who do you need
when you come undone?

- Duran Duran, "Come Undone"

Eroticism is my favorite mode of escape. While drug use has legal ramifications, and alcohol indulgence can often create awkward situations, the pure sensation of physical build-up and release with another person is one that can clear away a mountain of life's unpleasant byproducts.

The best way to ensure a regular source of that contact is to create and maintain a dating relationship. Even a partner with whom one has constant disagreements is better than none, because sometimes arguments that get blood boiling can make other things hot as well. Random strangers wouldn't work; they'd lack proven consistency. One-night flings show their insufficiencies almost immediately. Relationships are the only solution, even loveless ones.

And to acquire and maintain those relationships, these much-needed outlets for my frustration and anxiety, I have done some things that "unrespectable" doesn't even begin to approach. I've dated men far below me in social status, because I was more certain they would fulfill my every demand. I've dated uglier men and men I wasn't at all compatible with romantically.

When my supply of prospects began to dry up or did dry up for a time, I turned to long-time male friends. If they were open to beneficial friendships, I proposed and engaged in them. If they wanted real relationships instead and refused to settle for physicality alone, I developed a crush on them and pressed for a "real relationship." Of course, I would have been satisfied with mere benefits. But the idea of lacking a source horrified me! In my desperation, I really did feel genuine feelings for them. I can understand why all those knights in courtesan times pursued fair maidens they hardly knew so well. Lust with no outlet really does inspire some intense feelings, and it puts everything into making an outlet available.

So I understand, now, why I've cried and told guys I was completely in love with them...I was seriously missing the action. And even when I'm getting it somewhat frequently, I want more. Why? Life sucks. Being naked and breathing hard and reaching heights of ecstasy with someone else certainly does not suck. It's the best thing the world's offering me right now, and I want as much of it as I can get my hands on.

Masturbation makes you think about it. You have to move your body in a certain way, be sure to maintain a certain rhythm. And your brain, in splitting itself between touching and being touched, misses some of the being touched part. Highly inferior.

But with another person...at the top of that peak, I do love them. They're giving me a beautiful and precious gift, and I would do just about anything simply to know that I could get it again any time I so desired. I cry, I scream, I rage at the slightest provocation, still conscious of my body's unbidden desire to be touched and rubbed and fondled. Even when it seems like I could be completely filled with hate for my partner, a part of me still calls to him: "Suck on my breasts, massage my ass, give me what I need."

I do need it. It's my solace, my island of empassioned feeling in a world that is all too indifferent. Love and devotion is very well and good, but they don't make me feel like I'm in another world with this one long gone and bid good riddance.

But it wasn't always like this. For a time, all too short I guess, I felt love for a person instead of an experience. For once, it mattered who I was kissing, who it was that I felt touch me. And for once, I didn't completely blank out and lose myself in the sensation. Instead, I remained conscious of the fact that he was doing it. And it mattered a lot. I loved him...really. With him, things were good enough that escape was unnecessary.

He didn't reciprocate, though. Although he liked me, he didn't like me that much. Feelings were unequal. My self-protective mechanisms kicked in in response, and now I no longer feel like the world hinges on whether he smiles or frowns at me. When he touches me, I don't think about him anymore.

And that loss has been the worst thing I can imagine. Every caress seems empty now, but the caresses continue because that faceless, blank pleasure remains. The sad thing is that, despite how far it has fallen from what it once was, it's still the best thing I have and my only mode of escaping my unhappiness.

But I miss the love I felt once, even now. To no end. It was an escape that was nearly flawless in making me feel like nothing else mattered, I suppose, which is why it was so pleasant. At the time, though, it just felt beautiful...awe-inspiring...magnificent. Wonderful like nothing else...and I really mean nothing else.

But now it's gone. And to compensate, I request more sex -- but of course, no amount compares. And it hurts to note the comparison. It's a lose/lose situation, no matter which hand is played or by whom.

I know I don't matter to you. I am beginning to be okay with that, because I am mattering less to myself as well these days.

As I was walking to work today, I had a surprising realization. For me to recognize bad ideas for what they are, I need them to belong to someone else. For example, let's pretend I have a hunch that in the year 2010, an extraterrestrial army of spaceships are going to swoop down from outer space and subject the entire human race to sadistic domination. And I have some evidence for this, most likely circumstantial, perhaps along the lines of Freud's theory of the unconscious.

Yet even if I had a sneaking suspicion that this were true, if I came upon a group of people who believed this fervently, and were plotting to befriend or overthrow the aliens, I'd stay the hell away from them, reexamine my own beliefs with a more cynical and correcting eye in response, and then discard my insanity, horrified.

