put on your spurs and swagger around in the desperate kingdom of love

1:29 a.m. x 2009-07-21

currently listening to: "the desperate kingdom of love" by pj harvey

familiarity is a powerful thing.

mark was with his first girlfriend, the girl he married, for seven years. whatever about it was clunky, hurtful or frustrating, it was seven years' worth, and as much as mark highlights what they did not have in common, how they were fundamentally mismatched, what respective weaknesses trapped them in such a circumstance - he is still shocked by how she no longer returns his calls.

being here, especially at night (which is deeply twisted, unpleasant), the idea naturally occurs to me to tell jimmy i'm here and see what he's doing because we dated for three years. we were extremely close before that - as extremely close as he ever gets to anyone. but i know it's just the allure of the familiar. as much as i do want to tell him sometimes that i appreciate the time we were together, that i value all the good things that he did for me - i don't want to open myself up to it. i don't want to risk anything unnecessarily hurtful.

that mark can still talk to one of his exes makes me more worked-up than it should. the last girl he saw, in london - briefly, non-commitally, which they mutually neutralized into a friendship - talks to him in a very affectionate way, since their relationship - i project, i reason, i understand - was an isolated, cast-in-amber, happening-still-on-a-distant-planet it sort of affair. she rued to him in a very public way about how "our scene", as she put it, was not in the recently released harry potter film. that's a totally dumb thing that shouldn't phase me an inch and i spent my morning stamping around unable to get past, conversationally, how much i fucking hate harry potter.

it's a stupid thing to get myself concerned with on any level. it all spirals down to the wee core fact that i miss him. gargantuanly.

the depths to which i am internally attention-starved stagger me when i consider it, when i ask myself what i expect out of someone who is my boyfriend versus what i understand is reasonable behavior. i have pretty irrational patterns of behavior when it comes to how i express my affection, which all amount to a metaphorical banging-down-the-door.

mark doesn't make me feel this way, which is something i can very clearly, cogently discern. i feel that way, period. it isn't constant, which is a relief and the problem, because other times i can chill out and understand i am doing a lot that is nice but maybe i don't need to be doing that, certainly not if i'm going to get that back. then i will feel, no, it is a matter of my expectations of myself. and i am a Good Girlfriend, est. 2006. i have explained to mark the duff dilemma and how, at my most vulnerable, i was in a relationship that the boy consented to purely because he thought that's what i wanted, was very stern about how it's what i wanted and not what he wanted, made it into this whole martyr-complex business after i really ran myself ragged. jimmy, in the beginning, was mentally making up for it. the rest of the time was mentally making up for all subsequent breakups.

this, mark and i, began on a note that i know, i understand, is mutual: i asked him to sleep; he kissed me. i was still seized with panic one night at his house. he was having an anxiety attack, in fact, and we decided to get in the bath. i told him how i was feeling: that i was afraid suddenly that he would abruptly disown his feelings for me by citing how everything he did was because i wanted it. i talked to him about that, and afterwards i didn't panic about that anymore.

that he and i are able to talk and that i know that about us in a way that is all ready knowing and well on its way to instintual feeling, which will soon be automatic, is gorgeous and alleviates all petty, self-sabotaging, archaic-insecurity bullshit that i have rattling around in me. i love him. i want to love him actively, physically. when i am with him i cannot keep from making contact with him in some direct way - touching his hair or his neck or his shoulder, arm, hand, leg, back - insomnia affords me some gorgeous opportunities to watch the behavior of his facial muscles. other people are all ready very interesting to me, and people that i love that much more so. and he the most.

even when he's very, immovably sad, he gets past it by lying down with me.

ahhh, i love it - i love writing myself into a better mindset. and the fact that i will see him soon, and before that he is writing me a letter!

also: we are not reading under the volcano in the class on the novel i have this fall. mark's class did. he read under the volcano, going after cacciato, tristram shandy, the crying of lot 49, the hours and cat's cradle - which is mindblowing. we are reading going after cacciato (which i can't wait for!) and the hours (which i'm almost done with) also, as well as love in the time of cholera, rabbit run, a clockwork orange and the beetle leg. i am excited to tackle another marquez, have never ready any updike, LOVELOVELOVE a clockwork orange and am riveted to return to it (i read it years and years ago - mark read that for form & theory, so i suppose i am not), and i am unfamiliar with john hawkes but, based on what i can find on the internet about him, it sounds badass. i really did want under the volcano, but i will just pursue that on my own.

before i go back to school i'd like to obtain that, the unabridged journals of sylvia plath and something wicked this way comes.

and kiss mark. nnnnnnooooowwwwww!!!

if anybody should ask i'm going to a seminar
pieces of the moon
JOBJOBJOB
interviewinterviewinterview
sensitive heart, you're doomed from the start
(& etc)

anybody can be just like me, obviously.
not too many can be like you, fortunately.
� KL 02-11