Despertar

nadir, upswing

It worked out. Miscommunications untangled, we wound up at the bar from the other night, playing shuffleboard. Justin all apologetic about not picking me up right away. All is forgiven.

J emailed to say "lose this one," and my immediate thought was no way, I haven't done him justice in the journal, she thinks he's a bad guy and he isn't. Which, if I'm not mistaken, I used to think similar things about Marcus, when everyone and their sister used to constantly pick at me about dropping him, too.

(By the way, Marcus was in town for one night only, and called and texted several times to the tune of we should get together, didn't I want to come hang out at his hotel, what was I wearing, it didn't matter what I was wearing because he wanted to get underneath whatever it was anyway.

I wasn't even grossed out, just sad. Because now I'm in the continual position--this is the fourth or fifth time he has pressed at me for a similarly ill-advised hookup this summer--to play him the way he played me, but unlike him, I don't want to, won't do it. The sad part being that I don't think it's the same thing at all. We're real people now, our disappointments more significant than they were at twenty.)

Which is the confusing thing of it. Justin is not Marcus. Justin could not be less Marcus. Marcus wouldn't have risen at dawn with a hangover, his own fluids dried in a spray across his knuckles, dutifully driven me to the bus station and waited for me to board safely. Marcus would have been unreachable until the next morning, at which point he would have pretended to feel bad that he didn't get my messages earlier.

But to j, it sounds like the same thing. The thing that happened last night, the things that happened in March/April and that nearly wrecked my semester, college-style, sound, to an objective listener, like the Marcus saga in redux.

My feelings feel different. I used to claw at Marcus with a horrible desperation. He brought out everything that was awful about my personality, my attitude. As I think I confessed to Ernie one time, I used to daydream about Marcus just disappearing off the face of the earth. Not dying, necessarily, but spontaneously combusting, vanishing without a trace, and wouldn't that be great, my life would repair itself instantly and I wouldn't even have had to take the painful steps of purging him myself. I wanted that. I thought about that a lot, certainly every time he let me down again. There may have even been a bit of relief under my unhappiness when it ended, because here were my prayers, answered, just four years later than I'd have liked.

And I don't feel that way about Justin, ever. Which I know isn't enough, but I also think I [] him.

But who knows anymore.

Anyway, last night wasn't his fault.

I'm on a bus to New York now. J, want to hang out? The friends I'm staying with are working all day today and tomorrow.