the habit of being

The gutter is not such a horrible place to be; last night we camped in it without much trouble, our sleeping bags on opposite sides of the concrete trench between a fence and a sound barrier. I woke up with a sore back and a long way to walk, but slept well, despite the street lights. I don’t remember my dreams very often now, and remember none from last night, but the night before I dreamt of an apartment in Santa Fe with a St. John’s student roomate in the form of a dredlocked girl I’d seen earlier in Costco. I wonder if I am starting to genuinely want to get away from J., who hates my company so much of the time. For various reasons I find such a thing inconceivable, and I am grateful to him for staying with me, quite against his will, on the pretext of responsibility to help pay for the abortion.

I am so reluctant to give up my spot as the most important person in his life, for in a way I retain that simply by being the only person in his life, and his only lover besides. Hate me as he will for it, he cannot deny my precidence, or at least I imagine he can’t. Such vulgar feelings must be what he calls the look of love when it’s crashed all to pieces, someething which makes my trip good source material for writing. Something I didn’t understand before, something new. But maybe I don’t want to be the author of another brokenhearted tearstained memoir. When I get away perhaps I’ll be able to write about something else. As it is, this is all I know.

We were given a ride here, to a Castle Rock outlet mall, by a young man with a strange name I can’t remember. A traveller and seller of gourmet mushrooms, with the rather affected stoner accent of someone who’s followed the Phish tour and listens to the String Cheese Incident, characteristic of the Ben & Robyn set. He used phrases like “serve the man” in reference to work, and swore about cops, saying how he’d like to pull right into the police parking spot with some sort of strange humorous vengeance. He used the term “bastards” a lot, in reference to cops and bands who didn’t play his city. He talked about beautiful places he’d been, Montana and Utah and various national parks, and I took an aversion to him mostly because I felt that J. likes him and I was in a bad mood. J. gave false reasons for why we didn’t make it to Utah, saying it had to do with forest fires when really we thought we’d get more money here.

I’ve gotten so used to these lies we tell people who pick us up that sometimes it feels like we really do transform into carefree wonderers trying to “see the country” whenever another human being’s presence enters our collective consciousness, which is usually fixated on how wrong our situation is and how impossible it is to break free. All the time we were staying with Ben and Robyn it seemed like our relationship was pretty much okay, not really because anything was different, but because they thought we were okay and it wasn’t hard to play the role. I’m sure that had a lot to do with the pot and the shock of seeing a relationship so bad it made ours seem alright by comparison, and also the fact that we weren’t spending 24 hours a day in the sole company of one another, which would have to be taxing for even sane couples. It things were always awful it would be much easier really, it’s the good moments that make such a wreck out of me when the bad ones come.

Truly it makes little use trying to dissect the situation, as her did with his fingers for Venn diagrams - after you did this, we should have been apart like this, but instead we’re together like ths, and now we can’t figure out the right way to get like this due to everything that happened when we were like this. I’m almost certain attaining a doctorate in the science of broken relationships wouldn’t do a thing to help anyone get out of one. Of course it’s all wrong. Of course it’d be better if we’d done A, B, C, D, E… Z. The true mark of fucked-up-ness in nonplatonic relationships isn’t the ignorant refusal to believe that things are bad, it’s the perfect clarity and misery that come with knowing fully well how bad things are, how much worse they’re going to get, and not doing anything about it.

I keep seeing people who look like people I used to know. A sexy girl just walked by in a short pleated skirt and a shirt with a cheesy illustration of a fairy on it. We have about three dollars, signage is horrible lately, in keeping with the idea that things always break the very moment you really need them to work. People are walking their dogs. J. isn’t here because I was about to cry and said I wanted to be alone, because I asked hm if he ever enjoyed being with me and he said “occasionally.”