unravel pilot this last month without you has been entirely freeing in a way i´ve discovered so many things that i´ve forgotten about myself. my love of art has resurfaced. your absence has fed me enough inspiration to begin painting again. i go out with new friends, i discuss culture and literature and films and design with others, i actually engage in 071108 ... pilot this last month without you has been entirely freeing in a way i´ve discovered so many things that i´ve forgotten about myself. my love of art has resurfaced. your absence has fed me enough inspiration to begin painting again. i go out with new friends, i discuss culture and literature and films and design with others, i actually engage in meaningful conversations. its a shame how easily we unravel when we feel our world is ready to collapse or that the very fibers of it are going to be unwound. the truth is, not having you in my life anymore has been as refreshing and suprising as i hadn´t expected. there is no desperation to have you back or near, mostly because what you did and have done is by far the most hurtful thing anyone has done to me. what hurts more is i allowed it to happen. never again will i give that kind of power or control to someone else just as much as i gave it to you. you don´t deserve it; you have no understanding of how to appreciate, only use. despite the resentment i felt, in this moment the peace of having you gone surpasses all the moments that i thought i felt happy with you, because in actuality, looking back, i only convinced myself that i needed you and right now what i need is to refocus the energy i wasted on you back on me. Mexico has truly been an experience, all parts, knowing you, knowing this city, this culture, learning the language and the food. i don´t regret any minute of my decision because without it, i would not have learned all the things that i did in the short time that i´ve been here. i feel more prepared for my dream and future ahead, and for another country and another place, and should it occur, another boy to enter my life, when the time is right, when i have fully rebuilt myself and am strong enough to let the rest follow through. 071108 ... pilot there´s a line from "you´ve got mail" where meg ryan quotes some old song about wanting a pair of ice skates to skate away on a frozen river. i relate now (more than all the other times) with this movie as the holiday is approaching and i´m out of work for two weeks alone for the first time ever. you are on vacation with your wannabe boyfriend and the man i should be with and i´m stuck in a city in which i have little to do and no relish to associate with anyone that i´ve befriended along the way. it looks as though i´m going home for two weeks to work and make a few extra dollars doing laboral jobs. oh joy i hardly look forward to that. but i´m in need of a serious break as this year ends and another begins and we approach the two year mark in our relationship (i use this word with no reference to us ever being a couple but in the most general terms of our interaction and nature of it). these last months, though volatile, have actually been suprisingly settling as i stablize my position in my life here in mexico. i like my job, i like my apartment, i´m used to the everyday hum drum monatony. i´m used to the familiar sights of old women sweeping their front walk every morning to catch some sun and warm up. the houses are awful and cold inside and anyone is miserable functioning inside a refrigerator. i pass the woman who is on the corner of fransisco villa and avenida de las americas squeezing oranges in her manual juice maker, handing out cups of fresh o.j. to cars honking at her as they wait for the light to turn green. each afternoon the giddy pandemonium of junior high students as i pass the segunderia on my way to the bus stop. all the hub bub of the buses and the congestion of traffic, the crispness of night: all these familiarities that before fascinated me are now my life and as normal as i would expect anything else to be back home. quite honestly this year i want things to be about me. i want to feel complete with myself and alone. i don´t want to have any feelings of desire for another person to complete me. i want to save my money for my next adventure and leave this place. i´ve begun to fill with this experience and realize i don´t want to leave exhausted or resentful. you and i are volatile. i´ve accepted that. if we´re forty and alone, you and i understand that the person we end up with is each other. i want to let you have your life experience and i want my own, a new one, a different one. i bought a tiffany ring yesterday. i thought about buying you the same one, but then i thought what good would that do, you wouldn´t appreciate a gift like that. so instead the gift is mine. this is my engagement to myself and my reward for living and overcoming. tonight jen will call me. she´s in town visiting family and i´m sure we´ll have a few beers and talk about how much has changed and how different we are. no matter what, we are always changing, no matter how much we think we know we honestly don´t. i think the uncertainty i feel now is equally promising as it is disheartening. i just wish that i didn´t have to battle that. who knows, maybe we won´t spend christmas together, nor new years, maybe when i return you´ll be in california and the last time we´d have embraced would have been the day you left for mexico city. i just want to hold you one last time, close enough so that i can keep your smell inside my nose and file that sensation away in my memory. 