Honestly, I’d never known it was possible to be so consumed while being so unafraid and unselfconscious. Until now, I’d only thought consumption was fear and self-consciousness. I suppose this is what people are talking about (when they are talking about [love]).
* * *
My life has been reduced to a pleasant simplicity visible in (a portion of) my last email to Ivan, here:
Time is nice. I had four Thanksgiving meals to go to and I feel like one of life’s luckiest women. Nothing is difficult. Domestic living is better than I would ever expect, though I do eat more sharing space with a man with a bigger appetite. I talk more sharing space with a man with a bigger appetite for conversation. I am amenable to these things. This morning he told me apropos ?? that people who take black coffee are statistically more likely to be psychopaths (I take my coffee black). Max! Life’s great.
But otherwise in my notes for school I write, “PRIVACY IS THE ONLY DEPRIVATION THAT GIVES,” waiting for dawdling Max to leave the fucking house so I can get a fucking hour to do anything by myself.
It matters less what you want than what you have, especially in the case that what you have is quite good and will spend the winter in the USA.
I’ve stopped watching pornography. Weaning was a process. Part of it Max, thinking of his facial expressions and dick and sweetness. Part of it is my commitment to Max, the intent on forming a sexuality for myself that doesn’t always seek to latch on to some external image. But primarily, I think, it was giving myself to fantasies of something that looks so stupid and obscene as the porn I would otherwise be watching.
* * *
I feel like every day since fucking I’ve written myself some variant of “Not a dick is a lithium pill!” But I cannot escape the truth of this world. I love Max’s warm and stabilizing body, and I stay calm attached to it for hours I might in the past have thought to designate to other things. Twenty minutes alone allowing my mind to wander wherever it wills itself to, I get so hyper. It is like: reading faster, music playing louder, more attention to both, some dancing or exercise, running through the apartment. Too much energy to do anything. Then otherwise none, no energy at all. Only with another I care for is my energy in any way focused. Slowed yet not to a stop. Max at this very moment is at the doctor for more Dexedrine and I should be on my way to class; he was late, too!
Silently I cracked myself up this morning, and Max asked, “What?” And I said, “I don’t know: It’s the end! It’s over! I don’t want anything but to be touching you, and that’s one form of death!”
Funny when once, “Why does he want all the world’s attention? Why isn’t mine enough?” When now, “Why does he want my attention? Why isn’t all the world’s enough!?”
Before I left, I masturbated to pornography for the first time since the day I vowed not to, realizing that last night with Max, during the mutual masturbation, even to maintain control over my erotic imaginary isn’t to bring it together with the erotic real, which might still be a hurdle. And this afternoon, I didn’t want orgasm to be an exercise in the examination of my psyche. I just wanted some external virtual presentation. Too many hours with Max, and the investigation of what he is for me erotically can make me sad. I want to remind myself of all those other stupid shiny things there outside myself.
I cannot do this, and I know I cannot do this, and I have known that I cannot do this since it began. My relationship with Max does not suit me and I wouldn’t have chosen it. I never did choose it. I just had foisted upon me something I have been rejecting consistently for three years. Parts of it feel nice, yes. How couldn’t they? Cuddling and laughing are for all purposes very nice. But there is nothing of Max’s that doesn’t infringe upon me. I have tried to convince myself, you can adapt! You can learn what a relationship is and put limits before it! This is only the beginning; beginnings are always rocky!
But why? Why must setting aside time for myself be done in such a way so as not to hurt the feelings of someone I have no duty to? Why am I woken at 6:00 a.m., before work, to console a man who feels he’s at the end of his life who just fucking moved into my house? Max is in a tremendously difficult period in his life: his father is dying, and he is not getting paid work. I can’t do anything about either of these things but console him, which I do every day, and it takes me from my own responsibilities, which are important. Which, if I do not honour, will make it so I go through a very difficult period in my life. Max cannot cope. I cannot help him through the shame he feels considering wage work because he has too little to occupy himself and too little money coming in. I do not know how to offer support with upcoming familial loss when I have only the most detached relationship to my own family. I don’t know. The luckiest person’s parents shall die. Unless your own life is particularly unfortunate, it’s a guarantee. I just feel like so much of what I say to him is wasted labour. It effects no change, yet it is still my duty. But if we were not in a relationship, it would not be my duty. And if he didn’t live in my fucking house, we would not be in a relationship.
I do not talk through my problems with Max. Nor, significantly, with anyone—certainly not to the extent that he does. He nevertheless offers up “solutions” for things I haven’t volunteered as problems. I just want us to be two focused, self-sufficient people who do not worsen the day of the other. But instead all we are are bad parents to each other.
On coming home to Max: I don’t usually look forward to it. On days that I’m drained, I know I can’t go home to rest, so I just stay ambling around on campus not working, not resting, unhappy, doing nothing much. I’m more eager to return home on the chance that he is elsewhere.
I, too, am wasting his time. He thinks I give him something, but I don’t.
I feel scared that setting boundaries will cause him to be upset with himself, and feel more depressed than he already would be, and speak further about suicide, and be inactive and maybe destructive in ways I haven’t even seen. I fear that saying I don’t want to be with him long-term will invite a very hostile living situation, where he is even more depressive than he is now.
