do I dare disturb the universe?

The conversation I was planning on having with Jason at dinner on Friday about what it is that we are and where we may or may not be headed did not turn out as I had previously anticipated. Firstly, I expected to be the one to bring up a relationship. And I did not think I would be the one to suggest that one would be impossible.

Earlier in the day, after I mentioned having been invited to see Modest Mouse that night (by a fellow with ambiguous intentions), he asked if I felt free to go out with said other guy. I told him the thought hadn't really crossed my mind. He asked if I thought he was trying to make me his girlfriend. That thought had occurred to me but so did all the others wherein he mentioned the impossibility of it all and told me about all of his previous dysfunctional relationships without the requisite detached self-depreciation required in that kind of admission. It never quite sounded like he was over a single one of them.

I was, as it happens, not prepared for our conversation to go like this at all (apart from the proposal bit and the somewhat dated attire, this is not an entirely inaccurate rendering):


I guess, I got tired of waiting for me to tell me what he'd figured out. I knew he felt something because he told me as much. When I asked for words, I received exactly that. Words. A series of signifiers that managed, with very few exceptions and really only when he was using someone else's vocabulary, to signify nothing at all. Unfortunately, as much as I do like him, I just don't have the patience for someone else who can't ever really manage to explain himself. Maybe I put my guard up because I wasn't sure what would happen. And when something finally did, I was too guarded to let go again. It's entirely possible that I did this to myself, again. Be that as it may, it's done. And like he said last night after our hours-long conversation in his hotel room, I'll go back about my day. I will. I hate to say that because I feel like I should be more upset, more bent over all of this. I'm not especially. I liked him yes, but not enough to put up with all that. When it came down to it, I thought I'd found Walt Whitman. But again, I would up with Prufrock. Too many coffee spoons. Not enough Yawp.

Eventually, I will find a man who behaves like one. And when I do, I'll be done.

That is of course, not the whole of the story. After we established that this was not going in the direction that we had previously anticipated, I might have casually mention that it would do no one any good to let the moment (or the hotel room) go to waste. That we shouldn't pay attention to the syntax of things and that kisses are a far better fate than wisdom. I might have suggested that we should be absolved from previous ties and conventions and that in naming the thing we'd only subjugate it. We'd kill it doing that.

Did I use e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, and Michel Foucault to get a man into bed after telling him I could not be his girlfriend? Yes, yes, I did. And while I should probably be deeply ashamed of the intellectual manipulation, I am inclined to think that in that moment my education paid for itself. We'll add this to the list of reasons why I am a terrible person and call it a day.