i was just talking to a friend of mine while doing laundry — he had a mini-breakdown last nite, one of those demoralizing someone-i-like-just-wants-to-be-buddies experiences. i know those all too well, or at least i used to. i lived for four months in israel w/ my graduating class and started hanging out a lot w/ a guy i’d never spoken to before. we got along great, connected, all that crap; he was cute and we both were lonely; and every once in a while, he’d comment on how hot some girl was. crushing. i endured it, only telling him how i felt much later, once i was hundreds of miles away from up-close rejection. in the meanwhile i felt rather awful about myself and wrote reams of poetry on the subject.
in short, i know how my friend here (college friend, now, not the high skool guy) feels. i told him that, altho i didn’t expect it to help. it’s universal human drama. up until the last couple hundred years, everyone realized that happy endings were mostly only for the folks who could afford them; that love and tragedy were inseparable dance partners that made for great, if tear-jerking, art. now people expect love to come trailing happy endings like a boy with a wooden duck on a string. hence the hollywood fluff machine.
now i’m in ben’s room. he’s behind me, eating cheese-flavored popcorn and reading pynchon. he’s even finding ways to relate the two. this evening, after my first meeting w/ the For Colored Girls … cast, i’m taking him into the city to meet the other ben. boyfriend meet oldest friend. i’m apprehensive. no matter of nerves or flip cyncism can make me forget how lucky i am, tho.