keeping lists
After every romantic entanglement, I open my little dirty sticky brick of a phone and begin a note titled “Things I want to send _____”. The lists get long very quickly because when I love someone I want to put them into the magic school bus and launch them through my ear hole straight into the center of my brain. I want them to sit in a hammock in my cerebrum- lay down close their eyes and understand the way the irrational was triggered by the sight and sound of something strange, something secret.
The list is, ultimately, boring. Just bullet points of soon to be irrelevant tweets, memes about jazz, and passing thoughts about loneliness. For every list, a few months pass and I stop adding to it because I realize most of these things aren’t a real form of intimacy. I stare at the list at large and no longer see exchanges of real thoughts and feelings but, instead, a regurgitation of media and Internet shit. I realize that my loneliness rarely came swooping in once the relationship dissolved but began somewhere before that. Somewhere when I let people see me as a vessel for interesting links and big opinions about art rather than one of big feelings and experiences that have rendered me insecure.
This year, rather than shrinking myself as a lot of folks asked me to do prior, I will show up more demanding. Between asking about when you learned to play the bass I will ask and when did you learn you stopped loving your ex? Is that too earnest?
Maybe. But, I don’t want to be closed off. I don’t want to hide my need to know more. I don’t want to be ashamed for having needs! I hate feeling like asking someone to plan something for me as an act of care is some overbearing journey. I don’t want to not ask some shit that can guide communication because it will cause someone to want to disappear from me completely. I don’t want to stop myself from being the type of person who thinks of everything is permanent. I want to leave permanence for death.
Recently I got stoned and saw Puss In Boots in theaters because, despite my therapist urging me to do otherwise, I am addicted to doing shit for a bit. I thought it would be funny to go with friends in New Year’s Day (which my autocorrect just changed to New tears day, if that tells you anything about me at all). Being high as an adult has allowed me to remove shame from the real shit I think, feel, and taste. I feel goofy. I feel free. I feel hungry as fuck. So I sit in a dark theater eating a soft pretzel dipped in nacho cheese and let myself sit on the cusp of tears watching an animated cat voiced by Antonio Banderas experience panic over having only one more life to live.
When I went home, I couldn’t stop laughing before bed as I typed on the list I am keeping for my recent ex “watch the latest Puss In Boots to think about avoidant communication, making mistakes, and trust”
I can’t stop laughing looking at it now. Right under a tweet about a Sun Ra record reissue there it is- a fucking paragraph on why this man should watch Puss in Boots.
Perhaps I am too sentimental. Perhaps I am a fucking moron for holding onto these lists from every fall out over the past few years- all of these links and things leading to now deleted internet media and faded feelings. But perhaps, it is a mapping of how I dug myself out and beyond so I can do it again and again and again.
Or maybe it is a catalog of dumb shit like the time I spent too much on a movie ticket to see a Shrek spin off movie in my 30s.