Intimacy and ice cream both melt

I wake up in the middle of the night laying next to you and you are still awake. You are reading on your kindle and wearing your thick framed glasses. In that moment, you look like lenny kravitz if he were a professor of literature. 

We start to talk about intamacy and what it is for you. 

How your longest relationship of two years ended with you just disappearing for two weeks. This girl who you refuse to admit was quite possibly the love of your life left feeling like she was not enough for you. Left with empty space to fill. 

How did I end up in your bed again? It was late and raining and we forgot that we both arrived on your bike together. I said goodbye and walked out key in hand with no motorbike to ride. I suggested I could sleep next to you with all my clothes on as my personal barrier against lust. But then, you surprised me with the obvious. Just as I was asking if I was allowed to hit on your friends, you stuck your curly head up to my chest and I melted into you, enjoying the sweet comfort of much needed affection. I need this right now damn you. Fuck the future. I just need you to hold me in this moment.  You are my friend, let that be good enough. Just like scrambled eggs on sunday its not fancy and perfect but it will make me happy and full. 

You told me earlier that you had slept with someone. I held you with this knowledge. I saw that you unfriended her on Facebook. She looked like a rounded version of me, holding a glass of wine while lounging on pillows. Yes I digitally spied on you, how could I not? You declared we were over and then ran off without speaking to me for a week. 

I kept this image at bay and held you. Pushing back the flashes in my mind like a broken movie reel that only sometimes lets in a visible frame thru the light. I still wanted you even though you are tainted goods. You are a spoon on someone else's dinner plate. You are a cup with lipstick smears and a bit of orange juice left in the sink unwashed. I tried not to think about it. She was just one of many before, this was now. You are always just now for me.

In this version of now, you were suddenly so affectionate, holding me tight. Wanting me. We have gone thru this a few times, so I could allready predict the future. The first night we had sex twice and you held me as if you wanted me. Drinking me in. The second night, not at all, less snuggles. You texted me when I left after two strange days together to let me know that the retort to your landlord was "it was nothing serious" when she asked if we were "back on". You informed me unserimoniously that you would finish the movie we were watching together on your own. Not save the ending for another night in bed. 

Intimacy scares you. You build walls against it. You make rules. You routinely vote against it on the premise that it is dangerous. Like broken glass in a yard with barefeet. It could hurt someone.  It could hurt you. Danger Will

Robinson there are hearts involved. 

Intimacy is so much more than sex. Intimacy are those moments that we share late at night when neither of us can sleep and we talk while staring at each other across the pillow. Intimacy is what happens when two people share thoughts and feelings. Why are you tryinging to stop it, to block it? Why question it. It, like all things will pass. Just like the night, the morning always comes even if you can't sleep. We will both wake up from our heady ocsytocin laden cloud and declare that neither is enough for the other. In the mean time, pretend this thing we have is ice cream in the sun. lets eat it befor it melts.

You are broken my sweet friend. I forgive you for this defect. I imagine you as a baby crying it out in the other room as your parents weened you on the urge to need them. You sleeping in a bed on your own and not snuggled up next to your mothers breast. Enacting the modern myth that a flannel blanket is enough to replace human skin next to human skin. Is this what did it? What ended all possibility of enduring human connectedness for you? I don't know. But I no longer take your rejection personally. I no longer chase this want like I am chasing butterflies with a net. Escaping my grasp just when I almost catch it. I now simply enjoy those moments when you let down all guard. Those moments you let me in. Those moments when affection is what you give freely like peanuts at the zoo. Those moments I enjoy beyond words. Just moments. Let's eat them before they melt sweet friend. 

Judging judging judgers

Yesturday I was at a small social gathering. It was a coffee tasting party. There I met a skinny man from new jersy who was wearing a polo shirt and decidedly pompous as to his successful IT business. He chose to chat me up about my life in Bali while sipping coffee from an overly small cup. 

Now lets be clear from the start. I was judging him. I didn't really like him or enjoy his company, I was just talking to talk. I judged him for being conservative, for being from new jersey, a state that in adition to being the home of my exinlaws is also all that is wrong in America. I judged him for cutting his hair too short and for thinking that San diego was better than Spain or Bali simply because there were no holes in the sidewalk. I judged him straight off and kept judging him, but I also kept talking and imagined he thought I was witty, facinating and a cultural odity worthy of exploration. It was enough in that moment that he liked me. My ego swelled like a pregnant cat. He was genuinly enthrawled with my discussion of construction methods in Bali, mixing tales of bargaining with scrappy balinese men for gravel and finding distant tribes to built boat shaped rooves for my villa. He seemed facinated until I tried to explain how many meters were in an "are" of land and clearly got it all wrong. I was for way too many minutes struggling to decide if this arbitrary metric of land measurement amounted to one or ten meters squared. A difference that is so large as to make me look clownish. In that moment his opinion of me hit the floor and I was suddenly in one fell swoop an ignorant bastard who clearly was a fraud. In reality I am good at many things but numbers is not one of them. Should he judge me for this? Sure, and I will still judge him for being from new Jersey. 

A friend of mine who struggles to find guys she likes or who like her told me a story of meeting a charming entrepreneurial man on new years eve. She liked him untill he started to bitch about his day and then she was done with him. She left him standing there holding his drink. He was still smart, successful and hansome but now there was a flaw. 

