Last Monday, I met up with Rich and it was spectacularly undramatic. We caught up, exchanged a little bit of gossip, and even buried my face in my hands in amused embarrassment and disbelief at one of the stunts we pulled off. It was good to see him and even better to find that we’ve both mellowed. Even when I tried to press the point about just how much I know that what I did was wrong and stupid, he shrugged it off. We toasted to NOT being on the paths we were headed the last time we were friends. When I left, we exchanged a hug and he told me “Keep in touch.” And then; “but not too much.” And I know exactly what he means.

This Monday, I ran into Joe, who I have not seen for more than five minutes since another “dramatic” moment which I roll my eyes at, over 5 years ago. We caught up. I told him about my antics in New York pre-grad school, he told me about his job(s), unemployment, and thoughts on grad school. He told me that he would vote me “most changed” since high school and while there are fundamental ways that I will possibly never change that was the best compliment anyone could give.

I drove home that night, not thinking further ahead than my headlights dancing on the nearly deserted Northway, but being fully aware that I was racing away from everything I knew.

I got home and Xina was on the phone. “Hold on,” she told the caller. “My housemate just broke up with her boyfriend…wait, what?” She looked at me, and after assessing that I was okay said “My friend Keith wants to know if you’re hot.”

Proof that life would go on. Not as usual, but it would go on.

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Wednesday I forced myself up early to edit my Midterm. Around 11 AM I hit the “I can’t do anything more about it” mindset, printed it out and turned it in. Then I went off to attempt to read for my Thursday class; I didn’t even bother to try and read any of the Foucault for my Interpretive Methods class. (And, because of Feminist Political Thought with Favorite-Professor, I knew enough about Foucault to still speak up in that class today. Thanks Skidmore-Government Department!)

There was a pizza & beer party for our program, but I didn’t stay long. I had some free wine, talked to some poly-sci people within my program, and then went home and returned the phone calls I’d ignored the past few days.

I talked to Jill-IAN tonight, and while we were on the phone she got a call from Drucifer, who she hasn’t seen since recently leaving our Workplace, and it occured to me that it is not so much that I miss him, but I do miss the three of us together. We were a team. When I think about all we did this summer together, I get sad because I have no equivalent here, and I miss them, and I miss New York, and I am thinking of our last night in Brooklyn and how whole I felt. I grant that I’m closer to Jill-IAN than Drew, and she would say the same for me, but we both love him for his no-BS advice, among other things. … What I wouldn’t give right now for a night at 3JP.

At my 2nd good-bye party (yeah, did I ever mention that? I had TWO going away parties because I became such a social-fucking-butterfly in New York…I don’t get it either) I pulled Drew and Jill aside for a second just because I needed a moment to formally recognize the awesomeness of our dynamic and friendship or something. I am lame.

I’m not neccesarily happy, overall, with the way things are going here in Chicago. But I am extraordinarily grateful for the best support system in the world.

I’m out of half and half, but I NEED caffeine and so I’m taking my coffee black this morning. Throwing it over ice cuts the bitterness and I can gulp it down to free my sleep-adled brain.

One sip of black iced coffee brings back a hundred and one snapshots and then my brain is off and running; curse my memory that can never remember where I left my keys, but that remembers every cup of black coffee.

It was the spring I was twenty and I wasn’t sleeping much anyway. I wasn’t doing much homework either. Lukewarm black coffee in a small Dunkin Donuts cup, in the hallway at the top of steps of Hickory A, the night before the APD final, and it was Mother’s Day, because my mom had lectured me because I was giving up my D.C. Internship, but I didn’t care because in those days, nothing mattered, nothing but “this.”  

Black coffee and a corn muffin, playing Dar William’s “End of Summer” CD on the quick trips I used to make for what would stand in for breakfast/lunch/dinner before Comparative Politics.

Iced black coffee, but from the Dunkin Donuts up 29, on one of those fabulous days that I’ve referenced a thousand times. For the entire summer afterwards, until I quit drinking it, black coffee brought me back to that afternoon.

But not the mornings, like this morning, when I couldn’t seem to get myself out of the house to be productive before class, and I would sit there writing instead, no; those mornings were French Toast Coffee.

And French Toast Coffee is a whole ‘nother set of memories.

And reading that, I realize; I got another audience after that, but now that audience is on its way out. So I’ll probably be writing less (this used to be unconscious, breaks in writing) which will relieve my friends-list of my over-analytical and angst-ridden entries, which I’m sure are no less annoying then my “omg, I-am-so-happy-and-my-life-is-perfect” entries. I am mostly kidding, but I do have trouble writing when my life, and my audience, are in flux

I do feel better today, but also worse, because I feel trapped in my fifteen year old self. At least I am self-aware, which in my book, should make it more forgivable, but I am also having to work hard to convince myself I am not being harshly judged. And since sitting here writing in LiveJournal is really not helping my case any, I’m going to get dressed and do something less emo.  

