Ring Ring!

20:13, 26 April 2003

Well well well. I went to the gym, although I did go easy on myself. I only did 35 minutes, but that was probably more due to the fact that I read all of UsWeekly in that time and I had no other reading material. Fuck if I'm going to stay on the elliptical for ten more minutes with nothing to read and no hot guys to scope out. Hell no.

Speaking of "hot guys to scope out," I wasn't scoping anyone last night. OK, OK, I was checking the bar for hot guys. But not how you think. I wanted to catch their eyes, make them want me (as I always do, right?) and lean back against Piyush and smile and think: they all want me and they can't have me because I can't imagine leaning up against anyone else right now.

I'm always surprised at how much I like him. How very much I like him. Because "issues" aren't supposed to go away overnight like this. The entire therapy business would be defunct if that were so. I'm supposed to have to work through it... slowly learn to open myself up to a guy and feel comfortable enough in a relationship to slowly vanquish Revulsion. Whoops! Guess I took the fast track on that one. Hey! Revulsion! I can't heeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaar you! And then the sex thing. Umm... most girls who are sexually traumatised and unable to feel comfortable at even the lowest levels of sexual intimacy don't snap out of it in one night. And yet... and yet... I'm tearing his clothes off.

I was talking to Therapist about why I think I'm so OK with the sex thing with him. I said it's because he doesn't make me feel threatened by overbearing expectations, to which she asked why I put it all on the guy to be a threat or not, rather than on myself for perceiving a threat or not. But I think it is all the guy. Josh, for example, was moving too fast, always pushing for more in the most annoying, guilt-inducing passive-aggressive way. No wonder I ran screaming under my bed and had dreams of rapists. Then Scott: he didn't move fast at all--not even beyond kissing, ever!--and if you recall, I never felt sexually threatened by him, either. I never recoiled from Scott; I just thought he was pretty boring to hang out with after a while, independent of anything sexual.

And now Piyush. He took so long to kiss me that I actually wanted it before it happened. Everything that's happened with him I've wanted before I got it. Finally, the horse is pulling the cart! I think it matters that we got to know eachother and feel comfortable around each other first, before hooking up. And I also think it helps how comfortable we are with each other... for God's sake, I ate French Onion soup on our first lunch date! You've got to feel comfortable with the guy if you order something that guarantees you're going to have a sexy string of cheese connecting your mouth to the bowl throughout the entire meal, right? In the end, I don't know why I'm so good with him. Why it's so right, all of a sudden, like the Shel Silverstein story about the circle who finally found its missing piece. But honestly, I'm not going to try to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Back to the chronology of my day, then. I went to the library after the gym. I could feel my halo starting to glow above my head, given this morning's wallowing in my own lethargy, infra. At the library, I had worked for about an hour when Piyush called. I told him I was at the library; he said he was coming to the library to print some stuff out. How glad was I that I'd gone to the library, huh? Tee-hee-hee, an unexpected chance to see him! (Thank God! I mean, that would have been twenty-four hours without being in his presence! Can you imagine? Ay, fates worse than death!)

After the library I was perishing for want of a drink. No one to drink with. No one to drink with. No one to drink with. Since I was such a good girl all day, I got a pedicure instead. And then a lot of food at Trader Joe's. Dude, food there is so good and so cheap! Why don't I go there all the time?

Newsflash!--Piyush just called. From Orange County. To say hi, and that he wishes he wasn't there. He is going to call me on his way back home, which will be fourth time he's called me today. My cellphone oracle thinks he's falling in love with me, but I told it to calm the heck down, seeing as Piyush and I only just spoke to each other for the first time on 28 March. (God, time is so warped when one's in school! It seems to move so much faster in my experience than it does on the calendar.)

Status check: hungry, cold, tired, getting sick. I haven't been sick in years. Literally. The last time I complained about being sick in my diary was in July of last year. I wonder if I'm sick now because I smoke cigarettes when i'm with Piyush? Or I wonder if his skank-ass got me sick.

--Newsflash #2-- Piyush just called again. An hour and a half since his last call. He stepped outside for a cigarette break and called me to tell me he was bored. $10 says he calls again in an hour for the same reason. Of course, you know the whole thing makes me glowwormy.