Last weekend I did the hash with a friend. The hash is a run thru the rice fields following a paper trail. The man is a friend who I have slept with on and off. We still see each other and each time we meet, I see his mind turning to evaluate wheather he could like me enough to overcome my flaws. We are evaluating each other, still. Wheels turning, contemplating all the bits and pieces.

We were having a stunningly lovely afternoon full of amazing scenery and great conversation. We walked thru green and muddy fields past rivers and thru jungles. At somepoint in the conversation I used the word "drug" as a past tense for "drag". Suddenly I watched first hand as my intelectual stature in his eyes was reduced to hick. Bill clinton is fond of that usage I later messaged him, its a southern colloquialism. He is Australian what does he have to say about it.

Later that evening as we played poker with friends, me for the first time, I bet money to the end of the hand even though I had no worthy cards. I wanted to see what would happen. He frowned at my stupidity from across the table, clearly making small check marks in the against column on the imaginary chalkboard in front of us. I had my own list about him. He was drinking again, surely this was worse than bad grammar and terrible poker skills?

We have become a world of judgement. We banish people from our lives based on a single turn of phrase. We do it all day long, we do it without even thinking about it. If you are single at nearly 40 and have never had a relationship last very long it is because you seek perfection. There is no forgiveness for flaws. Like an episode of sienfeld everyone is either a close talker, a far talker, or a loud talker. No one can ever measure up. Seinfeld eventually got married. Did he get over it? 

Did he find someone whose flaws he was willing to overlook or did he just tire of caring. I don't know, but this year I will strive to judge people less and see them more as a complete package. Let them in as I see fit but accept them in the moment for all that they are. If you are from new jersey I will still talk to you

at least until you finish your small cup of coffee.  

This sucks and other explicatives

In the morning you excitedly texted me about how I could help you to build your future here. You joining me in the ranks of corporate refugees from civilization on this tropical Island. 

In the morning, things were good and fine and adequately imperfect. But in the evening you were suddenly fickle and I wasn't enough to butter your bread. As if the world is so overflowing with friendship that there is a surplus to be tossed out the car window without rolling it down all the way. 

Did you really want to start a bussiness with me this morning? The first hip place to drink and hangout in this small town. Was this my idea or yours? Did we really go looking for property, laughing the whole way? Exitedly examining abandoned buildings. What happened? I keep searching in my mind for the critical invisible threshold we stumbled across. Was the birthday cake we ate that evening so sweet that I couldn't measure up somehow or was it simply that I missed the moment to have reciprocated your flirtatious whipcream on my nose? 

I made the fatal girlfriend error of treating you like a friend. That's what we said we were, friends. I let you convince me that I should confide in you, as if we were two girls talking about boys, over kombucha at a cafe. Vomiting my bad day in your lap. I warned you that I shouldn't, that my "baby daddy" breaking into my house to steal our sons passport was one of many unsexy details of my life that in no way will illuminate me for the better. Only painting me as a critical character in an episode of jerry springer's talk show drama, girls in heals hurling chairs at each other in the background. 

Is this what did it, what tipped the scale, from good to bad? Maybe you were just never that into me. Never wanting to take me in the bathroom at a restaurant because the need was too great to let it wait. There was always something lurking in the background despite our endless hours of fun. Are you breaking up with me for sexier, younger girls with no children or ex-husbands? Girls who stand still looking pretty and laugh? Did you allready meet one? I don't know. 

As my friend I imagined you would listen to it all and still show up for coffee the next day. I guess as soon as you kissed me hard on the lips we were no longer friends, not really. I missed that distinction. That critical moment where from there on I should be coy, and charming and delete all the ugly bits. But I can't. Just like using whiteout with an old typewriter you can always see that there is something there, hidden beneath the illusion of paper. 

You suggested a walk, so thru the ricefields we went as my son tried hard not to go to sleep near by in my bed. Him wanting my company way more than you wanted mine in that moment. Me feeling guilty for selfishly wanting you, letting him go to sleep without mom snuggles. 

With iPhone flashlight aps protecting us from dark and snakes, we walked through the night sky looking at fireflies. You feigned interest when I described their romantic biological tale of sexy flashing. Instead, repeating like a mantra "we have really gone and done it, haven't we?" The question bringing the conversation back to the topic at hand. The insinuation that we liked each other too much. The lie to apease my heart from hurting, that this feeling of too much want was somehow mutual. Is that a white lie? Or a stray elephant? I think I have lost the metaphor for this type of benign betrayal that seemed harmless until minutes later when you turned on your own invented truth. 

We sat with our feet dangling in the ricefields. The crickets chirped. "I think I haven't wanted to end it because I didn't want to loose a friend." you said.

But really without using words you boldly wrote in the night sky that you don't like me enough. 

Fuck it, why not just be my friend. Is this such a terrible consolation prize? Right, I forgot, we can't. Somehow when we consumated what affection we had for each other, we opened something that can't be put back. Like an unruly jack- in-the - box whose lid refuses to close once he has popped out. Something that can't be put back.

The crickets kept chirping, but I could no longer look at you. 

The next day you couldn't talk to me either because you had gone to watch cricket by the beach. The odd drawn out sport that may or may not be named for the chirping animal that serenaded us as you broke up with me for the fourth time in as many months. 

I had thought we were just friends. But we were more. I will forgive us for not making it to friendship, for getting stuck in the "in-between" as you called it. Friendship is different than this. Friendship forgives all. It allows for bad hair days and unsexy moments of truth. Friendship is better than sex. Friendship is what I want more than sex. You however want it all and with the right person. I am not her. Good luck to you sweet man, may you find it.