This is a good argument for the prevalence of extremist views in society. Take racism, for example. I am slightly racist toward a number of different races, and sometimes I find myself getting all too comfortable in that -- lazily forgetting to make the concerted effort to mentally contradict my initial stereotypes and biases. But when I read a news article on supremacist groups or hate crimes, I recognize, once again, the importance of having my mind unclouded by disadvantageous predispositions.

For me to recognize the danger in my own ideas, I have to see them taken to an extreme in someone else.

So perhaps it's not good, then, that for the first time in a long time, I have no suicidal friends. For a long time, I always had at least one, and usually more. And it was their rational, composed arguments of why an easy death was far better than a troubled life that caused me to rebel strongly against their ideas, using all my mental resources to refute them.

And even if I hadn't refuted them? I imagine the following exchange:

Person: Life is not worth living. Can you really give me a reason it is?
Me: ...no...
Person: Let's die together, then. When do you think you'll be ready?
Me: I don't...I don't think setting a date is a good idea
Person: But you just said you couldn't come up with a reason why life is worth living.
Me: Uhh...I'm not completely sure that it isn't, though, now that you say that...

I generally trust my own judgment, at least on things that are important. But if someone else were to agree with me on an unusual/aberrant point of view, I'd be more likely to think they were nuts, and then change my mind.

As a result, I find my rational, strictly intellectual conclusion that life is not worth living growing in strength. And my rational, strictly intellectual skills of refutation remain untriggered.

For several months, though, I won't have the time or the stress to think much on either side of the issue. Church of Euthanasia, you've not converted me yet.

It's telling that at this point in my life, all musings that begin with "I always thought that" are almost immediately followed by disgust at my former stupidity, earnestness, or idealism. Indifference and cynical amusement are the only emotions I find acceptable in myself now; all else seems grandiose or altogether too involved. I want to stop caring about everything and everyone, because that way I can avoid the pain they can cause me. But even that statement showcases my weakness once more; my self-statement of purpose, not to mention a negative act instead of a positive one, is a goal at which I have clearly failed.

Everyone that I have once loved, I still love. No matter how dead an end the relationship, or how awkward the conversation now. No matter even if the conversation has ceased. I live with the painful, sad hope that one day things will return to their former ways, and our love will be shared once more. I live with the painful, sad reality that there is almost certainly no turning back, or even any moving forward.

October 2002. February 2003. January 2004. In each of these months, I lost someone I cared about deeply. But through the difficulty that ensued, I believed in time's eternal promise: the possibility of change. With one, there were letters that gave me that possibility; with another, there were silly, awkward conversations. Now, nothing.

And I've become more realistic as a result, by which I mean more cynical. I'm realizing that telling someone that we might be good for each other years in the future essentially means that the relationship is dead-ended now. And when a close friend tells me that he "knows he'll want to talk to me someday, just not now," he simply means he doesn't want to talk to me. In the general sense, that would seem obvious. But when it's a specific friend, a person you were once closer to than anyone else and who you really thought "got you," that kind of see-through banality becomes much more opaque. You find yourself believing the words instead of recognizing the implications.

I've never had a breakup that was wholly transparent, by which I mean that I've never left a relationship with the clear and certain understanding that I would never return to it. This certainly has something to do with the relationship of my own parents, who would break up to make up. I left someone once because he was hurting me, but I was sure that he would mature one day and then we would be happy. I left someone once because I was hurting him, but I was sure that I would mature one day and then we would be happy. And once it was mutual, because we were hurting each other, but I was sure that one day we'd both get too old, desperate, and set in our ways to be able to function with anyone else.

And I see now that I was wrong, that I just couldn't comprehend the idea of letting go forever. After all, it was always some kind of love at the time, and it was always someone I'd had unbelievably happy times with in the past. And it's just impossible to believe that something once so important could lose all meaning.

Yet I'm hypocritical even as I say that, because I still have one relationship I regret having had. But during it, I felt the same way, did the same things, said the same things, as the others. It's the one set of arms I would never go back to, just because I have honestly lost all feeling for him, and feel ashamed I ever felt that way at all.

So I know it's possible that the others feel the same way about me; they simply do not care. It doesn't mean they cared any less at the time. But it does mean there's no nice happy point in the future where our hibernating feelings can be awakened. The feelings are not hibernating, they are dead and gone. It means that if I try to go out with someone who was once my best friend, there will be awkward silences. It means that if I try to schedule lunch with an ex-boyfriend, he'll avoid me or stand me up. It means that letters stick to pointedly superficial topics.

