"Love," I say to Jürgen, "sucks my ass."
He smiles, but I'm not pacified yet. I'm intent on leaving him with an unappetizing mental image. "No, not in a nice, wholesome way. It sucks my ass in a nasty, bad, crappy, GROSS way. Like, really hard, and really unpleasant, and then my butt kinda hurts, from fucken LOVE SLURPING ON MY ASS. It SUCKS, Jürgen. It SUCKS. I feel like I have a butt full of rectal hickies."
Never, ever let me work for Hallmark...
["Dear Valentine, I love you forever. You make me feel like I have rectal hickies. Love, Your Secret Admirer..."]
Jürgen found that amusing. Gross, but amusing. Sometimes I think Jürgen finds ME gross, but amusing. Which is good; the world should think of me that way. I appreciate it.
Jürgen is in love with Catherine. I'm in love with Norman. And there we were, talking about rectal hickies, deep into the night. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to punch and claw and kick and make signs protesting the injustice of all of it.
It's too bad I'm so fucking nice.
(And I am nice, sometimes... Really. I know it's not very obvious, but sometimes I am nice... Otherwise I would have just clobbered the shit out of something, or someone, because LOVE SUCKS, and NOTHING IS FAIR.)
Of course, love has always kind of sucked, at least for as long as I can remember. Admittedly, it has its moments, but it sucks.
And I can be as amusingly gross as I want, but it still doesn't change the fact that I'm sad. So I looked at Jürgen, who was chuckling (yeah, yeah, so "rectal hickie" is a funny thought; but if you're sitting there chuckling over things like broken hearts and the innate unfairness of the universe, it just goes to show you really have no concept of love...), and tried to explain another way...
"You know... I love Olympia... I love my school, I love my friends, I love the water, and the Mountain, and the air... I'm just so glad I'm here, and... then... on the other hand, sometimes I hate it."
"Hate what?"
"All of it. I resent the hell out of Olympia."
"Why?"
"Because..." (I spoke very slowly, aware that the situation was already non-sequitur enough...) "Because he isn't here..."
*I* thought it was a pretty big confession.
Once, Norman and I had kind of a lousy conversation, which resulted in both of us feeling kind of glum. So I picked up my bookbag, and threw rocks at the lake all night. Angry rocks. I hated the lake. Fuck, it's not even a real lake. If I didn't love that lake, if I didn't love this town, if I didn't have this urge to lie down and roll around like a dog, until the scent of Olympia was permanently matted into my skin, I wouldn't be here. And if I wasn't here, I'd be with Norman. And I'm not with Norman, and so I kind of hate that lake, beautiful and full of herons and salmon as it may be. I've been careful not to show it. I didn't suppose anybody really suspected the intensity of all of this. Jürgen, however, did not seem fazed at all.
Forgive me, but isn't the person you're allegedly dating supposed to care a little bit when you start carrying on about another man? If I'd known it was this easy...
But then again, Jürgen's got his girlfriend Catherine in Portland -- his "long distance" thing. Long-distance, my fucking ass. It's sickeningly ironic that Jürgen needs somebody to play with while he's in Olympia, because his girlfriend is a whole hour and a half away. I love how mournful he'd been when he described Catherine's jealousy of me as: "she wishes she could be in Olympia, too." (Because, of course, the only thing that matters in matters of the heart, is proximity...?) Personally, I suspect Catherine has no idea who I am, no idea that I exist, and would probably want to choke me if she did know. But I'm beyond caring much about that. Jürgen's girlfriends are none of my concern.
I tried very hard to love Jürgen. You see, I'm lonely, and I miss falling asleep with my head on somebody's lap while watching Twin Peaks. I missed quirky little love-things: having sex in a rented car, IN the parking lot of the car-rental place; horror movie marathons; crappy morning breath...
Jürgen is sometimes very young, and sometimes very old. I often feel that nothing really excites him anymore; he's a world-traveller who speaks enough of several languages to ask where the bathroom is, so why should he give a damn about jellyfish, or the cool shadows the trees cast in the mall parking lot, or making soup from scratch without a recipe...? Jürgen is excited about different things: forest fires, because he's a firefighter by occupation; Hungarians, Gypsies, and Germans, because most of his ex-girlfriends are of the above heritages, which somehow makes Hungarians, Gypsies, and Germans superior ethnicities; and sex. And there's a huge chasm between us: I'm excited by damn near anything, especially if it's got pretty colors or loud noises in it, and I've always gotten the distinct impression that Jürgen thinks that's babyish. Whatever; maybe it is. I tried to love this man, because I was lonely and I like love. And it didn't work, because how could I love someone whose sense of beauty and priority is mostly nostalgia? Jürgen really has no sense of wonder; he goes from day to day, and the only times his voice rises with happiness are when he's talking about "back in Budapest..." or when he thinks he's going to get some.
