Total disclosure of the facts!

It's very strange writing this blog I know only one person reads, because I end up writing letters to them without addressing them as such, like printing one copy of a book to lend to a friend. Here's that book, and perhaps someone else will stumble onto it later and say, jeez what a rare book, I'll go sell it on eBay or just read it. I've decided to write a full account to bore the absolute shit out of anyone who reads it, but it's as comprehensive on 'my side' as it gets and I've written it as entertainingly as I can, for a lengthy story reminiscent of Grandpa's best.
Anyway:
The last few months have been emotionally some of the stranger ones of my adult life. Maybe I'll explain in depth without presupposing that this is some cry for love, because not a few minutes ago I think it would have been that. I would have written it full of pathos, and you would have said, boy, too bad things didn't work out for this lovable but troubled young man. I feel that there's an element of that which I can't avoid, but I promise to keep it to a minimum.
I had a crush on her, a benign sort of 'she's cute and I bet she's smart because of the way she dresses and pays attention intently in class and has a certain engaged look in her eye', not anything transcendent, but certainly worth finding out if she was single since I was lonely and hoping that a new academic life would lead to some secret cache of women with big brains. The planet of the brain women. As the semester got going, I began to wonder, where are these women who are interested in academia and culture and understand that my taste culture isn't evidence of some severe neurological defect and are actually interested in it in the same detached intellectualizing way that I am, and who also coincidentally like really squirrelly little dudes with stupid tattoos (of whose rapidly swelling ranks I am one). Where? And of course this led to conjecture about the girl who would say nothing in class but it was made mention that she wrote a really good paper for my professor.
This made me think, since I not only respected my professor academically but she seemed really rad and to be the kind of woman who maybe one day I'd live in a house somewhere near Oakland with and we'd sit drinking tea and reading incredibly dense texts like they were nothing when it rained and have a garden and be pretty close to self-sufficient and be living the radical politics we both honed to a razor's edge in college. And thus, a sort of bizarre inner fantasy life sprung up almost full formed. We would not have children (we would adopt, since the planet can only support maybe one billion people and we were riding for a fall with this seven billion shit), we would have a killer room lined with bookshelves, blah blah blah blah.
Of course, concurrently with the beginning of this fantasy, I had contrived a sort of silly little line to send to her on myspace just to pique her interest in becoming friends for a start, myspace because I was massively chickenshit at this point. I had lived in Chicago for a few months now and had precious few friends. I was getting to be somewhat inbent and fearful that any human interaction would lead to painful rejection: "Hey I see you are in this class too." "What are you, some kind of faggot?" All told, I was sort of regressing to an elementary school level, when I was kind of a mess all the time because of precisely this vicious circle, not helped by my wordiness, irrational clinging to sweatpants as normal dress, and desperate need to be accepted as a class clown. So a girl who I was not just interested in fucking and toying with her body (and that interest as a distinguishing factor was rapidly losing the overwhelming appeal of lusty puberty), combined with general loneliness and a feeling that it was time to drop the casual sex I'd been settling for in all my previous relationships to date, created kind of a perfect storm.
One reason I was unable to commit to any of my prior relationships was in fact fallout from the painful experience of telling Laura Frizell I loved her in the fourth grade and being (in retrospect understandably) rejected in a supremely harsh way. I was so wary about the idea of love that even commitment seemed like giving up a part of yourself for review (it is), and since that had ended so badly last time, I just opted out in favor of intermittent shackings-up. Not to say that these were frequent.
I digress. Anyway, there was this girl who I was starting to get these couple-fantasies about even before I knew her (not coupling like sex, although those certainly happened a few times, lets be honest, but honest to god reading in bed together, cooking together fantasies), and as I got to know her, because my social skills weren't yet so ingrown that I drove her away, I found that she was really pretty close to what I was imagining. Smart, interested in art with the right aesthetics, understood that my subcultural taste was just that, taste. I mean, she wasn't exactly what I had imagined, which is good because I think the woman I created in my fantasy mind was a little too mature and sophisticated for me, and would have totally emasculated me because that fantasy was a just a little too good and I would have felt stupid and inadequate. But returning to the real object of my desires, she was very good, and I felt good about even seeing her ever at all, but I was starting to have a real problem with what an elementary school gifted program might call a "rich inner life" and what a clinical psychologist might call "extensive delusions". Because she actually had a life, she was about a hundred times busier than I was, and I would have these fantasies of actually having an intellectual and spiritual equal as a partner, and I was just a new friend to her.
