6 of ♦s

hermusery:

THIS IS A PERSONAL POST ABOUT MY PERSONAL LIFE. SCROLL ON IF YOU GIVE NO FUCKS.

I sat at this bar that’s so small it doesn’t even bother with a sign. Two of my best male friends sat across from me. We talked about food, good chefs, flavors, literature, shoes, fashion, commercialism and consumerism, and on and on. We talked about how half of our ultra-tight group of friends are “talkers” and the other half are “commenters.” Some carry on conversations, others simply comment when they feel they must.

I realized recently that, despite my often severe independence, I’m so lonely, sometimes I wake up with the sensation of it so heavy on my chest that I can’t take a first breath in the morning. This is a new realization.

My last boss said to me that the guy who will make me happy in the long-term is going to have to be both insanely intelligent and insanely open to new experiences, and, though I often detested her judgements about my personal life, no estimation could be closer to the truth.

My friends and I are close because we are open to almost anything—it is what buffets us close together. We take on anything as a unit. We talk about anything with each other. No topic off-limits, no situation too awkward or complex to parse. But that can be off-putting to someone coming into our circle from the outside. Conversations over beer can run the gauntlet from queer theory to Family Guy fart jokes, and it all happens so fast that you can feel like you’ve run a mental marathon by the end. And you can pry my friendship from this big family as soon as you pry the light from my dead grey eyes.

The few of us who are in relationships complain that their partners feel overwhelmed by my friends, that there is too much to keep up with and too much you have to know to converse. It’s just too much to be “jumped in” to.

The kind of guy who gets along with these people is so intellectually open, it’s like he’s splayed out width-wise like a tanned skin in the sun. Personally, I’m blunt and honest (and not always in the best way, i suppose), and my mind hops from subject to subject (even on a hefty dose of adderall) quickly. More than one Buddhist friend has called mine a “monkey brain.” We all have this problem with finding partners. Maybe it’s why we stick so close together.

And I let myself get excited about this boy with the ink because we sat outside in the freezing december cold and he kept right up with me as I jumped from atheism to church jokes to cocktail recipes to 30 Rock references to Alec Baldwin movies and back again to politics and he never missed a step. I got really excited when he nodded along as I dropped both “hegemony” and “genderqueer” into a sentence and then made a different point using the same words, and using them correctly.

As much as I love to fuck and to bite and to cum, more than anything, I love to talk—about everything. My life has become this jumbled mess of all these incredible things that I’ve done and that have happened to me over the years, it’s hard to not constantly wonder aloud about all the things that could happen next. I’ve sat in awe of a quarter-century of a life that some people won’t live in their whole lifetimes, and I crave so much more of everything that my desire to slash my way through another quarter-life of untamed world overwhelms me, but I don’t want to go it alone.

Meanwhile, so many men and women tell me that I’m the girl they’d want if they could create one from scratch. The mini-entourage of 40+ (years, not people) delightful midwest gay men I’ve inexplicably acquired are always offering to set me up with their straight friends in their 30’s who would “worship the damn ground you walked on.” My parents’ friends, young and old, ask me how the hell I am still single. Male friends my own age wish their girlfriends and exes could be more like me. And I want to shout back at all of them that they can stop pondering my singleness for sport and start bringing in all these fucking dudes who would supposedly be so “perfect” for me.

(James Deen and Billy Castro, by the way, still have yet to tweet back.)

So as so many people line up to tell me to lower my expectations, to aim for someone who wants a normal dose of suburban sedation and medium-grade life expectations, I’m still holding out 24-year-old naiive hope that I’ll stumble across someone who wants to run and fuck and fight and taste and talk and tumble through the rest of their short life with the same fervor as me. I’ve never wanted a story-book ending. I want an ending worthy of a whole new kind of story.

Life boils down to the things amazing enough to your senses to make your heavily-filtered brain right them down. Before I waste myself into an parboiled pot of beige experiences, I want to state for the record that I’m out to continue to be amazed by all of the things that have knocked me right on my ass so many times before. Life is not a bitch and then you die. Life is a beautiful blur, and then you sit back and sigh.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope that I can find someone who feels the same way, but there is not enough realistic positivity to go around. Maybe what I want is a long-term three-way: Myself in love with a person, and the two of us in love with the eternal spring that is the potential to find something amazing hidden inside the ordinary.

All of this sounds incredibly trite, so forgive me, but this is my way of saying “Fuck you” to the sudden influx of people telling me to expect less and settle more.

If it takes building a steel scaffold around my spirit to hold it open, well, fuck it. I guess that’s what I’ll do.