You can't say I didn't try.
You can't say Jürgen didn't try, either.
But this is fucking stupid. Why have I been acting like everything is fine, when clearly, everything is not fine...? I have no desire to have horror movie marathons with Jürgen. (At least not after how he reacted to "Rosemary's Baby.") I have no interest, one way or the other, in whether I wake up next to Jürgen. I don't have an interest in much of ANYTHING these days.
And THAT is just Jürgen and me. That's not saying anything about Norman, or Catherine, or the Hungarian girlfriend...
Jürgen has decided that the best possible way to live his life, is to keep me on as a full-time employee, here in Olympia, and have Catherine fill in on weekends and holidays, in Portland.
Helena has decided that the best possible way to live her life is to completely give up on any hopes of ever really loving Jürgen, and being boyfriendless for a good long while.
...Because, yeah, I'm in love with somebody else, and it's beautiful, and it's wonderful, and it sucks ass because we're so far apart.
...And because, dude, Jürgen's girlfriends (myself included), like anybody out of a Milan Kundera novel, are really just caricatures. He refers to his former lovers as: "The Canadian," "The Gypsy," "My first fiancée," "The Psycho," "The Ballerina," and so forth. Once, I asked him: "Jürgen, when we break up, what's my nickname going to be?" He said: "The American." I told him I didn't like that much. He said: "The Writer." I still didn't like that much. Jürgen, like my father, is very impressed by the idea that I write, but, like my father, hasn't given any indication that any of WHAT I write has made any profound impact upon him. I told Jürgen I'd like to be "The Mad One," in good company with Kerouac's "mad ones." But I wonder -- if, tomorrow, I never saw Jürgen again, what WOULD my nickname be? Of course, two weeks from now, I'd have been replaced by somebody else (because Jürgen's made it abundantly clear he needs a full-timer), and she would know me as... what? Certainly not my name. Jürgen's made attempts at categorizing my list of former lovers in a similar way. Chris, for example, is, "The Laundry Kid," because Chris and I once lived equal distances from a laundromat, and did laundry together sometimes. I was quite offended by this, though I didn't know quite how to explain it. "The Laundry Kid," is hardly an adequate description of Chris, the dorky kid who reads classics for fun, plays Pearl Jam on the Belmar jukebox every damned night, and is the only other human being on this planet who truly appreciates the weird humor of Java Joes' pet Irishwoman, Lori. My friends and lovers have always defied these sorts of bland classification.
So have I.
I don't think I could ever love anybody who thought of me as, "The American." Or, "The Writer."
I tried, though.
I'm giving up.
Besides, it's SHITTY to be dating somebody, while you're really in love with somebody else. I mean, I do like friends, and sex, and companionship, and other warm fuzzy things, so I'm not going to go into a bar some night, and subject perfect strangers to Norman: The Saga. I'm going to live my damned life, you know? But there's just nothing respectful about how I HAVE been living it. While I do not believe that Jürgen loves me, at least not as anything much more than, "The Freak," or some other one-word description, it's still pretty crappy to let somebody believe you love them, while you're staring out the window every Sunday night, watching the bay and thinking wistful thoughts about somebody else.
So. In a perfect world, Jürgen now goes back to Catherine, to offer her her old job back. (Personally, after being cheated on, dumped, and ignored completely for several months, I wouldn't want anything to do with the man who comes crawling back to MY door for sex and companionship. I suspect Catherine will accept the position, however. Maybe Jürgen's lovers aren't always weak, helpless, frail little things, but he sure as hell makes them sound like it... Catherine and Jürgen will get back together, and she'll be needy and whiny and he'll be needy and whiny, and they'll live happily ever after in Portland, the pink-and-grey city of brewpubs, tree-lined sidewalks, bridges, and surly moods.) And Helena spends her time alone. Because Helena's fucking lousy at most of the alternatives to being alone. Helena will certainly not be treated like a caricature, a mistress, or an employee just to avoid being lonely. And, for all her modern, radical ideas, Helena's discovered that she's really not much into being in a harem, even if Jürgen would probably much rather call it polyamory, which it isn't. Helena will never go back to Portland, unless she absolutely has to. Helena will stay in Olympia, and learn things at Evergreen, and look out the windows of her apartment. Helena wants to be alone for awhile. Helena has earned her loneliness.
(Helena misses Norman and wishes she could see him...)
Helena's tired. Helena wants not to be numb anymore. If she can't be in ecstatic, happy, joyful love, with somebody who's on the same side of the earth as her, she at least wants the feeling of loneliness. Helena wants to feel SOMETHING.
Helena is going to go out in the sunshine and cry. And think about rectal hickies...
~H.T.*