Unbalanced

10:35, 26 April 2003

My life is not balanced. Beyond the fact that my priorities are severely flawed, I also have a tendency to swing so hard towards something good that I kill it. It's as if I bend down to smell a fragrant flower and I smash my nose so far down into it that I crush it. Again, my life marked by bipolarity: I get so high into the peaks of happiness, I want more!now!again!; then I crash, like Icarus, a fireball plummeting into the sea.

When I get excited about something, it is to the exclusion of all else. When I was a child, the days leading up to a vacation or my birthday or Christmas were not a time I would suggest someone try to teach me my multiplication tables. If I like a book, I cannot be torn away from it and will devour it in as close to one sitting as circumstance allows, reading the book ceaselessly through meals, trips to the bathroom, bedtimes. In college--and even now--partying, alcohol and drugs superceded not only schoolwork but healthy diversions like movies, taking a walk, etc.

When the exciting thing I've thrown all my energy and serotonin into inevitably ends, as all vacations and books and highs do, I am disconsolate. A heartbreaking, gloomy "Now what do I do?" feeling comes over me. There seems nothing to look forward to and the future stretches forward like a desolate waste. Only those quotidian chores remain, steadfast beneath the ebb and flow of more exciting pursuits, and in the bleakness of the funtime comedown they seem oppressive and insurmountable.

Of course, this pattern holds true with guys, as well. Things are going so swimmingly with Piyush; whenever I am with him I am somewhere on a scale from calmly content to deliriously euphoric. True to form, all duties, desires and pastimes which may formerly have had a pull on my will, my energy or my time are foresaken, cast aside, unremembered. Errands have languished on my to-do list for weeks. The gym seems a faraway memory. Even control over my eating has become less of a priority in the face of a chance to spend time with Piyush. Exam studying gets done solely because it allows me to spend entire days with him. I do not touch my exam materials when I am not with him. I don't do much at all when I am not with him, besides write expansively in this journal about him. Oed' und leer das Meer* without him. Or as another put it, in song:

In the rain the pavement shines like silver,
all the lights are misty in the river,
in the darkness the trees are full of starlight...
and all I see is him and me forever and forever.
...
I love him! But when the night is over,
he's gone the river's just a river.
Without him the world around me changes,
the trees are bare and everywhere the streets are full of strangers.

Forgive me, I am having a very melodramatic morning. Nevertheless, I just don't know what to do with myself today. He is in Orange County today. I actually went to bed last night with sleeping pills next to me on my nightstand so that when I woke up I could just pop them and go to sleep for the rest of the day. So I could sleep all day until it was time to drink myself to sleep at night. That is not to say I don't have a million things I need and should do... but I feel paralysed, incapable, torpid. And pathetic.

Yesterday was a wonderful day. We were in the library studying for five hours. (Note the seeming incongruousness of the previous two sentences; such is his effect on me.) We were to go to dinner afterwards and then out for a drink in Santa Monica. He actually ditched Manbir, his close friend, lying that he was just going to go home and study all night, so that he could spend the entire evening with me. In fact, he's going to try to get out of his Orange County committment today, as well, although I'm sure that's as much for the studying as for me. (Keep in mind that I am placing absolutely no hope on his successful evasion of the OC obligation.) Perhaps he, too, is casting all aside to hang out with me. But I doubt he is doing so with my level of reckless abandon.

Yesterday was a big sober arms-around-each-other, sometimes-leaning-on-him-and-getting-a-little-press-mouth-into-the-side-of-my-head-kiss. We went to his place instead of out to dinner. We ordered superdelicious Pizza Hut. We kissed at his apartment, sober. It was as fabulous as ever. Smiley smile.

Then we went to Bar Copa in Santa Monica to meet Rakesh for a couple drinks. We drank, arms around each other all night. I convinced him to have more than the two-drink limit he'd set for us. Again, I am the Devil and I live on your shoulder. We went back to my place where I convinced him to leave his car illegally parked with hazards on (there was no parking!) to come upstairs for 15 minutes. We made out like horny toads since we had a time limit! hee hee hee. It was seriously the most intense of all our hooking up. Inching towards stealing third base, I tell you. I told him "Next time I get more than 15 minutes." God, what a wanton little harlot I've become!

So today. Today today. We all know what I should do. But will I do it? Stay tuned...

...

*In Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, this line is sung looking out to sea for a sign of Isolde's ship, which Tristan eagerly awaits. The line translates: "Waste and empty is the sea."