17th
you still make me cry like a song of the east that loses its centre but always finds its way back home.
i tried to explain it all to r & a, sitting at dean’s at four in the morning, nursing the worst come down i’ve ever experienced thus far - physically, but most significantly, emotionally. dean’s is a cute hole in the wall, blink and you’ll miss it diner at the cross. it’s what i imagine la’s hotel cafe to look like, except smaller, dirtier and a little more homely. there’s a jukebox in the corner, an old arcade game beside it, and the ladies’ bathroom has a sweet picture of betty boop to distinguish it from the men’s room. the leather couches are old and worn, ripped in all sorts of places and probably stained with years, decades even, of history and tales to tell. mine now sits with them. the staff are all boys with long hair, tight jeans and singlet tops, they remind me of what seattle would have been like in the early nineties. they sit at tables with their feet propped up reading newspapers, smoking cigarettes and shooting the shit. i see their smiles in the dim light of lava lamps and neon signs from the main street half a kilometre away and instantly i feel at peace.
it’s all about power play, i told them. r & a, that is, as we sat with hot chocolates and a massive order of nachos (the menu had two sizes - large and massive). everybody and everything that has happened post-t is all about power play. i couldn’t figure out why, for the life of me, i strung men along until i was done with them and threw them away like i always hated to be in the past. i couldn’t understand why, when i knew how much it hurt, how much it left me feeling disgusting and disgusted, used and useless, why i would do the same thing to somebody else; i always thought i was better than that. i did with them what i wanted, teased them to the brink of insanity just to let them know that this was my game, i was in control and you do not ever mess with me - only to later toss them aside and count them as another notch on my bedpost, maybe even another war wound, another badge of honour. it was that way with l - i felt cheap and i was the one sneaking out of the hotel room at whatever ungodly hour it was, but it was on my terms, my game. it was the same with m, for a while at least, and it was the same last saturday evening with , , .i really wish i could remember names but right now all that’s coming to me is the fact that they were best friends. that’s disgusting and cheap in itself and i wouldn’t have considered anything like that, would not have dabbled in such a-like behaviour, a few months ago.
of course there’s the other side of the story. i was just being smart, i was covering my ass before somebody else had the chance to do it to me. but i didn’t even give them a chance, i didn’t listen, i didn’t care at all who they were. i once berated a, told her not to fuck like a man if she had feelings like a girl. i guess i was speaking to myself.
but my point was, none of this happened pre-t. there were men and conquests but i could count them all on one hand and they were all longer ordeals, stretched out for months and months, with people i knew well. these people are strangers and i don’t know what’s worse - hurting a small number of people i considered close to me, or hurting throngs of people i’d met only moments before it all unfolded. not that there’s been throngs of them, just saying.
a asked what it was like with t. and i told her, initially oblivious to her own point, that when we were “together”, it was his playing field. i came over when he asked, he came over when he pleased. i was his girlfriend when he saw fit for me to be, and just as quickly i was his dirty whore of a mistress when he felt like it. i was a doormat for him, i laid down everything for him. he was in absolute totalitarian control. maybe, she said, i was compensating for how i had felt when i was with him. maybe, she added, i was just doing what i had been taught, what i had learned from him.
as always, this is going nowhere. i am not reaching some large epiphany or some crossroads in my life. it is an observation, a documentation of the realization that this, this whatever it is, makes me sick and disgusted.