And all of that would be wholly expected, wholly bearable, if, as one would expect, these old friends were phased out by new ones. But I'm not picking up random, quarter-length new "friendships" anymore to compensate. Instead, everyone's slipping away, and I am finding myself increasingly alone. Lonely.

I know that I'll move at the end of the summer, and I'll find solace in the possibility of brand-new places with brand-new people. For several months, I'll have my location change as an excuse for my (admittedly pre-existing) sense of displacement. But until then, I'll be sad, and I'll miss the people who Chicago has seen me love.

I emphasize this over and over, writing it again and again, so it will eventually lose its meaning to me. Only then can I regard it with the amused indifference my philosophy so closely embraces. Instead of suppressing my feelings, I'm trying to drain them out so I can genuinely be rid of the unproductive ones. And if some positive ones go as well, like healthy tissue along with an excised tumor, so be it.

yesterday seems like a life ago
because the one I loved, today I hardly know
- Ben Harper, "Another Lonely Day"

Well, it looks like this B.A. is going to be earned.

My boyfriend has given me grief about my decision not to participate in our Convocation. He thinks that it's something that should be done unless there's a good reason why it shouldn't be. Which is fine, I guess, for him. That kind of thinking is sufficient for some people.

Anyway, after giving three people three different explanations for why I wasn't walking, I realized what my strongest aversion to the idea really was.

I want my mother to come. And her alone.

Of course, under the current situation this is impossible. And slowly, the sad impact of that is fading, but large gatherings where people celebrate their achievements with people they love re-open all those wounds for me. I'm proud of myself, but the person I love most won't be there. Instead, I'd just get to see my friends, acquaintances, and near-strangers embraced by the people they love and who love them.

I don't want to see my few remaining friends with their families. I don't want to celebrate the most recent of an upcoming string of important life events alone, with no end to that string in sight.

So to avoid this as much as I can, I'm simply not going. I'm selling my tickets. I'm not attending dinners with or meeting any of the families of my friends (not that I have been or even expect to be invited to such things). Instead, I'll spend the day alone. Probably, the week alone. And after that, I'll just have to wait and see, but I won't get my hopes up that things will change anytime soon.

But hey, I am thisclose to earning that piece of paper that signifies four years of beating the odds. That's something to be proud of, at least.

Every indignity felt a thousand times more painfully. Most waking moments endured, few enjoyed. Each morning, awakening with unbearable loss. The "I," gone. Longing for oblivion.

There was once someone who understood me.

The rain is surprising. Gloomy, gray, crying skies. This exists outside me? Where is the comfort that comes from knowing there's balance on a greater scale? Angels have their own troubles; no time to spare me pity.

There were two. One is dead.

The sum of individual and social surplus must be maximized in an efficient world. My presence shows deadweight loss. My life continues, I continue, to function below the shutdown point. Every day, I increase my own debt.

It is too important a decision to make impulsively. If I become convinced it's the only way, I will begin writing a note. That note could take a lifetime. It could be completed that night.

Satisfaction, true contentment, comes from interaction with others. No one can exist as an island. Right?

I wouldn't want to leave anything out. The appreciation, the love, the blame. My last hope would be that the appropriate parties feel appropriately guilty.

The thing that holds me back from seizing the life I want is the only thing I have left. I can't make things better without starting over. I need a clean slate, no limitations; only possibilities. But instead I cling to what little I have, long for what I've had in the past. I was different, then. He is different now. But someone understood me, once, the way I was, once.

Who understands now?

Complete absorption brings comfort. Exhausting work. Unconsciousness. Too-detailed planning. Every day that I have something to do, I wake up.

For a long time, I haven't thought about it. Now that I am, I am losing hope that I can do better. The best I can do no longer wants me.

This is not a cry for help. I am writing for myself, to keep going. I am writing to preserve these sentiments for later, when things are different. I am writing to create a test, to see who understands among those I will one day meet. I am writing for Adam, who did understand once, and whose impossible possibility of doing so again I hold as the strongest chance of hope in my familiar universe. All other chances are as-yet unknown. The unknown is more scary than exhilarating these days.

Not all avenues have been explored yet.

I am running out of tears. No one really cares, anymore, that I'm crying. Maybe one day I won't either. I can add my own scorn to the pile too. I'll wear my scars like badges, carrying the pompous self-righteousness I abhor now. I'll say I earned the right to be hypocritical.

I'll never lose hope for the future as long as I can pretend someone hears me and understands.