You are against the odds, you are unexpected, you are a memory of both butterflies in my throat and a punch in the stomach, you are a magnifying glass and a mirror, you are unconditional, you are uncertain.

You are restless, you are ambitious, you are smug. You are exactly and nothing like what I remember. You are the creation of almost three years shrouded in the smoke from the bridges I burned. You distrust, you are suspicious. I am an invasion of sorts; I know all that.

You tell me it is still surreal to hear my voice on the phone, and I have to strain to hear yours and remember how it took a few months to adapt to your low talking. You type ‘talk to you soon’, and say I’m such a dork. When you back away, I raise my defenses. Later,  we rehash, we confess. When your walls are down I want nothing more than to take back every horrible thing I ever did to you. It makes me wish I could give you a clean slate and forgive the laundry list, once and for all.

You were thought of only in passing, and almost always with the disbelief that I had spent 4.5 years of my life with someone I no longer knew anything about. You express about the same about me, but I’m sure you still know how I take my coffee. I think I might know nothing about you, but maybe I do. I can still hear your exact tone of voice when you chide “Shut up.” in a mid day light hearted conversation. I’d forgotten all about the angry ducks and Dracula 2000, I smile at the reminder. But then, you don’t know me, not really. I took my coffee black for awhile, and you don’t know why. I burst out laughing one 1 AM night, and after I hang up the phone, I realize it’s been years since you heard me laugh like that.

I wonder lots of things and with so little information I dissect. I’m sure there are questions I want to ask you, but I don’t even know what they are. You don’t really ask me questions. I want you to know everything. I don’t want to reveal too much too soon – it’s hard not to be at least a little defensive. It’s as if I’m on a perpetual first date, except with it’s with one of my oldest friends.

You are a measure of the passing of time, you are heavy; sometimes even a pleasant burden, and I start to understand there are other kinds of baggage. You are my unconscious stand in, and I am yours.  You are an ex-boyfriend. You are an old friend. You are a first love. You are a standard, good and bad. Through you I learned what it meant to have a broken heart, and later, what it was to have broken a heart. You know how it is.

I wonder what I look like to you I try to see myself as through sneaking up on myself in a mirror. Instead, I see my own startled eyes, nearly three years older, and wondering what the hell we’re doing. But anyway, it’s all okay

You are open. You are guarded. You are as passive aggressive as always. You may be trying to rattle me, I can never tell, especially not now. A few times I catch the acidic tone to your sentence and wonder if this can ever really be natural. You still think I should be punished. I get that.

You tease me a little, you drunk dial me, you make me remember things I thought I’d forgotten. Through you, I can see how much more comfortable I’ve become in my own skin. I should be wringing my hands, but all I really want is a good chai and umpteen hours to get to know the people we’ve become. You are four years of my life, and a lifetime ago.

You make me think, you make me regress, you make me write nonsense, you make me want to live a better life.  You make me remember that I once wanted lots and lots of things, and that I mostly got them.

“So what happens now?” you ask, late Sunday night that’s become a bizarre routine.

I still don’t know, but I never did.

I graduated almost a year and a half ago. Listening to Laura on the phone this evening, I’m overwhelmed with this weird in-between-passage of time.

I miss Laura. We had so much to catch up on in this phone call, and there was no way we could fit it all in tonight. Laura and I bonded my last semester at school. I listened to her neurosis on late night drives to nowhere, just because she called me and said “I need to get out. Now.” She was the only one who understood my boy drama, because she was the only one who knew HeWhoShallNotBeNamed. And tonight we were catching up on our most recent failed relationships. We’re both proud of ourselves for our emotional composure. But we’re still both wondering…

I miss her, and I miss Sebastian, and I need to go on a drive to Dunkin Donuts at Exit 17 right now.

Tonight I was supposed to have dinner with Xina, and it didn’t happen, because she is unrealiable about making plans.

And yeah, I’m annoyed with her in terms of “making-plans-that-you-can’t-keep” because…well I don’t do that, and because it’s like, I never get to see her, so I completely free my schedule and change stuff around for her, and she’ll just call at the last minute and be like “yeah, so it’s too much of a pain to come into the city.”

But, at the core, I just miss her. I miss her living across the hall in my house. I miss coming home from a medicore date and being able to go straight to her room. That’s what I did that whole last semester at Skidmore; when I was trying to date to forget HeWhoShallNotBeNamed.. When I was going out with Rob…I came home that night, after spending hours getting ready and went straight to her room; “Well…he’s smart…and he’s really, really sweet and nice, and he’s not HeWhoShallNotBeNamed., but…”

And she finished my sentence; “…but he’s not HeWhoShallNotBeNamed.?”
“Yeah…exactly.”

So meh. I’m just missing my friends tonight.