I am not a fool. But I have certainly got a lengthy foolish streak, which shows almost the whole length of itself shortly. I had a party at my house, and there were a decent number of friends there, and I invited her, "and anyone else you want to bring." This included a few people who were tagging along for the night and... her boyfriend, which was devastating. I conducted myself admirably, a spirit of fun at the party, one might say. I always do, pretty much no matter what. But inside, I was frantically trying to decipher what I should do. The day after, my "rich inner life" was consumed with images of her and the boyfriend, the stand-offish, wary, bepony-tailed boyfriend, together in loving harmony, then contrasting images of the same couple, him sullenly watching TV and her biting her nails and sitting in the same head-propped on hand-propped on elbow on knee or desk posture I'd thought was cute but possibly a nervous habit. I was nowhere to be seen in my own fantasy life. I resented him immensely. His manner had been matter of fact, as if, of course! I'm with her! Now that I'm in recovery from this bizarre love story, how else could he have been?
Giving up was not an option. I felt about her more strongly, and more emotionally, than any woman since before I even hit puberty. I contrived to tell her, make an impassioned (yet of course reasonable) plea, and hope for the best- a far stretch, now that I think back on it. But this I did, after a night out drinking heavily with her and a few others. I was surprised at my relative success, yet overall I was a failure. She had broken up with him briefly and only recently had gotten back together with him, yet had a crush on me as well. I wondered the depth of the crush and went home to think. One of the prime lessons I gleaned from this period was a Hitchcockesque understanding of anticipation and suspense as a more painful sensation than the resolution of said suspense, no matter how that resolution ends up. There was drama via the internet, which left so much nuance out of the conversation I felt like I was dealing with a robot trying to predict the outcome. I had several signs that the conflict could resolve in my favor and my "rich inner life" would be realized. Ultimately, she decided to break up with him! Success! Sort of! I felt shitty for encouraging a break up and felt bad for the guy, but it was a step in my direction, and I thought my capacity for fantasy deserved a break.
This meant she was now free to pursue whatever she wished, which it was subtly implied meant a slow gravitation toward me. However, the period of conflict had led me to sort of divest myself so as not to be utterly crushed by the 'inevitable' rejection, and I was beginning to realize what a god-damn nut I was for not only having the lengthy fantasies about couplehood but acting on it, breaking up a fully functional relationship to pursue a dream. The dream being something which when I last fully indulged it I was ground beneath the boot of a callous fourth grade popular girl. The casual sex method of avoiding real intimacy suddenly seemed like a wise model for a relationship, since it avoided essentially constructing your partner in your mind, you understand that after you go eat you might watch a movie and have sex and that's all it is, not some shared life of the mind and possibly really truly erotic sex because you connect on a deeper level than boy-parts/girl-parts. No, that was such a cinematized understanding of sex that it was just not possible, maybe I've made up who this girl is and if we get together there will be more hollow conversation followed by unadventurous rutting in front of a movie like with the other girls so why spare the grief? I was kind of checked out in my mind at this point, and I had met this other girl, precisely the same kind of casual shared-interest justification of body-pleasure as all prior engagements, and I just couldn't pursue it. I was exhausted. The struggle to get the idea of couplehood even on the table for both of us had worn me out, and I'd have to tiptoe and be careful about what I said about her pony-tailed ex for at least half a year, someone who at the time was one of the simplest objects of dislike I'd ever had, especially for a cruel comment he made to me as he horned in on the internet discourse, confirming all my fantasies about his failure as a lover and so on and so forth. I also was about to leave for almost six weeks, six weeks being a geological epoch in 'new love time', and it would have possibly backfired almost entirely to get together and then leave her with the same group who knew her with her ex.
