I woke up a few minutes ago with my heart racing, unadulterated rage coursing through my body. I’d been having repetitive nightmares about last night, when I went to two of the oddest, most high-schoolish parties I’ve been to since high school. Both were heinous new (and old) media clusterfucks, and both contained unfortunately high concentrations of people (well, okay, two, but it feels like a lot to me) I’ve fucked. Or will, in all probability, fuck (why did that brand-new boy show up? the thing I was liking about him was that he’s not part of this world). Also out in force: people who would like to fuck me, but likely never will. Also: people I’ve fucked with, people I’ve fucked over. And one person, in particular, who I can say with complete certainty I’ll never fuck again.
The nightmares were about him, of course. Jake! I thought I was so over him. I mostly am! But there’s still this huge part of me that wants to punish him, or protect the world from him. I wince, of course, when I see girls fawning over him. But I’m not deluded enough to think that my impulse to warn them away has anything to do with protecting them. True, I don’t think he should be loose in the world, working through his issues on unsuspecting, vulnerable easy targets. But there’s no way any of those ladies is as easy a target as I was. And anyway, I don’t care about them, or him, really. I care about myself and my wounded pride. I care, mostly, about the idealized self I glimpsed, momentarily, through his eyes: a beautiful prize, something that someone as pretty and poised as he is would be proud to wear.
Ugh, and he is so pretty, and he so knows it, and it’s exactly that overweening confidence that makes him — made him! — irresistible. But my dreams last night weren’t about romance, they were about anger and competition: him fucking me over (professionally!) and me feeling impotent to stop him. And when he creeps into my fantasies, this is the context: I’ll flash on his prettiness — like, him asleep and innocent-looking at dawn, gold summer sun coming in through the window and slicing bands of light across his muscular back, his cherub-in-a-painting ass — and then immediately my thoughts will turn violent. It scares me, actually, how much the idea of hurting him (which I’d never actually be able to do; he has great reflexes from years of martial arts training) thrills me. Mostly I imagine the satisfying crumpling sound as my fist connects with the cartilage of his beakish nose.
And then I feel weird and gross and pathetic, because another odd truth of the situation is that there’s still this part of me that likes him. Not LIKES him, but just sort of sees the value in him as a person, likes talking to him, values his smarts and his skills. Above all, I think he’s funny and talented. He might be evil, but he’s interesting, you know? And how many people can you say that about? The other boys I’ve been killing time with lately, while they’ve got a ton of compensatory charms, don’t ring that bell. There’s nothing about them that makes me want to investigate, to get to the bottom of it.
But I’ll never figure Jake out. Duh! I’ll have to settle for trying to figure out me. Because seriously, what the fuck is going on there.
