Contrary to previously harbored beliefs, moving in with someone is not at all like the “House” game we played as kids. In our naive child imaginations, mundane tasks like dishwashing and cooking dinner took on grandiose, mythical proportions. Oh, the freedom of having our own set of dishes to muddy and break! I do not entertain that sort of whimsy anymore; plus, I’ll never look as cute in an apron as I did at age six.
I am moving in with my boyfriend, and it is all of these things at once: terrifying, exciting, amazing, relieving, and claustrophobic. Over the past few weeks, we’ve slowly been moving my stuff into his apartment: the framed photos came first, then some of my favorite dresses, and on Saturday we moved my cat there. In some ways, I have actually taken to domesticity with the ardor (and drunkenness) of Betty Draper, lusting after multi-hundred-dollar Dyson vacuums and searching for “small space decorating tricks” on Apartment Therapy. I’d even make the bed every morning, but I really don’t want my boyfriend to develop unrealistic expectations about my orderliness.
On the walk home tonight, I passed by a sidewalk covered in chalk drawings. There were spiders and rocketships and a sailboat perched on a rocky sea getting pummeled by lightning. You could tell which of the drawings had been done by adults and which had been done by children, because the ones drawn by children were much more imaginative. I looked at the drawings for a little while and thought about how nice it would be to just lie down next to them. The sidewalk would be cold and I would get chalk on my clothes but it might feel like disappearing into another world, a world where dinosaurs still exist and the sun has a sweet, charming face.
The trouble with living in a city that isn’t built on a grid is that, with a sense of direction like mine, I get lost very easily. On side streets that turn suddenly into 35% grade hills, in BART stations on the outskirts of the city and in gourmet produce markets I am consistently lost and alone.
I think that caring about someone is not minding getting lost with them, and last night I told the only person in this city willing to do so with me that I couldn’t see him anymore.
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It had been almost three months, but I still couldn’t help looking in his medicine cabinet.
I wouldn’t say that I went into his bathroom with that as my sole intention–I really did have to pee!–but as I was washing my hands an internal debate raged. “Do it!” someone on my left shoulder said. “No! Don’t be so pathetic!” someone on my right shoulder replied, disgusted. Feeling helpless, I listened to my left and popped open the medicine cabinet as I ran the tap, hoping the gushing water would overpower the noise of my snooping.
Inside there were a string of condoms that had come from a box he and I had bought when we were together. I know this because they were the same kind that I have buried deep in the back of my top drawer. “He is using these to have sex with someone else,” my right shoulder whispered. “So are you!” retorted my left.
I only had the cabinet open for approximately three seconds. Like a gruesome roadside crash, I had to look, but I couldn’t look for very long. I had to look, but I didn’t want to see.
Recently, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about different theories of love, two of which Ned graciously parsed for me on Philoblog. Thinking about love in purely scientific terms simultaneously gets me off and makes me depressed. I love reading the cut-and-dry ways people describe really hulking, emotionally charged subjects like “falling in love” on Wikipedia. There’s something amusing and almost charming about trying to define these really undefinable concepts in scientific terms.
Wikipedia describes “falling in love” as “the process of moving from a feeling of neutrality towards a person to one of love.” How clinical! Granting only scientific credence to a concept that dominates so much of our drive to live is sociopathic in some ways. Love is chemical, sure, but I refuse to believe that the men that I’ve loved–the people that I’ve loved–have only etched their meaning into my life because of the way my brain reacts to them.
I’m really attracted to the Alberoni Theory of Love, which states that “people fall in love when they are ready to change, or to start a new life.” In this way, falling in love is really a choice. We tend to think that “the heart wants what it wants,” which is true, but you have to be willing to let the heart want in order for it to want! You don’t necessarily choose to love, but you choose to be capable of loving. I have dated far too many men who have refused to make this choice.
A friend came to me with his broken heart clenched between his fingers and I shook my head to say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you now.” It was selfish, and at night sometimes I feel sick about it, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s okay to be selfish for a little while if your heart requires it of you. I needed my sewing kit for myself; the spool of thread I prepared between my fingers was short and I didn’t have any extra needles to spare. I worry sometimes if he forgives me for tending to my own wounds instead of his, but I won’t be able to properly take care of anyone else until I learn how to properly take care of myself.
He had walked in on her in the apartment they shared with someone else’s hand up her skirt. He packed his things and took the next flight back to the Midwest. “I almost wish I had walked in on them fucking,” he wrote to me. “Anything would’ve been better than the image of that asshole just TAKING her.”
I’ve never been cheated on and I’ve never truly been close to death but I imagine they both feel the same.
“She was just as complicit as he was,” I responded. I couldn’t stop myself from hating her just a little bit.
After a week he was back in New York and they were together again. He wrote, “She explained to me that she was in a manic phase.”
“Oh,” I replied. From 20 blocks south he couldn’t see the way my hair moved when I disapprovingly shook my head.