2:06 p.m. - September 07, 2002
I've got some Vivaldi on and I finished mowing the lawn so I smell like early fall
The concert was good, the company less so. No, it wasn't him; it was me. I felt awkward, stilted, uneasy. This is a game I don't know how to play and I'm not eager to run onto the court and learn the rules; watching from the sidelines doesn't interest me much, either.
After the concert we got some ice cream and with each minute I drew further and further away and he exerted more conversational energy until I looked at him and the only thing that passed through my mind was I'm still here? At the BART station I turned to go and he asked, Do You Have To Go and I said Yes.
I'd like to say it's not him, it's me, reassure him that I'm the one with issues and phobias and anxieties but whenever someone says that, it's heard as I can't be bothered with you and that is not what I want to convey.
This life is not for me, neither his nor mine, that's what I'd like him to know. Does that make sense? I don't know how to be myself anymore and I feel it's an act to relax and laugh and I think If it's supposed to be this way, then it sucks. I do not want to know about the seedy underbelly of being gay or how a brave few rise above the muck, consoling themselves with elitism and confidence in not being like the rest. I do not want to know that sexual intimacy comes and goes like pubescent hormones, nothing more than biology, instead of the regard with which I've view my couplings. I do not want to disabuse myself of the notion that I am not an animal and that there is right and wrong and a moral code. I do not want to be seaweed drifting from leg to leg in hopes of finding something solid to cleave unto before being tossed onto shore and desiccating.
It does not sicken or disgust me; it does not appeal. I think of Dana and how I'd hold her hand and we would walk for hours and I would listen about terazzo tiles and children and she would listen to a teacher's frustrations and othertimes we would be quiet and our hands would play and I miss that, I miss my hands moving, showing much more than spoken words and that connection appeals, when it's two people sharing the same skin.
He thinks I'm genuine and I feel like a fraud.
