proustian, faustian, or fustian

[glaucon]

someone else wrote elsewhere:
Somebody did not want me in touch with them because of some hurt they feel I caused them. What did I do? I backed off.

I wrote:

somehow that reminds me of the the situation with my Fatal Ex.

the ex-gf in question is the only one of my exen with whom I am not on speaking terms. I'm very pleased with this record, by and large. there are about a dozen people with whom I had a dating/romantic/sexual type relationship lasting more than a week, and I'm on fairly friendly terms with all but one of them. in some cases, "friendly terms" means an email once every year or two: just a quick "how ya doin'? what's new?"

in other cases, it means I'm living with one ex, or that I get together for breakfast or coffeee every week or two with another, or that I really can't stand a third, but I like her boyfriend a lot and hang out with her sometimes as an excuse to be with him.

but there's still that one.

sara was my closest friend for about four years (from the time I was 15 to 19), then we had a very intense, otherworldly relationship for about a year. there was a brief engagement, soon broken. there was a lot of big shit hitting a big fan. there were a lot of bad feelings, a lot of *things said*. you know those things that you know about your closest friends? the really weak spots where, no matter how much you might tease them or fight with them, you would never aim for because of the reaction you'd get? not anger, not surrender, but more like horror. a horror that twists the face into a fist with the heart bent and crushed inside it.

those things.

yeah.

anyway, so there was that ending, and it was probably a better one than we deserved for the kind of hubris we were emitting like chernobyl, but there it was. four years of intimate friendship and love, and one year of passionate intensity and love, turned from amity to enmity in a month.

I was crazy as a bedbug for quite some time after. I still have a bit of a seizure whenever I encounter bryn mawr college, guava juice, robert graves, or that mike oldfield song Moonlight Shadow. and a few other things. but by and large I'm over it.

today, we have no mutual friends and live on opposite coasts. a lot of time has passed and the bitterness of our parting has faded and now I just miss my friend. I drop her a note every five years and see if she has come to feel the same way.

six years ago, a letter was returned unopened. one year ago, we exchanged a few very congenial emails and she seemed really pleased to hear from me. she asked me to write her a letter, so I did. she wrote back and said that she couldn't think of anything to say and that we probably shouldn't be communicating.

I don't know what that was all about. maybe I'll find out in 2007.

Comments

[bcstillman.livejournal.com]

Dude, please sit down already and write a novel or three.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

is there pool tonight? i still think its funny that you, me, and mjd were contemporaneously dating women from the classics department and never ran into eachother while there.

[glaucon.livejournal.com]

yes, pool tonight.
I'm heading over to charlie's now.
should be there until at least 7.
if you are thinking of coming by after that, you might want to call elsner's cell phone to make sure we're still there.

[opadit.livejournal.com]

I don't usually get caught up in anniversaries (although I send out birthday cards to pals, I don't care much if my own birthday is acknowledged, and it's a real effort for me to remember my wedding anniversary). But this summer has been feeling weird to me. It's my first entire summer back on the East Coast, and it's also the tenth anniversary since we nearly got killed at Kirkwood Highway and Cleveland Avenue.

I think that, if I were spending this summer anywhere else, where the weather is different and the sun is at a different latitude, not just Seattle but anywhere, I would be sleeping better and my shoulder wouldn't have a knot in it. I hadn't thought about that summer frequently, and then the weather turned hazy-hot-humid, and there I was. Anyway. I sent you a card so won't repeat everything here. Maybe you're having a tenth-anniversary thing, too.

Happy July 4

[shellefly.livejournal.com]

Happy July 4th. I miss you. I miss the picnics and the thick, happy crowd and the blistering heat of July 4 in DC. The other day someone was talking about grilling and J said that the weirdest thing he had ever seen anybody grill was a coconut. Me too.

music

[ms-violet.livejournal.com]

E-mail me your snail mail address. I have a really good CD I think you'd like that I want to send to you. It's my friend's band. If you don't like it, you can throw the CD off of something.