I mean: identity seems to make a case for itself when it’s so hard to change one’s behaviour, it’s so impossible not to behave in exactly the same ways forever. (A new prof, a young and attractive man, who seems, too, to be a little nervous and on somewhat poor footing, is already giving me undue attention—I am, despite my better knowledge, delighting in it.) Instincts to suppress writing double entendres to my professors must be cultivated, because the opposite instincts come more naturally. Each year, all the same, I am doomed to be myself.
* * *
So few thoughts produce when I can’t convince myself of their privacy. Yet privacy can be between two. The thoughts that produce for Helena: in our own private discourse (even if produced in some writing chamber for their eventual release into the world). She’s not teaching me this semester, but I still write for her. I trust her: I trust her to gracefully receive all I should give her. There are no deaf ears. Impediment to writing or speaking: when you don’t know where your words will go or under what circumstances they will be welcomed. Too long without satisfactory affirmation, and the lines of communication close. You have privacy not with the object, but from it. This, I imagine, is the end of any relationship.
I find it easier to direct my thoughts to school, direct my thoughts to anything, if I imagine that Oreste and I might separate completely. Then I will not have privacy with any love object and I will return to stability once again. The nice parts—not the hateful parts—of identity will return to me. Just those parts of identity that tell me I have a history to think about, that I am some accumulation of experience, so I shouldn’t ever be bored with myself. That part of identity that can finally shelve away the most recent love affair with all previous love affairs as a new but discarded contribution to my former life.
Spent almost five hours at Helena’s house on Sunday, talking about femininity and humanity and identity and power. In her thrall, I’m always seeking to make myself as similar to her as she seems to want me to be, as we are both women who’ve had affairs. She speaks through—and assumes me to have shared—a preternatural sense of control over lovers. I really don’t believe I share this. I hardly ever have any idea what I’m doing. Tried not to address Oreste directly. Went to see him do a set this same night; left early, didn’t invite him over, could have broken up with him right then and there were the goodbye kiss not, as always, so good. Now he’s on tour for a week. And soon, another. I don’t want us to write or fill the physical absence with verbal presence because such a presence is a strong one that, for me, permeates everything.
Helena says all her relationships have been profoundly passionate; she barely has any of the slighter ones. It is much more affirming to date hyperverbal men who always have something to share.
Paul wrote a nice story that’s getting good circulation on the internet, but I think it’s socially irresponsible to over-romanticize disaffection. To me there’s an injunction not to dwell there, and to pretend, instead, that it doesn’t exist.
* * *
Really a shame that infatuation is far too pleasurable to convincingly renounce. Oreste and I clarified (at—smart for me but idiotically for him—my behest) that we won’t spend time together anymore. Pretty very sad about the most enjoyable three weeks of my life, but there are always discrete periods. So much late-onset discomfort. Never more sad than when feeling so much more comfortable communicating with exes than with present lovers. Well. More sad now. Otherwise.
Max told me a few nights ago, perhaps through a slip of the tongue, that he would marry me. Hypothetically, I think. I didn’t ask! It’s a strange thing to be told by someone you had never even comfortably called a boyfriend. How he cherishes me when I do not date him. Days ago I was still seeing Oreste, technically, told Max so, he seemed unsurprised. Oreste and I are a bit alike, he thinks. I don’t really think I am so similar to Oreste. I remember how sad I was when Max broke up with me, four years ago. Quietly, unrelentingly sad, with no resentment: nothing to hold but my experience of loss. And that passed. Because all wounds that one does not pry apart heal. And then you’re better, different. I don’t want to marry Max and I tell him so even though I had, for all intents and purposes, a perfect night.
Infatuation is awful. Arrive whole, glowing, proud—leave soft and mushy and terrible. Then reform again, knowing just what will happen.