I don’t want to be callous. Things are not easy for him. But he is not being kind. He is not tempering his experience in order to be kind. He knows, after years, what gets me going. He has come to know that his need of care will inspire more from me than a will to offer it. He’s adorable. And he often behaves with kindness and gentleness toward me. And he plays himself off as such a guileless, incompetent little doofus that who in the world could think he was manipulative?! But Max is not stupid, and he knows. He knows that when he tells me—my day has been so bad, will you forgive me? I smoked. I’m terrible. I shouldn’t be allowed to live—that I will say, oh, my sweetheart, lie down with me: you’ll always have me! He knows that I will put down whatever I’m doing to say it, too.
It’s not crazy that I might be manipulated with tactics I mostly recognize from my family—it only makes fucking sense! It makes sense that they are common tactics for familial/conjugal dominance and that I, specifically, am attracted to them. I know this. Why is it that, since rejecting Max, I’ve still been attracted to him? There is something primal in the crush I got on him as a performer fucking ten years ago that isn’t easy to cast away fully, because it has to do with childhood attachment. It’s almost mystical how well Max brings together my relationship with both of my parents, and how perfectly, by chance, he’s managed to capitalize on my feelings of duty. To what? We’ve been dating for a fucking month, and we speak as though we’re married!
Nothing is right and I will not forgive myself if I let this fuck up another semester of school. Not now. Another sign that dominance has succeeded: when you credit your dominator with the relative calm and security you feel. It’s not Max. I had an emotionally and philosophically rich summer where I read, studied, socialized, and calmed down. I came home feeling prepared for the year. That I’ve avoided the school anxieties I felt last y
ear isn’t because of Max—it’s me. And if I’m doing anything for Max, I have to stop it. I don’t want to. It’s not my responsibility. It’s taking away my responsibility to my own life.
It’s no surprise that I can be loved, and less still that it would happen when I feel a responsibility to be at a sad man’s service. I do not need what this love gives me.
And what is that? What does it give?
Like it gives him: daily touch and a feeling of support in life’s cracks. I get sad. I get sad because I do not have traditionally stable family support and I often place a great deal of importance on the affection and praise of less-than-reliable people. Max in my life makes me think less of who isn’t calling me and what emails I’m not receiving. He makes me think less of how little speaking or writing I’m either doing or being asked to do.
This doesn’t mean I need Max. It means I should invest less in unreliable friends and cherish my reliable ones better. It means I should not economize so much when it comes to contact, period. I should, in fact, care just as much about writing and speaking as I do when I’m without him, and I shouldn’t feel ashamed when I have school to do, too. I should ask people to spend time with me. I should go out and socialize. I should just invest as little as I do when I’m with Max in who should call me first (when I’m with Max, everyone calls me first).
A relationship is a way to be affirmed. To the outside world. “Congratulations.” Someone has said yes to you. And you to them. You’ve made a commitment. You are adults. In the case of Max and me, it seems our commitment to each other ensures that we are not adults.
There is this sort of curiosity: wanting to know what you’ll be like with a person, under them, as though having come out the other side of something. But it seems I may already know.
* * *
Poor Max and I just want our best lives, from which we aren’t as far as we think. I’m so prepared to minimize my life and blame him for having done so, but I’m less prepared to confront, legitimately, how momentous this is. Max is a sweetheart and I am ungrateful.
Max is good to me, and he is good, having trouble. He’s not having trouble to trick me. His fucking dad is not fucking dying in order that I may be trapped! Max’s kindness and generosity are just things I barely have any context for. And the way we talk. Nothing is forbidden. Most is a joke. A utopia you don’t need to be excused from for your low moods. I’d always thought it was a dream. I’ve never in my life made with anyone what I’ve made with Max, and indeed, I have made it, too. How could it be that someone gives me so much without threatening me with anything more than the fact that it may continue?
Murder-suicide is primarily recast as fodder for jokes, too, which is better. All the shit folded into our love. Some as masturbation fantasies, others as jokes. (I don’t remember if I’ve written yet, as Max and I discussed what makes our relationship work, he suggested that most people would prefer to cut their limbs off than to share the better part of the conversations we love so much.) I suppose he understands better what people enjoy, and that is why he is a comic. Because with all our talk of death and sickness and perversion and inadequacy, all I think is that everyone must wish they had a relationship like ours!
* * *
No more computer orgasm. No more demolishing consciousness and funnelling in some substitute. If I’m not feeling desirous enough to bring myself to orgasm, perhaps I shouldn’t be having one. An orgasm I give myself is a new practice of commitment and focus. Of meditation, insofar as I have to direct myself, without losing the thread, to a very pure form of thought. That’s why, on the best mornings we’ve had, Max and I wake up early—he goes one room over to meditate his way while I stay in bed and do mine, and then breakfast. This makes me feel good. He likes to make a big, slow breakfast and listen to a podcast, and at this time I usually prefer to return to my bedroom with a coffee to read something. Attention to his ritual can also be attention to my own, too. All is fine and will be fine. Nobody wants to end my life. Nobody even wants to take it.
