Equal parts Butthead and Peter Pan

I have a ways to go, I’ll be the first to admit, but I’m definitely ready to leave all the boy drama of 2006 in 2006. Bring on new drama or girl drama or something else. I want to make a pact with myself - no taxis, no alcohol, and no sex in 2007, but I’m sure I couldn’t stick to any of them, though if we added no diet coke in there, it would be a real fight between them which would be toughest to uphold. I am all about taking everything one day at a time even as I try to envision what I want as a way of actualizing it. Though I want to get better about doing rather than just talking.

So I will try to make this the last post that is all about him. I’m moving on even though it’s slow, and I get derailed, and sit on my day off and cry in the most ugly way possible. It felt good to get out today, to walk across the bridge, to run into friends, to cook, to be totally silly with my baby cousin and just delight in his presence. Too much time alone, inside, asleep, is too much time to think. My creativity seems to have vanished and I need to get it back, for me, for my deadlines. I have more to say, so much more, but maybe that magic time period has passed and it all feels old, past tense, as Stephanie Klein would put it. Writing about the former me, the former life, the former heartbreak. It’s a little bit funny now, all of the irony packed together so tightly. There’s a book I just bought that I will post about more when I’m done, but it didn’t escape my notice, as I hopped on Amazon and sent a copy to my dad, that I so wanted to send him a copy too. I didn’t see it then but I do now, but that would’ve been okay, but I think just realizing that he is not the kind of person I want to surround myself with, or certainly plan a future with. The coke, the hookers, the self-centeredness, the whole dynamic that seemed so right but was so utterly fucked up. I was thinking about the Shawn Colvin song “New Thing Now,” the one she wrote about Courtney Love that Mary Lou Lord used to sing at times, and how fitting it is for him. I always thought that song was so specifically about her, about a certain time period, and it is, and yet, maybe it’s like Jeannette Walls says about memoir, that it should be universal.

Sometimes I see the half and not the whole
Sometimes I see the face and not the soul
Sometimes I think this place has no part
For anyone who ever had a heart

I am not going to try to endlessly second guess myself. Maybe I should’ve heeded the red flags at the very start, stepped away before I could get hurt. Maybe I could’ve and should’ve done a lot of things, but I didn’t. I wanted him to be this person that I thought I saw, that I both wanted to see and wanted to be. It wasn’t the outer accomplishments, the Emmys or the apartment or even the killer body (though that was pretty nice), it was the heart, or what I perceived it as. I would hear certain things and not others, skip over those and yes, think I could change them. I’d hear taking care of his friend’s baby, but not not having time to call his sister on her birthday. I’d hear letting me use his calling card to call overseas, but not dragging me out to look at apartments I’d never live in. I thought I was being so cautious and careful and yet there were so many things I couldn’t and didn’t dare say. I thought there’d come a time, in the near future, when it would be okay to ask, okay to broach tender topics because I’d already know what those answers would be. “Mixing up those latest junkie-isms/With all the pretty terms of religion,” indeed. I thought “Jewish” was this code word for “good,” for “pure,” despite clearly knowing differently. All the guys who broke my heart in big and small ways this year were Jewish, and the one who didn’t, the one who on the surface would look like the least likely candidate for anything more than a fuck buddy, the one who was engaged, the one who is so much smarter than I think his peers could ever perceive, the one farthest away, is the one who has managed this year to make me laugh out loud, uproariously, to take me totally out of whatever I’m doing and into his world. Who’s managed to see inside me in ways I think are rare.

I thought that’s what S. and I had, I did, and it’s so strange now to look back, to think of the things I worried about, the things I did somehow manage to capture on paper. The whole thing baffles me, like it was a dream and yet real at the same time and I just look forward to more distance and to new adventures and people and getting back to figuring out who I am and who I want to be.

That day just coalesced in such a way that made it clear to me that I need to be proud of who I am and not try to save anyone else, dead or alive. The juxtaposition, even now, of sitting in a synagogue hearing words that felt so untrue being spoken, of wanting my funeral to be one where people come out and remember me as I truly was and hopefully for that person they mourn to be someone they were proud of, and wanting to share that with him and then finding out everything I did, is still stunning to me. It’ll work its way into the novel, I’m sure, but I am trying to take away lessons for myself and my values and morals, which clearly weren’t his. So it’s reading about the serenity prayer and trying to make amends for my huge failures this year as well as embracing all the wonderful people in my life and trying to live up, even a few days early, to my six word resolution I sent in to SMITH - “Show love by any means necessary.” And by that I meant, by any means necessary to me. I don’t want to just hope the people I love and care about and appreciate and value and learn from know that, I want to make sure they do. I want to spend much more time alone, with myself, but also when I’m with others, really be with them. I want to develop better people skills, better radar, without being totally cynical. I want to follow my heart but not let it control me. I have so much I want for myself in 2007 and I wonder sometimes if I can ever hope to live up to my own dreams, but I guess all I can do is try, every day, every minute, to be that person I want to see in front of the mirror, instead of looking for her in other people.