Feel bad. I’m anxious about how bad, cumulatively, I’m likely to feel this fall and winter. The aim-inhibition involved in not telling Oreste that we should have one final parting fuck is obscene. I suppose one wouldn’t do much. Postpone lack of pleasure. Give me just one hit before slower weeks. I know it would do nothing. Probably wouldn’t even feel right to him. How could someone who fucks like Oreste experience such prohibitions. Life: sucks. Nothing even starts.
Celibacy is good, I guess. Plenty of good things come to celibate people.
Maybe the real reason I sleep so fucking much is to prove wrong the men who call me “energetic,” but as the sleep is private to me, this is not a good strategy.
OK, CATHERINE. JUST BECAUSE FREUD SUGGESTED AIM-INHIBITION SHOULD BE WORN AS LINGERIE DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE BEHOLDEN TO THIS. EVERY TIME YOU THINK OF DOING SOMETHING STUPID JUST GO AND PLAY SQUASH INSTEAD. NO ONE IS EVER FORCING YOU TO BE A FUCKING IDIOT.
I asked because I have bad impulse control but also because if he says yes I really fucking want it. (Because I have bad impulse control and because I am a fucking idiot.)
* * *
Oreste and I fucked our final time. We almost did not speak at all, but there were moments and images ready to stick in my head for daydreaming afterward. He had exactly the energy I wanted: fierce, forceful, intense. It’s strange: the way Oreste is good in bed, it’s almost as though there’s no room for me—he’s firm, so much in control of it: the pace, the position. There’s no blank time, no moments of indecision, no talking, no pausing, just all at once I’m being fucked a new way or at a new speed, or someone’s genitals are in the mouth of the other. I was fucking so instantly giddy that barely a minute after his arrival into my house were we panting, completely undressed, he’s already thrusting into me. I feel as though I am ravaged, and I want to feel so; it turns me on insanely. All the same I can’t ignore how invulnerable this sort of sexual behaviour makes someone: to be in control, he must be completely in control.
I wonder when I will get over porn on the basis that porn that looks like the sex I want to have simply doesn’t, and surely could not ever, exist. Oreste and I fucking could not be caught on camera.
Neither of us slept well. Slept touching—not at first, but then consistently. Had to be up early for work. We both showered and dressed. The mood was not solemn, but it was scarce. When he asked me, even, how my week had been, I hardly felt prepared to answer, and only barely did. Volleyed the question back at him, same sort of response. Out most nights. Many shows.
Didn’t feel anxious—sort of unburdened and slow, like the beginning. The few words I spoke were not slurred or self-monitored. He made some comment, as I was putting on my shoes, about how I was “always running around.” I told him, like the various times he’s commented on my energetic nature, it’s not really a compliment to call me energetic, because I don’t feel this way about myself. It’s so little of me—something I have a tenuous hold over that it distresses me to lose. I said, it shouldn’t be this decisive or attractive factor about someone, something they struggle so much to maintain. I don’t know that he understood. It’s strange to speak one’s impressions of another at all. I don’t think I do this with new people, tell them, you’re this, you’re this, you’re this. How am I supposed to know what they are! Early impressions are cloudy. I can’t distinguish between the different parts that make a person up. And I don’t possess this instinct to tell someone about themselves.
We both said the night was nice and kissed in short pecks. Neither of us said goodbye forever, because neither of us co
uld bring ourselves to do so. Nevertheless, it had already been said—we were simply fulfilling the closing terms of our agreement. We had texted each day, about almost-later-fucking, until it happened, but there has been no contact since (two nights ago). That’s OK. I mostly feel good. I mostly just drift off into fantasies of the quickness of our fuck’s beginning, or the strength of his hands.
I am alone, again.
