A wave (oh, just bear with me) of manic energy propelled me through the month after my breakup with William and then it, uh, crested and broke right on top of me, leaving me feeling pretty much like how you feel when you’re bodysurfing and that happens. Like, I have sand in my ears and water in my nose I’m not quite sure where the shore is and I’m still a little bit exhilarated but mostly I’m just impressed that I didn’t drown. (”Enough with the metaphors” is something my therapist Susan says pretty often).
I’m almost nostalgic for the manic month. I loved everyone! I was going to accomplish EVERYTHING! I was going to relearn French! How could I possibly avoid doing yoga and swimming every day? I could spend however much money I needed to and it wouldn’t matter because the Universe was going to send me some big lump sum soon (this actually worked out, but I highly don’t recommend it as a financial strategy), I could just feel it! Good things just kept happening and happening to me and the only real problems in my life were that sometimes people on the street in front of me walked so slowly that I wanted to kill them, sleep was almost impossible, and I was occasionally filled with the nagging feeling you get when you’re boarding a plane and you know you’ve forgetten to pack something for your trip but you can’t quite remember what it was.
It turns out, of course, that the stuff I forgot to toss into my carryon ( Susan: “Seriously. Stop.”) was anxiety and depression. I think I’m plagiarizing the one chapter of that motherfucking Elizabeth Gilbert book that I actually read with this terrible metaphor, but you know what? Fuck it. It’s apt. It’s about how she went off Wellbutrin in Italy because she was like “Who could be depressed in Italy!!!” as soon as she got there and then once the honeymoon period was over she was like “Oh. me!” I can relate, unfortunately. I can relate to fucking Elizabeth Gilbert. This alone is enough to make me feel depressed.
And anxious. Fuck! I really had myself convinced that if I never smoked pot again and if I established a real daily yoga practice, it would be, like, chemically impossible for me to ever have another panic attack. This theory was disproved today when I found myself lying on Jake’s bed, short of breath and with a pounding heart for all the wrong reasons.
So after a week of not seeing Jake, and feeling really ambivalent about seeing Jake, I’d finally felt comfortable enough with the rules I’d established in my head about him to make plans with him. The rules were: I am not allowed to expect anything of him and that’s the only way for this to stay fun. I am not allowed to treat him like a boyfriend by being so to-a-fault open and honest with him because it just makes me feel like a big emotional open wound, and I know now that he is right there with a salt-shaker, just haphazardly flinging salt around, not even realizing that some of it is landing in the wound (Susan: *rolls eyes*). I’m going to keep his flaws at the forefront of my mind. I am not even going to think about “love.” Or the other girls.
And then on Wednesday morning, when I was supposed to go on date with Jake Wednesday evening, I had a random question about the cats for William and instead of emailing him I decided, since our accidental meeting had gone so well, to just call him. He’s so easy to talk to (well, of course he is, I’ve been talking to him more than anyone else for six years). We were affectionate in a totally new way, this friendly way that felt good and not overly-intimate. We just chatted about nothing mostly. Really this is the moment of our conversation I do remember: we were talking about how for the first month I was eating insane amounts, like oatmeal and eggs for breakfast tacos for lunch and ribs for dinner, and how he’d gone in an opposite direction, mostly because while I’d thrown myself into my workouts he’d buried himself in American Spirits. “You’ve lost easily 20 lbs, ” I told him. “Fuck, is it really 20 lbs? Well, no one is cooking me pork chops,” he said, chuckling. “Are you worried about me?” “I am and I’m not, because I believe in you that you can take care of yourself,” I told him honestly. I heard him smiling on the other end of the line. “Yeah, I’m worried and not worried about you, too,” he said.
It turns out that it’s way too early for us to be chatting on the phone like friends. I know this because I canceled my plans with Jake that night in order to cry, talk on the phone with my girlfriends, and walk the dog I’m dogsitting a million miles. In fact, it was when I was doing these things simultaneously (bad idea!) when I walked into an iron gate and stubbed my toe so badly that right now it’s barely walkable and actually might need medical attention. Gah.
Still, today, I managed to hobble into Manhattan to see Jake. I had been feeling okay about seeing him, even looking forward to it. It’s hard to pinpoint when ‘happy anticipation’ morphed into ‘full-on panic,’ but as soon as I set foot in his apartment I realized I wasn’t going to be able to fake my way through it. “Jake, I’m having a panic attack from seeing you. This is not a good sign, ” I said, clutching my knees and staring at his bookshelves as my conscious brain tried vainly to convince my autonomic nervous system that there was no sabretoothed tiger that it needed to be running away from anywhere in the room. What Jake did: tried to distract me with talking, strumming his guitar, and getting really into trying to learn how to whistle the intro to ‘The Stranger.’ His bedside manner was perfect, now that I think about it. Except the part where he said “Yeah, I’m used to this, my sister’s kind of bipolar” and I was like “HEY I AM NOT BIPOLAR” (of course, my secret fear is that I am bipolar. But I really don’t think I am.) “No one in the actual psychiatric community has ever told me that I’m bipolar, Jake,” I informed him, and he smiled. Later we talked about what’s wrong with him (I called his workouts compulsive and he was like “not compulsive! It’s fun to work out!” and then I was like “for four hours a day?” and he was like “ballet is expressing yourself with movement!” And then I did something that I thought was brave (or stupid): brought up how he’s like his dad in re: wanting to have a girl in every port. “I’m not like that,” he said quickly. “‘I want to be with you when I’m in New York,’” I quoted him. “Did I say that?” he asked. “Yeah, you said that.” “I mean, did I say that or did I say my Dad said that?” “You said that.” He didn’t tense up or pull away. He laughed. “I think it’s funny that I had to ask that.” So at least he knows.
And then after a while he took his shirt off, with just a glance in my direction like “Is it okay to take my shirt off?” I am bad at describing sex, or maybe everyone is, so I won’t. But just thinking about it now makes me almost too distracted to keep typing. I mostly remember his hands pressing down on my wrists and his being surprised that he was going to come so soon. “It’s been a week,” I reminded him, feeling powerful and powerless at the same time.
Then we made craft projects and then we had sex again and then he went to boxing and I went home, stopping off on the way to buy myself dinner. I thought about going to a restaurant alone, which almost suited the mood I was in. I wanted to be taken care of, and to be alone with my thoughts. But then I realized that I wanted to be alone alone, so I went to Whole Foods. I poked heirloom tomatoes for like five minutes, trying to find ones that weren’t soft, and finally came up with two good ones. I got a little tub of buffalo mozzarella and basil and half a pound of peel’n’ eat shrimp and a bar of swiss milk chocolate with hazelnuts. Here is the recipe for eating this food: cut up the tomatoes and tear up the cheese and basil, sprinkle some good olive oil and salt and pepper on top and eat while watching an HBO show that must not be named. Then make cocktail sauce (lots of horseradish, a little ketchup, lemon juice) and eat it with the shrimp. Then with the chocolate drink a totally respectable Muscat (like R.E.C, I only just recently realized that not all dessert wine is inherently disgusting) and go to bed at 10, feeling better than you have any right to expect to.
