A Month’s Perspective

I’ve spent the day enjoying one of my favorite past times: remembering. 

On this day a month ago, my life changed. For the better. On this day one month ago, nearly two months of what felt like the realest relationship I’ve ever had with someone finally became tangible.

We finally met.

I can go through the entire day. I can remember what I was thinking at specific moments and smile, wish I weren’t doing so now from so far away. She was nervous. She was nervous for much of the two months building up, and the day before I came, I think she probably wanted to throw up. I was the opposite. I took comfort knowing she was nervous and that I’d be able to ease her mind when the wait was finally over. 

But then, after finally seeing her, after dropping her off at work and waiting for her shift to end, the universe turned on its side. I was nervous. The confidence I had slowly built for so long didn’t disappear; it hid. And I couldn’t find it. Couldn’t find it while we watched TV and I repeatedly tried to look for a “smooth” moment to put my arm around her. Couldn’t find it when we finally got to my hotel room and knew what was supposed to come next. 

Until I did what I’ve done so many times before: I told myself in three, two one, JUST DO IT. Like four times. Then, before I knew I could fail my mental countdown again, I finally just did it. I kissed her. 

And so began four days of realizing every daydream can be realized. That in just a short time, all your inhibitions can be cast aside and you can enjoy every second of being with a person like you’d only fantasized about one day being able to do. 

But I keep going back to that nervousness. I’ll never forget it and I’ll never let go of its power. I can feel only one emotion in response to that happening to me: gratitude. I’m grateful I was reduced to a teenager who didn’t know what to do. I wanted it all to be perfect, because she deserved it, and was. It was perfect. 

“How was your trip,” everyone asked me when I came home. 

“It was perfect.” 

I’ve begun to consider the fluidity of that word, perfect. It tends to turn people off because its implications are that some unattainable expectations come with it. Something that’s perfect is without mistakes, without flaws. To me, something can only be perfect if the potential for flaws and mistakes, and thus, growth, are present. Fear, anxiety, confusion—all emotions that can be unpleasant, but without them, would leave me feeling empty. Dead.

This time one month ago, I finally did move closer to you on the couch, put my arm around you and rest my hand on your leg. I felt comfortable, then nervous again, and then I felt like I had climbed to the top of the world and took you with me. 

Losing touch

Today I watched an episode of Boy Meets World. Shawn found himself associating with a group called The Center, headed by a “Mr. Mac,” an obvious cult leader who took advantage of kids who felt “lost” and “without purpose” by making them believe what he believed.

I’ve always loathed that idea, that someone could doubt their identity to the point where they felt they didn’t know who they were or where they were going. It always seemed so over-the-top to me for someone to claim such a state of disconnect and emptiness from the world around them. Now? I get it. Not because this television show bestowed me with some kind of wisdom I hadn’t previously felt. I hadn’t even connected my current state of confusion with the episode I watched earlier this afternoon until I began to write this.

I don’t even feel that far gone. I’m not Shawn Hunter, I’m not lost and seeking someone to connect me with myself. I just feel frazzled. Tired, but hyper-aware of myself. Worried. Generally okay though.

Before I began writing this I thought I would be completely unable to tie my thoughts together in any organized fashion. I thought I’d be making vague statements with seemingly no continuity while I ruminated on whether or not this has anything to do with my recent choices to approach writing differently, to turn my back on some of it and just see where I ended up. I suppose this isn’t the stuff of prize-winning essay writing, but I expected something more chaotic to leave my mind as I began typing. I guess that’s just another level of uncertainty I wasn’t aware of.

I know who I am, but I’m not entirely sure what’s going on.

My celebrity best friend or something

Dreams are really weird. Often I’ll wake up from one feeling emotionally affected by whatever crossed my mind while I slumbered—I remember a long time ago, I’d occasionally have a sexual dream and I woke up feeling like I had cheated on my girlfriend. Or when I was single, I’d have a similar dream about a friend and I couldn’t stop thinking about them that way. 

So it’s no surprise that when last night I had a dream that I was in some weird hotel like building, when I ran into Tina Fey and she and I made a couple of 30 Rock jokes (despite the fact that I’ve never cared for her character Liz Lemon), and when in the dream she said she’d love to get breakfast with me and my friends, that I woke up thinking “I finally get why everyone loves Tina Fey. I’d be her pal.”

Dreams are really weird. 

lol Men’s Fashion

“You expecting a flood,” the guy wearing baggy jeans and a t shirt he wrote “Modern Warfare 3: 42-0” on the back of asked me. I’ve gotten weird looks and even comments before for cuffing my jeans, but it only ever really makes me scratch my head when it happens where I live. 