* * *
I had a very nervy, interior, hyperenergetic but detached weekend. I feel a mild hysteria. Can’t stop thinking about Oreste, and Helena, too. How I’ve looked lately to either of them. The way Oreste saw me never satisfied me: of course I should be eager to seek recognition instead from Helena, as what she sees in me so perfectly corresponds to what I’d like to have seen: a strong, complicated, knowing woman who is unstoppably irresistible, always compelling in her thoughts, and in control. Any comment Oreste might make about me seemed minimizing, to the exception of something else. The comments were fixing: I lived such a way, was such a way: “free,” “confident,” “energetic.” I am only these ways as much as I am their opposites. I want to be understood one way or another, I just don’t want someone to vocalize to me that they’ve chosen which.
Too many Dworkian metaphors at work in heterosexual couplings: the man, desiring, should want to get to the bottom of something, and the woman should want to be bored into; the man should want to be incorporated, and the woman should want to incorporate.
Why should vulnerability seem like an absurd thing to allow oneself? Because it is. To seek affirmation from a person who must recognize in you something you desire to be seen in yourself, having not known you—that is nonsense. You won’t get what you want. You will either suffer disappointment (what they see in you fails totally to meet the fantasy of what you want to have seen in yourself) or, otherwise, you’ll be surprised (what they see in you won’t match what you’d wished to have seen, it will surpass it). It will be a reading for which you are not prepared, and this very lack of preparedness will facilitate a rupture in the Freudian sense—we can only really be struck by what we don’t see coming.
* * *
Yesterday evening, amid fantasies, I told Oreste we should sleep together once more before he leaves Toronto, though I don’t know when this will be. He said, “Catherine, I don’t know. This makes me sad ultimately.” I said, sure, it makes me sad, too, but at least not during. He said, yes, but after. I said, what difference does it make, I’m already sad. He said, it obviously won’t make anything better. I said, you’re right. He said nothing else. I didn’t say, as I nearly did, that he could not imagine how I wished to delay having to meet and flirt with and kiss and fuck someone new, the fucking grim realities of the next person I meet who will not hold me like he does, with whom it will not be as it was. I did not tell him that after our first kiss, I am fucking spoiled for first kisses. I didn’t tell him, because I don’t want to manipulate, and because I don’t feel I had an equivalent effect on him at all, and I feel pathetic.
There are some things I know and, with each romantic failure or loss, must remember:
IT ENDS. Things feel bad if you want them and they end. You should feel bad. If you are feeling bad, the right thing is happening. If you are feeling compensatorily powerful or sped or denying, the wrong thing is happening, and you are stunting yourself. As with quitting smoking, each time you indulge, you only lengthen your withdrawal time. Loss feels horrible. You can fool yourself into rushing through it, but it will still feel deeply and magnetically horrible until some very surprising day when you forget to think about it, and such a day will only be postponed by fucking them again, or even telling them that you want to fuck again, which is a virtual version of the same thing. You will not be made to feel good by courting your own failure through a lost relation. There is no counter-argument to this. There is only bad impulse control.
Parting will obsess you with equivalence: the stubborn insistence that your desire either was or could not have been equal to that of your partner. Such a thing cannot be quantified and, were it possible: even total equivalence of feeling will not save you from your loss. Is it embarrassing to think that you did not do to another what they did to you? Certainly. Are seduction, affection, intimacy not made up largely of embarrassments? They are largely made up of embarrassments. Save yourself the experience of thinking about it.
If you feel like this love has ruined you for other loves, there is little purpose to indulging further dalliances for the sake of distraction. Remember that, as the last time, the next time you fall for someone will be by surprise: it will not be deniable, and you’ll know desire is coming.
* * *
I did a heavy dosage of mushrooms with Ivan last night, but I believe my newer, optimistic lease on life will be fleeting until I put it into practice. It is clear to me that avoiding sex and relationships is the best tactic if I am feeling a great deal of loneliness, confusion, and anxiety. Also. Came to terms with being a verbally and emotionally demanding woman, with a primally annoying soul.
