Split Ends

08:55, 07 July 2003

The weather has changed. After so much balmy perfection, this morning dawned cool and overcast. After a weekend of the exact non-stop hedonism and hijinks upon which I thrive, Monday has arrived with the grey finality of a cell door. I'm back where I started with the added burden of a lot of catching up to do.

These past few weeks have been the supernova of a dying chapter in my life. The combination of this weekend and my recently passed and upcoming New York trips are the final glorious flare. It is not a sudden extinguishing to utter darkness but rather a dimming, a conclusion in stages, a series of small snuffings that will leave me surprised to realise that the light has faded and everyone has gone home and only I remain, left to find a new way to light up my life.

What a brilliant weekend it was, though. On Friday, after the barn, I went to a Fourth of July party at Adeline & Pierre's in Malibu, where we drank and chatted and lazed on the beach, occasionally tossing a football about. I left there with Anu and Piyush to pick up Sunny (Anu's husband) at LAX, hang out a bit at their room at the Standard and then head out to the clubs. We went to White Lotus and danced and drank, and then back to the hotel for a bit of an afterparty. We finally slept as the sun was rising, and I rose a few hours later to go to the barn.

Saturday Anu and I went shopping. All these Indian friends I have met through Piyush live a life I cannot imagine. They all come from wealth and privelege. They hemorrhaged money all over New York and Los Angeles with indifferent abandon. Anu and I spent about an hour at Saks Fifth Avenue as I helped her buy $2500 worth of shoes. These people are the high society of India, equivalent to the bold-face names on New York's Page Six: the heirs and celebrities and models. They think I'm one of them... or at least closer to their station in life than I actually am.

It is true that I grew up in an world with a similar level of wealth, power and leisure, but my family's situation is modest in comparison to such extreme affluence. Nevertheless, I helped Anu contemplate $500 shoes and $4000 handbags as if I made the same decisions every day. I tried on $800 completely impractical Casadei boots. My acting skills are made all the better by my ability to convince not only others, but myself; in character, East coast Old-money Hippo would have brought out the plastic if the prize was right. As it was, they didn't have the Marc Jacobs shoes I wanted in my size nor the Chanel bag in my preferred colour and so my credit rating remained unviolated.

Saturday night was more of the same: pre-party at the hotel, drink and dance and laugh at the Pig n' Whistle, afterparty at the hotel, pass out at dawn. Saturday night was Piyush's last night in LA, and so I suppose it is fitting, at least in my mind, that it be spent at Pig n' Whistle, the scene of such milestones as the first (and only) time he expressed in words how much he liked me and then, a few months later, my freak-out about the pending termination of our relationship. Sunday morning I left the hotel room at 8:30 so I could go to the barn; I nudged Piyush awake enough to wish him a safe flight. I don't even know if he was conscious enough to understand what I was saying.

This particular ending is not as bad a comedown as it could be. It's a rending in stages, a gradual deceleration with time to adjust between downshifts. It began as the chilling of the relationship between Piyush and I, continued with the partying as friends in New York, and again partying as friends here in LA while Anu has been here. Yesterday, although Piyush was officially gone from LA, I spent the afternoon and evening with Anu and Sunny and so was not left to drown in the flat grey sea of desertion. And in a week and a half, I'll be back in New York partying with Anu, Piyush and the rest of the clan once more.

Despite how incremental the concluding of this chapter has been, I still have a nauseous hatred of finality churning in my stomach. "Over." "Never again." "Gone." My skin feels prickly and my breakfast sits heavy in my stomach. It doesn't really matter that Piyush and I ended long ago and the taste he left in my mouth had decidedly bitter notes. He's gone, and with it he took the good parts of our relationship, too. He is the last to step out the door all the memories and new friends I made this year escaped through. And when I come back from New York this next time, the door will latch shut behind him and then I'm back where I started, alone in my apartment, terrified of the silent stillness that suffocates me whenever there's a lull in the action. Why am I so afraid of sitting still?