us uncomfortable. That was what prompted me to make the decision. I can't be so weak. I need to be stronger and I guess I've decided that the only way I can get stronger is to cut out the weakness that is Gary. Today I had lunch with him, I really don't know why or how it happened, and the weakness returned. The conversation was really strained, mostly because I was trembling inside (Gary never really says much), and everytime he looked at me with those brown, nepalese eyes my heart would just melt and I would tense up inside.
Friends have told me to just cut him out of my life for good...to not even preface our break from communication with an expectation of temporariness. I understand why they advise this, but I can not fathom the reality of it. At this moment in my life, no matter the pain, there is a large part of me that believes that one day, maybe not anytime soon, Gary and I will be back together. Is it something I sit around and wait for? No. Is it a hope to alleviate some of the immense pain and sense of loss? No.
For now, while he and I are both still in Gainesville and close to each other, if we remain apart, as I believe we will, it is going to be tough for me. Being that I have only 4 months left in Gainesville I will have to spend the entire time being near Gary as a time for healing. There are no other boys in my immediate future because there is no one around that could even begin to replace Gary, not now, not in Gainesville, and maybe not ever. Even friends are having trouble replacing the sense of companionship and closeness that I felt with Gary. Gary was my boyfriend, but first and foremost he was my best friend. A best friend that knew every single detail of my life. A best friend that I could tell anything to without fear of being judged. A best friend that had the ability to cuddle with me and not say a word and where it did not become uncomfortable. He was the most comforting, sincere, and beautiful friend/companion I have ever known. It is that reason that has made this break-up so difficult.
I was trying to watch Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind last night and I began thinking about how nice it seems that it would be to just erase the memories that cause this pain. But I don't believe I have the balls to do it. I can honestly say that the memories I share with Gary, the year and a half that I've spent with Gary, the connection that I have with Gary are the best aspects of my life to this date. No way in hell would I want to delete all of that from my brain. one day the pain will subside and I'll be left with the fondness of great memories. For now, I will live the reality that is the pain and loss, but I will constantly dream that one day Gary and I will be in each other's arms again--older, more mature, ready--and it will be the happiest moment of my life.