First Impression/Background: I'd met #114 several years before and he'd never been much of a talker around me. In fact, he was almost mute. I remember once at a party I was sitting next to him and having a conversation was difficult, to say the least. He was what I like to call "He of the two-word answers." It turned out he had a huge crush on me, which was hugely flattering. He went on to date a woman who I liked very much, but then they broke up--right around the same time as my breakup. I ran into #114, we compared breakup notes and he invited me to a Halloween party...which turned into three.
Halloween: Getting ready to go out, I was still in a post-#111 state. It was all I could do to don a costume. Every day, I still woke up in agony, having to talk myself down--trying to make myself believe all the things I diagnosed about him in the previous posts (emotional shut down, no capacity for a real relationship). If I let myself believe that #111 broke up with me for rational reasons, I'd crumple, so I constantly kept that idea at bay. Plus, as my shrink said after I told her how he lived, "It sounds like he didn't think he deserved you." If he could have just said that, it would have cleared all this agony up.
For some ridiculous reason, in my misery, I decided to be a princess for Halloween. Talk about your insides not just not matching your outsides but being violently opposed to your outsides. Something "dead" would have been much better--even "dead princess." But I didn't have enough functioning, non-agonized brain cells to make the mental leap to "dead princess." The whole idea originated when I'd found a gorgeous pink satin dress at a secondhand store in Arizona that fit perfectly. I couldn't not buy it. Truth be told, when I first saw it, I thought: future wedding dress. I'd look terrible in white anyway. And I got my prom dress before I had a date, so there's precedence (although it can only be considered a successful precedent if one ignores the fact that my prom date was a dud).
I was supposed to be Grace Kelly, but I didn't have the energy to get the hair right and then I accidentally left one of my white gloves at home, so I just went as a generic, half-baked princess. I met #114 out at an apartment party in Soho. Everyone was young and coupled-up, which only made us feel worse. After about an hour, we got in his car and headed to a second party in Brooklyn. It was in a gorgeous Brownstone, which they'd decorated in a combo Halloween/Octoberfest theme (Spooktoberfest), so there were lederhosen and Swiss Miss/bar wench-type fraus everywhere. About an hour into the party, #114 and I were standing in line for the bathroom and I mentioned my Arizona convalescence and how I had told my host that I hoped my plane crashed on the way home. A little spark lit up in his eyes. "You think that way, too?"
See, normally, when you talk about wanting to die, people say things like, "Oh, that would be such a waste" and "Don't let the (other person) win" and blah blah blah. But here #114 was saying, "You want to kill yourself? Awesome. Me, too." We spent the next two hours talking about what ways were most attractive. I said pills would be best, but if it didn't work, I might end up a vegetable, which would be terrible. Otherwise, a garage and a car was my method of choice, though a difficult one seeing as I live in a studio apartment in New York. He said he thought the best way was to put a noose around your neck and shoot yourself in the head, that way if one didn't work, the other would.
We also had to consider the calendar timing. We agreed there was no way we were going to make it through the holidays alone, but there were a couple of parties coming up and we didn't want to miss them. Shelagh's safari party was in a few weeks and then the weekend after that would be Thanksgiving, so, really, the perfect timing would be after her party. We were both dreading the holidays: The horror of being a holiday orphan and needing to be taken in. Nightmare. Especially seeing as on my first date with #111, he told me that when he has a girlfriend, his mother makes sure he tells her that Thanksgiving happens at his house--always. Things were headed in that direction for us and I had it all scheduled on my mental calendar. And then--whammo!
Discussing things further, #114 and I agreed, there was no way we were going through another bleak New York winter alone. No way. So if we were going to die, it was going to have to happen soon. In short, we were done. After almost ten years of working on ourselves (therapy, etc.) and how we function in relationships, we were back to where we were ten years before, except ten years older. What was the point? Especially when every day we were waking up feeling the same--miserable and needing to talk ourselves off of our respective ledges. I was starting a job-I-didn't-want two days later, but I was so numb it was barely on my radar. I just knew I had to wake up early and show up somewhere.
So there we were, sitting amidst all the German bar fraus, Titanic victims and oiled-up BP employees wondering if it was possible to will an aneurysm or if there was some way to make our suicides look like accidents so that our exes wouldn't have any idea it was about them. I knew #111 would get an ego about it, anyway. I told #114 about #111 and #114 said : "Seriously. It sounds like you dodged a bullet. It sounds like it was as good as it was ever going to get and it was going to be all downhill from there."
It turned out #114's ex really wanted a Jewish guy. "She could have fucking figured that out a year ago," I said.
#114 had a third party to go to and I was just going to get a cab home, but there were none to be had, so I went with him somewhere deeper into the more concrete and roadside-metal areas of Brooklyn. We parked on a desolate stretch of urban tarmac and dodged a few cars, heading toward a noisy storefront. It was nearing 2 a.m. now and as we walked up--he a pharmacist and I a half-assed princess.
#114 had a third party to go to and I was just going to get a cab home, but there were none to be had, so I went with him somewhere deeper into the more concrete and roadside-metal areas of Brooklyn. We parked on a desolate stretch of urban tarmac and dodged a few cars, heading toward a noisy storefront. It was nearing 2 a.m. now and as we walked up--he a pharmacist and I a half-assed princess.
"I feel like we're in a movie," I said
"We should have recorded our conversation," he said, then added, "You started it."
The party was at a record label in Green Point: DopeJams. We walked in, stocked up on candy at the bar in the basement and then went back to the main room where three DJs were writhing in a booth with a few dozen twenty-somethings--dressed, enviously, as dead people--writhing similarly. #114 told me it was deep house music. Apparently, I like deep house music very much. Dancing amid the dead in my big pink dress that was now dirtied and squashed, I was totally out of place, and I didn't give a shit. It. Was. Great.
Diagnosis: Despite what everyone says, suicide is an option. But the fact of the matter is (and not to put too much of a silver lining on things), if #111 hadn't dumped me, I would never have had such an awesome night: trekking all over the boroughs, going to three very different parties in three very different areas of the city, coming home at 4 in the morning--all the time being able to carry my misery with me and knowing that because of who I was with, it was totally OK.
The party was at a record label in Green Point: DopeJams. We walked in, stocked up on candy at the bar in the basement and then went back to the main room where three DJs were writhing in a booth with a few dozen twenty-somethings--dressed, enviously, as dead people--writhing similarly. #114 told me it was deep house music. Apparently, I like deep house music very much. Dancing amid the dead in my big pink dress that was now dirtied and squashed, I was totally out of place, and I didn't give a shit. It. Was. Great.
Diagnosis: Despite what everyone says, suicide is an option. But the fact of the matter is (and not to put too much of a silver lining on things), if #111 hadn't dumped me, I would never have had such an awesome night: trekking all over the boroughs, going to three very different parties in three very different areas of the city, coming home at 4 in the morning--all the time being able to carry my misery with me and knowing that because of who I was with, it was totally OK.
No comments:
Post a Comment