No more shall grief of mine the season wrong

It is after three and I am still optimistic. Victory.

Perhaps this is because I have a handful of really lovely people in my life who have significantly upped the lovely quotient in this shittastic time. Perhaps I'm grateful for the unexpected solace I've gleaned from the comments you've left, Oh, tiny and faithful audience. Perhaps I am indeed as strong as my shrink thinks I am.

I actually took a lunch break today and went to the gym . . . only to—in a row of empty elliptical machines, mind you—find myself directly flanked by a slack-stared fat girl in bike shorts and an annoyingly overzealous fellow who reeked of B.O. and was in the process of expelling a great deal of curry from his pores.

Pet peeves, people. Curried armpits and people who pick the machine next to me.

But then I came back to the office to a package from my Dad. A package containing the coolest earrings I have ever seen. That's right, America, I've got the King. Elvis Aaron Presley: on my ears. What a perfect present.

And I had a lifesaving fun night in with Peter last night: an episode of House (emotionally unavailable man number 53 to whom I am deliriously attracted), take-out eggplant parm, chocolate cookies and a bottle of wine. I just have to quote him, as we were dorking around our apartment and I was sending inappropriately assertive text messages to failed loves of yore:

"Hey, do we have any pop tarts?"

quiet like stains are on a tablecloth washed in a river

I made it almost to 1 pm today. So that's promising, but now here I am at my desk, feeling my chest constrict. Succumbing when I ought to be sucking it up. Failure.

This is so much bigger than boys (because they are not men) and drama and the fear of dying alone. Those are just extra questions, part of all that is unresolved in my heart, and I am trying to practice a Rilkean patience. This much I know. No matter how much it hurts, this too shall pass. What matters now is what I do with me, the woman I live with, for better or for worse, for the rest of my life.

It is a beautiful day, though it feels for all the world like the first of fall. Freezing in a turtleneck in May—figures.

I don't know which is worse: feeling like I won't make it through the week, or knowing damn well that I will. Day by excruciating day.

It is not this one. Or that one. Not today. Not this particular rejection nor this particular pain. It is the pattern. The serial effect.

Bear with me, y'all. We all know I'll be rolling in begonias before we know it, cresting high and happy into something else. But for now, it is no fun waking up in a world where so many people go about their business indifferent to the impact their rampant douchebaggery will have on the heads and hearts of others.

well, you build it up, you wreck it down

I am a break-up masochist.

Raise your hand if you're sick of this saga. And feel free to ignore me for the next week or so. Until then, I process.

My shrink is right. I am no stranger to survival gear. I'm stronger than I even know myself to be.

I can almost feel my body, its churning metabolism, willing myself to steel up and scab over. But, frankly, I'm surprised by how much this stings . . . you know, for something I've been actively dreading since December.

Fight. Fight the Maybe He'll... syndrome; fight the big What If! Pound into your bones that it is done. No negotiations, no love songs. Mourn the loss, and keep on fighting (though it feels more like fending off a panic attack). Here is an end to the uncertainty. It has to be better this way. Maybe my brain will get that through to my sore ass heart.

Meanwhile I torture myself. I refuse to take a break from the music that was loosely knit between us, mine just as much as his, spider threads across our uncrossable chasm. Better to drown in it, roll it up in the sandstorm till my heart pops out a pearl. Delaying it only means you'll be blindsided next time you turn on the radio. Better to salt some wounds yourself.

He can't keep Bukowski. He can't keep Dylan. So I have to sit like a three year old in a cake-stained party dress, pounding my firsts in the center of the living room, wailing out my sugar rush in a flash flood tantrum. No! Mine!

either you don't have the balls or you don't feel the same

This hurts a whole hell of a lot more than I thought it would.

Waking up was bad. The half Xanax I took to sleep wore off into the kind of tears that squeeze the back of your throat and burn your cheeks on the subway. Thankfully, I have a mother prescient enough to be online and emailing at the spank of Thursday morning, who knew enough to forward me a horoscope advising me to, among other things, relax the manic intensity of my current pursuits, because:

"Life can't bring you the sublime gift it has for you until you interrupt your pursuit of a mediocre gift."

Well there you have it. Stop running headlong into the wall of some man's emotional infancy because the glass betrays behind it the mirage of his potential.

The hard part now is holding on to what he gave me. Keeping that torch trained on my smoldering signal fire. Keeping the words, the films, the blues tunes, and the idea that—someday—somebody else might love me for my brain. My fucked up, book-addled, melancholy brain.

With him, more than anyone else, I felt like myself, my true and taciturn postulate self, swimming in pretty words and sitting around in the dark listening to gruff men sing sad songs. Trouble is, I just couldn't be myself. There's plenty about me that's easy and open. The ennui comes just as much from joy as it does despair.

Which will I miss most? The book exchanges, the rutting of prose in heat, that mind to mind intellectual intercourse? Or the flowering that happened, my blooming in the hothouse of his basement, the warming and the thaw. I will ache for both, I'm sure.