* * *
I love Max, certainly, but I’m not sure his love for me has much effect. I worked all summer for this kind of freedom but I’m not sure it’s in the interest of what I’m trying to undertake at present. Last night, friends together for drinks. It was lovely. Oswald, Blaise, Morgan, Marianne. Mentioned Max and new demands of beholdenness. I feel a great deal of warmth toward Oswald, which was not something I expected to see in my future when I selected him from the mist for haphazard casual sex under a rain curtain of mania some night back in April. I talked so much about my worry that if I didn’t somehow find the right path for it soon, I’d never be able to form a career from what I hope are my intellectual talents. He said he’s not worried: he’ll find something from which he can earn wages, and write just as he’d like without the worry of gaining popularity. I envy or admire this. I think it’s how I felt when I was younger, before I understood that people could capitalize on their creative pursuits to earn a living so they didn’t have to have some other, separate thing. Oswald’s comfort with this doesn’t come from a place of naïveté. He knows about careerism. It just doesn’t concern him. He brought me a copy of a collection of poetry he just compiled from his friends for release at a bar. (No price, just the polite request that you buy a drink for a contributor.) I was not there the night he released it. I was at home, probably cuddling with Max.
* * *
When solitude is all you’ve known, it forms your basis for life. You consider it your resting state. Doesn’t mean it’s better.
Spend less time interrogating your ambivalence. You’ve made your choice. It’s rather a beautiful one. If you don’t want your life restricted, don’t restrict yourself. It’s not him: it’s you.
* * *
I fear I’ll give something up to Max, offer him care that I don’t require the equivalent of, and then when he’s done grieving, he’ll be done with me, too. I have some experience with this. Max is not a parent of mine. He has such concerted, devoted focus upon me. What I’ve learned can happen is not happening. He’s good to me, and he needs care, because a profoundly difficult thing is happening in his life.
He has now joined me in joking, almost serious: no one has what we have.
* * *
One wants someone with whom to perform the thing after having lived a mostly normative life. Another has a fair bit of trouble explaining her mostly non-normative life to him, and the way it makes it so that each one of her experiences is different from his. Not curable, different.
Max’s father passed away on the day of my last entry. Max had been spending his nights at the hospital for a few days, expecting it. He texted me about it while I was eating with my mother, who I saw for the first time since she got home from Morocco, where she was married to her internet boyfriend, Yasin. We met in a coffee shop instead of the usual lobby of her workplace, which I took to indicate something unfortunate, and I was correct. She had been let go earlier that week, just after coming back from Morocco, and had been told that she could go home immediately. The dinner, however, was good. Talked a lot about Max. Even though my mother seems to have just thrown herself into a new yoke of dominance, she’s very attentive to fears that I might be doing so as well. She has recently seen a new therapist, one she likes. She recounted to me, mystified, that he finally made her see that she needed some purpose regarding work, labour, her own abilities. This is unreal. Good for her for finding the stranger finally equipped to guide her to this realization. During too much talk about history and family and guidance and relationships, I understood that despite all she wouldn’t give me as a child, despite all the comfort and care and security I lacked, she could at least deliver me toward something that was never hers until it was too late: freedom and independence, and the will to claim some individual purpose at as early an age as possible.
Came home that evening to be ready to receive Max, worried for his state, but oddly
, it seemed improved from earlier in the week. It finally happened. So much of the stress Max experienced was due to seeing his father in pain, confused, unable to do anything—to be witness to this weakness. This night was sweet. It was easy to be there for him. He was upset but responsive. Saying little, being calm, simply being there: these were the things he needed, and these were not things it was difficult to give.
I have reached a point of irreversible certainty that I do not want to be with Max. Despite him seeming to be an honest man who is committed, and who is special and handsome. There are innumerable women for whom he can be this. I am not happy with him. This relationship didn’t move at a kind or favourable pace, and I never got to make a real decision. Is it a coincidence that talk of suicide stopped once his father was in the ICU, once there was a new catastrophe? I can’t say. I cannot say what he intends, or what another woman, with her own set of experiences, wouldn’t feel trapped by.
Two nights ago, we had a drink at the bar across the street, and this night, just the talking without the cuddling or any of the benefits of being in our apartment, felt worse. A few times, as he talked, I teared up, which he read as empathy for his present situation, but in fact was out of lamentation for my own, because what do I do? I can’t leave him now. We cannot just break up and still live together, and I certainly can’t force him out. I don’t actually want to give up my room, which I’ve had for over three years, the longest since my childhood home. The burial is Tuesday. I first said I wanted to go, out of a sense of duty, but this morning I went back on it and said I thought it was better, perhaps, only to attend the reception in the evening. He was upset. Less that I wouldn’t be going than that I’d promised to and now wouldn’t. Visibly very upset. And then, fuck, did I worry about everything. The fucking layers and layers of said-I-would that I’ve blanketed myself under because at the time it felt like a duty, or like the right thing to offer, or like the appropriate thing to do.
Sludge Utopia Page 17