And so I took up a casual thing with this other girl, who was sweet and willing and even shared the taste culture I was in with me. My taste culture is of course a traditionally masculine space and I didn't realize at this point that I didn't necessarily want 'one of the guys' to shack up with me and talk dirty to me at shows when I'm just trying to get sweaty and homoerotic and dumb with other males aged eighteen to thirty-five, as the demographic information would put it. And she quickly got kind of clingy and I began realizing she just didn't have enough going for her mentally to hold my interest and I went through the same process in divesting myself from her that I have gone through with every girl I have ever had sex with who did not hold my interest. I stopped talking to her and made sure to frame every talk about 'us' as just a casual thing, I didn't want anything too serious now, blah blah blah. There's another incident on New Years eve involving an even more casual and even less engaging girl (read:actually pretty dumb) who pounced on me when I was shamefully blackout drunk. This was at sort of the depth of my nihilistic pro-casual sex misogynistic/conquest mentality I had as a reaction to the exhausting ordeal of mental effort in divesting myself from my rich fantasy life. I was smoking a lot of pot and was with my old group of significantly less cerebral friends, and it seemed OK to do this horrible debauched "if you know I'm a jerk and you go ahead anyway, it's fine with me" thing. Really, in terms of the knuckledragger perspective, it's been a banner year for female attention, even if its in the shittiest way possible.
So I got back to Chicago, and felt the depth of the winter pressing in on me and didn't want to go out much and just felt shitty, and didn't want to see casual hesher girl, and just stayed in being a lazy hateful misanthrope, and I hated my roommates and even myself some. My fantasy life had been rebuked and I wasn't about to let it happen again, and I was just some haggard asshole who managed to get laid with girls he didn't respect. This was a caustic state of mind, and, dear reader, you should be able to tell that's not how I end up at the date of this writing.
I started going to class again for the spring semester, and she was there, the girl who inhabited a pretty large space in the "rich inner life" I was denying. I felt like things were fairly settled between us but every once in a while, I'd feel this intense forlornness for what could have been. I was relatively certain she was back together with the pony-tail (which is how I referred to him during the period of my deepest contempt), just due to the fact that she loved him and he loved her and it seemed natural. I had sort of been cleansed of my envy and hate for him and my "rich inner life" with her wasn't really happening anymore. But, I found myself just thinking about little things, like kissing her on the cheek or holding hands, really basic 'new love shit'. I also started to realize that she was developing her mind in really dynamite ways. So the crush returned, because I realized I really did like her, just for who I knew her to be, not as the fantasy intellectual babe of my imagination. This part's a lot more straightforward and, I think, more sane. It's also a lot more like the cry for love I promised I'd avoid at the beginning but bear with me. I'll be quick since this is getting lengthy.
So we start getting together with a group of other people whose minds I dig, and we're talking and of course it's fun, so we get booze. And like almost immediately, I get drunk and stupid. I don't get horny when I get drunk, I mean any more than when I'm sober, but I do feel sometimes like booze is a license, which I know it's not, but that's just a problem I have. And so we get together and have what I think is a really tender makeout/spoon thing which we both say we really regret and I do in a way but it gets me thinking, and I start thinking that this is what it is to develop love.
So almost immediately, the crazy sets in and I start bugging her to hang out even though it's obviously a ploy to develop a vocabulary of tenderness, and look her in her eyes, and be subtly complimentary and impress her with my mind and maybe get her to start thinking about it. And she knows. She wants none of it and avoids me and avoids me and I start understanding that she knows and wants no part of it but it sounds so good I can't avoid trying and thinking about it almost all the time, and finally I make some little hint intending to draw her out, and she says, in short: No way, I love my boyfriend, don't need this right now, friends can share a life of the mind and be intimate without sex.
It hurts, but this time I had this safety net of already having thought through the rejection thing, which caused me to develop this exhaustion neurosis about it and fail to follow through on the one real chance I think I got, and I know that was the only real chance, and I accept it. I think I still love her, but in a way that means I have to respect her enough not to be sexual if she doesn't want to. Sex was never a dominant enough part of it that the idea of really close friends who share their minds together is unappealing. So that's where we stand. Intellectual equals.
And that brings us up to the present day. I feel much better.