Many other thoughts, like: I feel nostalgia for earlier in life, when I was closer to an amplified, hyperactive verbal state more often. I was unstable, but in some ways had access to a greater portion of my mind’s faculties. Now I have stable, responsible attention and I’ve lost much of the freedom of being young.
Still, the major conclusion I came to with these drugs is that no one has been kidding about these drugs. They are the real deal.
Every man I date just feels like the next wild animal released to eat the smaller one (Oreste devours who preceded him, but now he is the one loose).
* * *
OK, OK, I am going to do some work after copying what I wrote on my cellphone’s memo app on Saturday night on the drugs (retaining initial placement of line breaks and capitalization):
This mental activity feels really good!
But sad
Mostly I feel sad about Julian, with whom I was the most 16 years old, because I was actually that age
And a lot of the time it felt like this
Hugely stimulated
And I would share the weirdest shit, and always have it matched with the good, right, weird shit
I need someone with the most supportive and surprising mental activity
Who makes me feel at home, no matter what
Why is this so hard to find?
Look it’s very sad that no one should be fucking rushing to comply with my enormous verbo-
emotional demands
They are also DICK DEMANDS
they are ultimately simple and exactly right for me
I DO WANT WHAT I WANT
EMOTIONAL TAUTOLOGY IS REAL
it’s also not so bad.
No one will ever be able to take away from me that I have dated some of the best looking men in Toronto
Like I feel I wouldn’t turn away anyone who met my emotional demands exactly.
So, OK, why would anyone else, I guess I fail in many ways to meet the emotional demands of
people.
Or, OK, in not drugs life we’re not all so busy making emotional demands
I want the shit?!
Life is sad. Someone put their shit here, please.
In NOT TEEN LIFE we’re not all so busy I was great as a teenager at making adult teens fall in love with me how do I now as an adult make adult adults fall also in love with me while feeling just as safe as the adult teens now this is a hugely difficult
question.
The problem of living has really been that I am the only one who finds myself this funny.
Going to give my therapist a real talking-to for not coming to a few of these conclusions first.
* * *
Things are not very good. They have not been very good in some time. I sleep constantly. I throw all my time away. I do not take school seriously. I don
’t see friends much. I am slobbish. I primarily eat takeout food. I was physically sick for a time and too heavily fixated upon it. I do not possess the requisite attention for life. I am elsewhere. I am nowhere. I am vacant and bereft. I have felt neither very stimulated nor comforted at school, getting few new surprises. No new surprises. Everything is stale. I am not setting expectations for myself to meet. But I’m so tired all the time, OK?! Life does not seem exciting. Books don’t seem exciting. My insights don’t seem exciting. I don’t launder my sheets often enough. I’m gaining weight. I feel weak. I play a bit of squash but not enough. My world feels small and unlikely to expand.
This period of life that I’m in—I don’t know how to not be in it. I don’t understand how else I so recently lived. I don’t understand so recently being gratified by my thoughts, by myself. The only energy I possess is the nervous sort. I feel nauseous and unhappy. I don’t know how to fix it. I can’t do anything. I feel sick. I don’t know what to do.
I feel so, so lonely. I am worried about my future. I feel I’m failing my future. I feel totally uncertain about the future I’m bound to have. I can’t write. I am fucking up my life. I am delaying my life. Even my delayed life will not be the one I want. At least I look young. In the spring I’ll be twenty-five. It will not have gotten warm yet, and there I’ll be, barely closer to graduating from college, single, always, and twenty-five. No one older than me would consider this old. But these are people who have graduated from college.
* * *
I think I spent four or five of the last twelve months this year continuously satisfied, stimulated, healthy, and happy, which—as far as years? Pretty competitive.
* * *
Of the lovers who bore into us most skilfully: that we recognize in them something we shamefully expect of ourselves, that we are drawn to and want to cleanse them of (e.g., they are sociopathic, serially seductive, hyperverbal with no proper place to put it and, God forbid, honest about all these personal failings).
Sludge Utopia Page 3