I couldn't get to sleep last night. I suppose you could say that I was visited by ghosts.
It was one of those moments when it's late and you know you should be asleep, but you let your mind just wander. I thought about that episode of "Boy Meets Boy" that I watched last night - how the show was kinda tacky but still sorta fun. From that, and I think it's because my old friend Dax looked like the guy from that show, I started thinking about Dax. And then I thought about how Dax knew my friend PG, the major horrid unrequited disaster crush of mine, in college. Then, I thought about how Dax was friends with the really nice Brian Armistead, which is how he knew PG, because Brian and PG dated for a year or so. (These connections between the three of them seemed a bit weird to me then - I met them all separately- but the fact that they were essentially a clique united them in my mind last night.)
Anyway, once my mind had summoned them, thoughts of PG and Dax wouldn't leave me alone. Memories of them. Thoughts of them. How friendships failed. How attractions weren't equal. How I made errors in judgment and couldn't read the signs in front of my face. How obsessions began. What was wrong with me. What was wrong with them.
If you know something's wrong with you, you should be able to fix it, right? I'm an obsessive, and memories of PG haven't occurred to me in ages. I kept asking myself what, exactly, prompted him to return front-and-center in my thoughts last night.
He was not, in retrospect, a nice man to me.
Whether that's his fault or mine or both of ours I don't know.
He was my waiter at The Grill. He was cute, short and blond with glasses. I was such a dolt that, after I left the restaurant, I turned around as I walked away and looked at him through the window. He told me later that I'd looked back at him through the window and smiled about five times.
I'd run into him on the street, and we'd talk.
I asked him to lunch. We went to lunch. And it was at lunch that he told me that he wasn't attracted to me and that we weren't on a date. Oh, and that he'd known my first boyfriend Tom and found Tom disgusting. He'd wondered what sort of person would like Tom, and I guess that was the first time he looked at me like I was somehow beneath him.
But I was attracted to him. And I was convinced I could make him love me.
Though he returned my phone calls when it all started in 1995, and that was my basis for liking a person at that point, he and I were not friends most of the time we were hanging out. I mean, it was one of those mutual torture arrangements. I was constantly trying to be good enough, constantly trying to show him how worthy I was, and that was the thing that bugged him most about me. I was completely insecure. And he either toyed with me about it, found me occasionally fascinating and intelligent in spite of it. Mostly, I guess, he just made fun of me and my desperate, needy, transparent, misguided, creepy, forsaking-myself attraction to him. My feelings made our friendship unbalanced. It gave him the lead, all the time.
When someone you don't want still insists on giving themselves to you despite your objections, I guess you eventually run out of options and have to start mistreating them. It's the only way, I suppose, for them to learn.
I remember my 20th birthday. PG spent time with me, had coffee with me. My mom had gone on a trip, so she'd forgotten to call me to wish me a happy birthday. And I walked around all day feeling victimized and devastated. PG and my roommate Amy were the ones who helped me through it. It was really hard for me when my mom forgot my birthday.
And I made PG hang out with me and treat me nicely, he told me later that summer. He told me that I'd sorta forced him into spending time with me on my birthday.
That day he told me that was also the day he told me that he couldn't hang out with someone so weak. He said I meant nothing to him, that I meant nothing to myself and that friendship with me was hardly worth the trouble or the annoyance of having to constantly have the same conversation about how in love with him I was over and over and over.
I couldn't get myself to leave the table of the cafe. I felt like I was about to cry, I remember, and I got mad at myself for not being able to leave the table when he was essentially insulting me, hurting me.
My friend Vic once told me that I seemed to think the world of any person who was condescending and insulting to me. She came up with that theory, I think, in high school, but she didn't tell me the theory until long after PG.
So he was there last night, popping up when I wanted to go to sleep.
It's the thing about my condition and about the quality of my memory, sometimes the exact feelings from ages ago can sneak up on you for reasons that you can't unlock.
The empty, pit-of-your-stomach feeling I got when PG told me I was worthless hit me in the middle of the night last night.
The memory of Dax showing up at my bookstore 11 months after our friendship "ended" with me insulting his awful Georgia State admissions essay hit me last night, too.
I realized it'd been a year since that reunion, when he asked me if I had his phone number and I laughed in his face and told him no. Then, later, I tried to be all nice to him because I didn't honestly know how I wanted to deal with him.
It ended with him thinking me just as crazy as he'd thought I was the year before.
Our initial friendship didn't work, I wrote him once, and he agreed with me. I think it may be because his self-esteem, it turned out, was just as fragile as mine. And, despite appearances, I think I was better adjusted than he was. Not by much, but I think I was. I'd gotten to the point where I could handle criticism, when I understood that I'd not misrepresented myself in our friendship even when I was needy.
I thought about Snapshot last night and Crocker and that guy Lonnie. I thought about how I end up saying goodbye to 90 percent of all the gay men I'm attracted to.
It's always the same pattern. I put them on a pedestal. I try not to be weird. I end up weird anyway. It ends.
Granted, my endings aren't as harsh or as scary as they once were. I've gotten to the point where I can leave a table if someone is insulting me.
But what prompted me being haunted? The idea that I scared Snapshot away? (I actually considered this last night, but then I remembered the time he told me that he didn't want to see me when I'd driven to see him and was two minutes away - even though he could've cancelled on me at any point before that and that he also had nothing really to fear from me.)
Larry said during the dinner party last night that he knew what I needed to fix my life and make myself more social and make my apartment work out better.
"You need to find yourself a lover ... immediately!" he said to me.
I told him what I always tell him, that I'd prefer to find myself, but it sounded more like a catchphrase coming out of my mouth than it usually does.
I've not kissed anyone since January, I thought last night. The last guy I slept with didn't kiss me. The last date I had was a misfire. Teenage boys are the only ones hitting on me lately, looking at me (of all people) with wonder in their eyes, and that's more fun to think about than it is to actually do.
It's too soon for me to think about that dumb stuff. I'm too busy to have a boyfriend. I haven't even unpacked my damn apartment yet. I don't need to think about who I've been attracted to and why it failed. And I don't need a damn lover.
Where are these thoughts coming from? Why are the bad feelings, the worthless feelings, the fears of failure coming back? Why now? Why is PG in my head now?
A couple days ago, when I was working one of those endless shifts in the bookstore, I got a song stuck in my head. Usually, I read, that just means that you're tired. It was specifically from the Bette Midler version of the "Gypsy" soundtrack, and I remembered the lyrics and the rhymes perfectly. I remembered watching the movie and how the scene was set. I remember who had the cameo in the scene.
I've not seen that movie since high school, and I remembered all of that from it.
And it just hit me in the middle of the day when I should have been focusing on something else, and I sang it while I worked.
It was there in my head, and I couldn't get rid of it. So I let it play itself out.
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