071219 ... pilot i already know that the next six months will unravel in a messy hem like the one of your favorite sweater. i can feel the emptiness well up inside of me in these mountains that surround the city jeering up like great oxes. i await everyday for you to leave for australia, and i know that when you return i will be back in houston, doing the normal routine functions of my life, encased in the normalcy of my american life, eating dinner inside the loop, drinking coffee with friends in Montrose, rummaging through Buffalo Exchange and Taxi Taxi. my vacation home has given me the realization of how strong and healthy i once was, how nurturing i was to the ones i loved and to myself, and here i just feel the emptiness slip over me like a tight black glove taught against my flesh, only i am a mannequine´s hand and hollow on the inside. i have a list of things building in my head of things i need to do once i return, things to restore, parts of me that have broken off and need repairing. my life is void of spirituality now as i have given all my attention to the physical necessities that so often choke out the rest for any real consideration. last night we went out to a bar and we danced and drank and had on our best, sure to make a statement and it was for the first rare moment in the last six months that i realized we really were truly acting as friends. how rare and far apart these moments are. its as if we have become resentful siamese twins, joined and venegeful. i wonder how two people get to this point of silent resentment. i can see the wheels turning in your mind as you pick out all the ways you irritate me and i tumble the situations over in my mind like irritating stones in a stream. i look in the mirror and disarm myself with all the things i think are my fault, my errors. "you are too clingy" "you shouldn´t have been such a jerk" "you need to be more considerate with your words" "let more time pass before you text" "your complexion isn´t even enough" "you could tone up your body a little more" "you need to just let go" why is it that i am the one who is always at fault? in my mind i reason that i´m the one who is incapable of being loved. this morning i woke up and hopped in the shower letting the steam fill up in the tiny bathroom like a sauna before entering the heavy air and smelled the smoke entering into my nostrils from last nights excursion. i hate how the scent clings to your hair and your skin and you awake feeling as though you´ve been on tour with rock musicians. i didn´t drink but only two beers and i felt level headed and clear when i woke up. my intentions this morning were to come to your house, as your mother would be gone and make you an omelet and serve it to you with orange juice as you would be reclining on the couch, huddled under a blanket watching telehit or mtv or vh1 and then we could have watched some ridiculous novela like rebelde and scoff at the terrible overacting. i know that when we have finally parted, all of this will be gone, there will be no more breakfasts together, there will be no photoshoots before we go out, or you prancing around my apartment to some new teeny-bopper pop song or imitating britney spears or walking around downtown and buying candies and then gorging them on park benches. i will miss these things, but realize, just as childhood, that these things are only a temporary part of life. there is no substance to them, they do not make us who we are, they are merely a distraction for the reality of the system in which we live. i have imagined that even next summer in paris, the time we share will be one night, and it will be choked by your necessity to worry about whoever else is in your traveling party. i will visit europe alone, i have friends there and it will be the first trip i will take to truly recover from the energy i freely gave here. i wanted to. i really did. i don´t regret one minute or ounce or peso or effort. but i will need that time to re-recognize the person i am. i will need it to see where i am going. i will return to houston and settle into a somewhat normal life and continue traveling to fill whatever piece of me has felt empty. you are like cigarette mark in the back seat of a car burning a tiny black hole through my aorta. i should guess that after this june, it will be nearly two years before we actually spend some quality time together. when you come, i will pamper you in houston, i will make sure you have a good time, but you will see my indifference to be near you or close to you or intimate with you. i will sleep on the couch and offer you my bed. i promise i will protect the rest of my ventricles. there is no such thing as a failed relationship. we simply learn what and what not to do as we struggle through the tension and iconize the moments that were not anything less than bliss. 080113 ... cocoon *sigh* I hate to spoil your blather, but I just had to say how much I love your writing. I read a lot, and am so used to skimming over things, but this - this I REALLY read. And the last paragraph? Beautiful. 080114 ... cr0wl high five, pilot. 090106 ... unhinged it's like something, someone tugged on the string that was holding me together 090220 ... pilot Thanks! funny I'm just now reading these purgings some three years later. amazing how you feel after three years and all the changes you can bring about when you purge details from your life as they happen. 111116 what's it to you? who go blather from