“Brandon, your shorts are unmanly.”

I’m not sure what that really means, but if I had to guess, the person who said that to me probably means because I don’t wear shorts that are four sizes too big for me, six inches below my knees and hanging off my ass like every other guy (or her baby daddy, yeah I said it), I must not be a man.

I’m 5’10” and about 130 pounds. I’m fucking skinny. I wear clothes that fit my abnormally thin frame. I don’t wear t-shirts with skulls on them and yeah, my jeans are of a skinnier fit. Because I’m fucking skinny. 

I’m really not unique in the larger picture. I enjoy fashion trends more than the average male, sure. But don’t look at me funny just because I wouldn’t fit in in an Eminem music video and fuck you if you wear cargo shorts and have something to say to me, because life isn’t a god damn Dave Matthews concert, you sandal wearing fuckers. 

Gonna go shopping now. For clothes I like. 

You’re different too

I was scared when things got serious I’d feel things I’d felt before, and they’d come too quickly, with too much force that I’d fear not being able to recover if things didn’t work out. But you don’t let me worry about that because you’re you. You’re a thousand miles away from me, but you’re with me all the time and you take away my worries, make me feel at ease. Normally I’d want the world to know too, but now I don’t even care. I only need you to know and you do, and despite this contradictory fashion in which it’s not only you reading this, again, I just don’t care to worry about that. I’ll sit in bed in my jeans and wish I owned a pair of sweatpants to feel appropriately lazy when I think about being comfortable with you. I’ll smell your hair without warning, look around, think you’re there, and then realize you are. 

It’s hard to type with one hand

It’s hard to type with one hand when you have so much to say. 

I have one arm in a cast, protecting two cracked bones in my wrist, but everything that feels less than pleasant is inside my stomach and my chest, not inside my cast. 

It’s even harder to type with one hand when it doesn’t matter how many hands you have, because sorting through everything feels impossible. 

Nearly two months of focusing on five dates on a calendar was a new experience. Having those five days move by at an agreeable pace, rather than thinking they moved too quickly was even newer. 

Now what?

The real answer is things continue to move one step at a time. The real answer is things will be doable, still, and at times frustrating, again. But until there’s a new group of blocks on the calendar, it’ll feel a little upsetting. A little frustrating. A little crazy. 

My friend asked me on the way home from the airport if I learned anything, because that’s “what’s supposed to happen on a trip.” 

I learned that no matter how outlandish my daydreams may seem, they can happen. I learned the ideal person you want to be with can exist, and I learned that while perfection is a heavy word we should refrain from using, sometimes it feels wonderfully appropriate. 

So, until next time, we keep taking care of each other. A date will form, anticipation will take over, the tears rolling down our faces will dry, and I’ll come get you. 

And I’ll be waiting for you, the first thing you see, when you arrive. 

Two weeks

Can’t sit still. I need any resource available to me to keep my emotions from bursting out of my chest. I can compile a list of words whose meanings I thought I knew before, but only now can truly understand: 

• Anticipation
• Desire
• Passion

I’m going to explode. I’m picturing floodgates, buckling behind the force of more water than I ever thought existed. If it keeps on raining, the levee is going to break. Small cracks, but I’m determined to keep everything in tact just a little bit longer. 

Add excitement to that list. 

Pouring Rain

One moment the only sound you hear is the music playing overhead, shopping carts being pushed, price scanners meeting bar codes, and people talking. Then it’s all drowned out as the sky opens up and dumps torrents of rain, swallowing everything it hits in its sudden blitz. 

Then it stops, and inside your head, you see a dictionary page, you see your fingers scanning down until you reach the word intermittent. The music is still dead, the air itself is temporarily quieted, waiting for it to it to start again, and like forty-three stock cars roaring back around a mile and a half track, here comes the rain again. 

Your senses are overwhelmed. All you hear is pounding. You look down, maybe even close your eyes to let the rain be the focus of everything. It stops.

Quick, think of something profound. 

You can’t, and one more time, whatever you’re doing is met with the sound of thousands of pounds of water descending from the sky before someone breaks your concentration when they say “It sounds like it’s raining.” 

It starts and stops and starts again with such staggered, unpredictable irregularity that you don’t know how many times you’ll traverse this carousel. 

I don’t know what it’s like in other places, but here, it can be raining on one side of the street but not the other. You can drive into what looks like a science fiction movie and as you approach the rain, you can eventually see exactly where the dry road meets the soaked road, where the sound of the music playing or the engine singing will be blanketed by water pounding away before it either eases up and stops abruptly or disappears without any warning at all. 

Then the air gets heavy, the sun reappears, and all you want is for it to rain again.