What I won't miss is the emotional storm front, always on the horizon. This is his loss. I wish I could say: don't tell me I'm young and beautiful, adored and in demand. I don't want the boys you say are breaking down the doors. I wanted you. Messy, malcontent and surrounded by books, piles and piles of books. I wanted seriousness and dignity. A song for the goat.

a dream lies dead here

So today sucked.

Worst day in months, arguably. Haven't felt this heavy of heart since the great bed-moving ordeal. It is an awful feeling, the siphoning of one's heart through one's intestines...

It started an hour early, bad omen numero uno. Up at six to set up a 9 am breakfast for work. As caterer, a term loosely given to the employee most capable of mopping up the egg yolks of others, I had to arrive promptly at 8 am, to plate fruit and decant juice and set tables.

There's a different set of commuters, an hour earlier. My train was a surreal aerie of the 7 am set, secret calm couples munching pound cake, wearing sunglasses against the glare all the way to Queensboro Plaza. Their peace made me unpeaceful. Bad omen numero dos.

Then at work, arranging muffins, the big boss' bipolar son was stealing food faster than I could arrange it on the platters. Fucker took a whole carton of blackberries, saying only, "These are needed for lunch." Scooped out half of our cream cheese carton without so much as a "May I?"

Predictably, we survived. The day continued with little more than the usual snide and unprofessional interludes with the Hell Beast, who has more or less informed me that my position is on probation, pending a stress test by our incompetent board. (Translation: come July, kiddies, I may not have a job.) I made a big mistake (mostly out of stress, overwork and a lack of lunch breaks this week: bad omen numero trés), but I fixed it.

Then there was a reprieve. The nausea from seven-minute salad snarfing (under occupational duress) abated and I was able to make dinner for my favorite recently affianced friend: insalata caprese and fresh spinach linguine with leeks, radicchio and walnut pesto. We chatted about dresses and plans, we drank a half bottle of Veuve and ate a tiny lemon curd cake from Dean & Deluca. Everything was going to be okay. And then it wasn't.

I should have known. I did know. One step forward two steps back. Only this time the step forward was sasquatch-sized. There was no other way down from this tree, I say to the caged kitten in my heart. He had to do it.

Unexpected and impending dance a funny one for you. This was a choice I made, newly minted, freshly torn. No tagbacks. And I don't regret it. I said yes to the mystery. As I've always done, on one scale or another. If anything, I'm proud to have gotten here. Though I find myself alone in the igloo, wildness and snow for miles, I did it. I finally showed up. And he said "no." Just "no."

It takes a certain blend of poetry and meanness to say something like that.

Ironically, this has become quite the pattern. I show up just as the other party shrinks away. The last time I did—convinced someone to stick around—it ended in three years of pretty lies. The fool, upside down, falls on his head, lies there despairing, and sets off anew.

Nothing to be done but brush off the knees and hope it's not all over at 26, that this corduroy clad man who seemed to understand me—who certainly understood Melville—will live to regret himself.

I'm almost impressed that I managed to get out the few snarky lines I did in our conversation. Such gems as: "I'm either someone you care about, too, or I'm a barnacle. I can't be both." I actually asked a grown man to tell me whether he thought of me as an arthropod parasite. The answer was no, but how can you trust that? Who in their right mind admits to such coldness? Every breaker-upper wants the moral upper hand. And we barnacles give it freely by listening to such platitudes. "No, of course... we have a tremendous connection. That's what makes this so hard."

You just never relaxed, they say. It just never got easy.

Well, of course not, genius. Ours was the incredible five month one-night stand. Maybe this is all your fault: for memorizing my number as you dashed off the PATH train in December, for keeping the other shoe afloat. I never asked you to. I never asked you to be anywhere but where and who (and in what state) you were.

I'd rather imagine he was bored to tears this whole time than feel like this.

He's Just Not That Into You. Live this mantra, ladies. Because otherwise, you'll be left with a big empty sac of what-ifs and what-the-fucks.

in which the gods are clearly messing with me

Went to the gym in my lunch break, sneakers and The New Yorker in hand, ready to punish myself.

Sign on the door said: Gym closed until 2 pm.

Typical.

well, a steelhead salmon or a mud bank carp

We spent the day at the beach: sarong sushi feast, seaside nap, baptismal dip in the frigid Atlantic. All this with Paul Simon on the tape deck, the Met game on AM radio, books crosshatched over the blanket.

I gave up. And I give in. We read Bukowski together on the train.

Walking hand and hand through warm New York at night, I wore his cardigan, wrapped it around me over midnight omelettes at a diner on 14th Street. We slept till 2 pm.

God only knows where or if or for how long.

I will weather his hesitation. (Men are delicate origami creatures) It doesn't matter who he is or where he's at. For now, it is enough. For once, I find I have the balls to leap.

And a really good new therapist–you know, on standby.