Think In Reverse

what’s on my mind - April 30, 2013

You Say You Don’t Want A Boyfriend, But You Know That’s Not True by Charlottee Green

via Thought Catalog, 29 April 2013

I know; I say the same thing. I write about it on my personal blog — the one where people I really know can read me and maybe talk amongst each other about how strong I am. It’s kind of odd how many of my posts over the last few months have been so intensely anti-man. I wonder what it must look like to someone who has never met me. For a few weeks, I thought I would get “misandry” tattooed on my wrist. But I would probably get fired from my job.

“Boys are disgusting.” “I don’t want to put up with yet another manchild’s belated coming-of-age that he has vicariously through me.” Then a bunch of Sylvia Plath quotes. I don’t know, it’s all kind of a mess.

I say that I am working on myself right now, and I am. My job is pretty good, and I think I might get a promotion soon. Recently, I’ve been treating myself to all of the things I used to consider extravagances that were much too rich for my blood. My nails always look nice, and I have a lot of new shirts. Things are going pretty well for everyone but my check card. And all of this can go under the heading of “self-care,” of paying attention to what my body is telling me it needs.

But my body also feels alone. And regardless of how many times I have been hurt by something wielding a penis and a ludicrous sense of entitlement, a man is what I want to lie down next to it when it is aching alone in my bed. And I could walk outside and get with any of the number of leering strangers or cat-calling blue collar workers or friendly faces on my OkCupid homepage. I could put a band-aid over the bullet wound and fuck someone just because I want to feel them moving around inside me and doing some sad version of filling me up, but I don’t want that.

I want to be in love. I want to get it over with so that I can move along to all of the other parts of life that seem so easy to achieve when someone at home cares about you. I want that feeling of imperviousness, of security, of having that major thing checked off the list so I can attend to everything else. And for me, it will necessarily come in the form of a boyfriend. Someone who is bound to me by nothing other than his own desire to see me in the sunlight every morning. In my (sometimes messy) bed.

I was seeing this guy for a little while a month ago, and we both knew it wasn’t going anywhere. And even though I didn’t ever expect to fall deeply, madly in love with him, I was still torn to pieces when he stood me up to get back with his ex whom I should have known he was rebounding off of. There was something about it that just seemed so awful, and so predictable. And worse than feeling hurt, I felt incredibly bitter. I wrote a poem about it, and then threw it away, because that’s the last thing I need right now: More words dedicated to people who will never dedicate a single thing to me.

what’s on my mind - April 24, 2013

I Want A Tuesday Kinda Love by Stephanie Georgopulos

via Thought Catalog, 29 May 2012.

 

I want a Tuesday kind of love. The sort of thing that involves little dreaming and scheming; the sort of thing that comes paired with too-strong coffee and too-loud songbirds and the drone of the news at 6 a.m. or any time before the sky finds its identity, really. A Tuesday kind of love that isn’t indulgent, one that doesn’t stop the earth from spinning but maybe keeps us grounded in spite of all that uncontrollable movement.

I want to split the bill and pay the bills and not get lost in some unsustainable delusion where the rest of our lives become inconsequential. I want us to be human, I want to argue, I want to take too long in the shower. I want to hear about the horrific lines at the DMV, about a boss who doesn’t get it, about plans to pick up the laundry after work. I want stories of strangers on the bus, of a child who looked lost but turned out not to be, of chance encounters with high school classmates because these seemingly colorless instances are meaningful when filtered through the eyes of someone I care about. A Tuesday kind of love, breathing relevance into otherwise monotonous moments.

A Tuesday kind of love is this: commuting to work knowing that someone cares about what you’re going to have for lunch; understanding that you do not have to be your dynamic, charming, weekend self this time; this time you can butcher sentences and make bad jokes and trip over thin air and it won’t change anything. A Tuesday kind of love is when weekends and weekdays are one and the same, expanses of time where unpredictable, irreplaceable closeness exists, swells, bursts. Tuesday is directionless conversation about things that happened five hours or five years ago; it’s knowing where he keeps his receipts and when he has a doctor appointment; it’s ordering Chinese food or taking his parents out for dinner because they’re in town or forgetting to eat because you’re full of each other’s words and there’s just no room for anything else.

I don’t want to dream through our lives together, don’t want to sleep in, don’t want to put on my sunglasses and pretend that life’s a vacation. The fantasy is that I want to exist in reality; the fantasy is to be there for someone on a Sunday morning but also on a Tuesday night, when the haze and laze of the weekend has worn thin and seems far away as ever. I want a Tuesday kind of love.