A compedium of love

In the late fall of 2005 I was living in Boston, and as rare occasion would have it, one evening I found myself winding down the barren-tree’d banks of highway 24.

Home is a tough place to describe and harder still is the reasons I’d go home to do nothing with my family. On this one particular occasion I was going to play cards with a group of friends that, by the proxy of Irish-hood I regarded as I might an extended family. It was here I met Marie.

We went out once, and then for the betterment of her own education she headed home to Texas through the remnants of Hurricane Katrina. In the interest of full disclosure I felt that while I had fun, that was the end of things for us, if there were a “things” at all. But she kept in contact with text messages, e-mails and the occasional late night phone call. (their an hour ahead over there in Houston).

We met once between that fall and the summer and one night together was all she wrote until she packed up again and flew back to Texas. Then the summer came. She showed up unannounced one day at the front desk of the building I worked in, told them her name was Gretchen and they put in a call that I had a visitor. I was as shocked as one might imagine and from there we had the chance to see one another more often than we’d ever even spoke before. But a month into that summer everything turned for the worst and floored it. We had a conversation, she told me she’d no longer wanted to conduct ourselves the way we had. Her friends had read my blogs, I was moving to fast and she wasn’t ready for something like that. The following two months were torturous.

The last time I saw Marie was after a wedding. The same woman who’d accidentally introduced us nearly a year ago was getting married. We drank the champagne, said our goodbye’s and with Marie in tow, we had set off to South Carolina to visit our friend Amanda. We had to make two stops before hand. We picked up Amanda’s college roommate Ginsey in Balitmore, and then we dropped Marie off in D.C. where she had left her car a week earlier. She headed back to Texas, and Ginsey, Issel and myself headed south. After we dropped her off, Ginsey drove the rest of the way, and because it was 2 a.m. I went to sleep in the backseat.

That was the last time I saw Marie and I woke up the next day on a Virginia highway with two people who’d known nothing of my story and were in good spirits because of the road trip and the vacation. For a week, I couldn’t think about how depressing it was that I would never see her again.

But I had to return home at some point, and when I did the pain was a dull lingering mope. I didn’t know what to do. I started school a week later and immediately found myself attracted to another girl in my class who I, when I think back about it, gave ample consideration to because she was brown. (Marie was Mexican, she was Pakistani). Maybe it was because I’d been emotionally drained but I played this up relatively cool and it wasn’t before long that she and I were sleeping together. Sabeen however, was not Marie. She wanted an open relationship, she had 5 majors and she was very cut and dry. If something didn’t make sense, you were an idiot and she didn’t have time for you. In an intellectual capacity I still have a deep amount of compassion for her. Its not easy to find someone as mercilessly logical as a tax attorney that is intelligent enough to argue political philosophy, entertaining enough to drag you to a Brooklyn Rave, and impetuous enough to shoot off to Thailand and backpack over to Africa. We spent 4 or 5 months together before she shot off to Oxford where she studied something philosophical enough for me to loose interest. When she got back things were a little more than complex because at this time she was living with Dmitri to save money for the Thai trip, and soon after her return she started seeing two men at once. (its hard not to like her).

I hadn’t had much trouble adjusting by virtue of a Road Trip we had taken in October of the year before.

Before I’d really started seeing Sabeen, I had spoken to Cathy about the situation with Marie and she had suggested that going down to New York might do well for the spirit so a ended up going there on Columbus Day weekend (if memory serves me correctly) with Sabeen in tow. She was going off to meet up with Dimitri who was studying at Columbia and after dropping her off, I went to meet up with Cathy. (after an accidental detour into Spanish Harlem). It was there I met Dana.

She was callous at first, and I would find out later its because she hadn’t known I would be there, and as an ex-boyfriend of Cathy’s (with only Paul as a reference point) I had the potential to be a huge tool. [Possibility still not ruled out]. After a rocky start and a couple glasses of vodka we were all getting along swimmingly and as people tend to do while drunk, we were openly flirting. But I was, to a degree with Sabeen and I had plans to ride out to Brooklyn to go to the decompression. Due to illness and the 1 o’clock hour, Dana and Cathy went home and I attempted to find Grand Central. At 5 am I arrived back at Cathys apartment and, being a pain in the ass enough already by ringing the buzzer at that time, I decided that in lieu of a bed I’d ball up my clothes and sleep on the floor.

The next morning we ate at a dinner before I went to pick up Sabeen and head back to jolly old boston. I can’t explain why I’d remember something like this, but I can still remember her impression of a little French boy she’d taught in her classroom and I still laugh if it catches me off guard. When I left I didn’t know if I’d see her again, but it would be awhile before I forgot her.

As luck would have it, while Sabeen flew off to England for a few months, out of no where Dana and I started speaking. I don’t recall the path it took to get there, but eventually I went back to Manhattan to meet up with her. I stayed in Jersey that night at some hotel and the next day I hopped a train back to the Bus Station. We would meet this way more and more often but the strain of the road and the distance between us was too much for her to bear. When she was too booked to meet up, I made the trip down to Jersey to see her while she watched two children that had been students of hers. That was the last time I’d seen her.

In july I asked if she were available at all that month.

“Nope” she said “all booked up, sorry”

I was crushed, but with Sabeen and Dmitri there to tell me to “take the hint” I had to move on. In all honest I managed to get that text message while at a BJ’s and thought that if the text message had permeated the lead-clad walls of a warehouse, it just wasn’t meant to be. That was July.

In October I couldn’t take the silence anymore and I had sent her a message in modest terms about how I felt. That I still thought about her and how I hoped things were well. It was a month before I heard anything by which point I’d contented myself with thinking there was no chance and she was disinterested.

One late November night I got a phone call from her and we had talked about how things had ended, and how life had gone since we last spoke. Again, if my coincidence or fate, the phone cut out. I sent her a text saying it was good catching up.

I’ve had girlfriends since then, and I’m sure I will again, but the last two were not worth mentioning either because of the shortness of the relationship or because of the cruelty by which they ended. I’m sure I’ll find someone of equal caliber again, but this was something I had to put out there, and I felt I should release.

I met someone a few weeks ago and who knows if it will be a flash in the pan or a vested relationship but what I do know is that I’ve died at the hands of lovers before, and I’ve come back to fight again and now to even tell the story. I’ve survived the worst it can throw at me, I’m hoping it can start trying the other direction for a change.

“…For three years I had roses and apologized to no one.”

Wtf?

"UPDATE: Tucker Bounds, McCain's spokesman, responds. "It was remarkable to see Barack Obama’s hysterical diatribe in response to a speech in which his name wasn’t even mentioned. These are serious issues that deserve a serious debate, not the same tired partisan rants we heard today from Senator Obama. Sen. Obama has pledged to unconditionally meet with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- who pledges to wipe Israel off the map, denies the Holocaust, sponsors terrorists, arms America’s enemies in Iraq and pursues nuclear weapons. What would Sen. Obama talk about with such a man? It would be a wonderful thing if we lived in a world where we don’t have enemies. But that is not the world we live in, and until Sen. Obama understands that, the American people have every reason to doubt whether he has the strength, judgment and determination to keep us safe."

McCain needs a little help. Half of the things he just mentioned there in response are flase, and are ripe for an Obama firing squard. A quarter of what he just said are traditional republican attack points that are going to prove useless. A hysterical diatribe? We're going to try and make him seem crazy? Thats the best we've got?

and for such an aggressive war hawk, I think its a little neutering to see him utalize such vaginal manuvering such as "in which his name wasn't even mentioned."

Unless you're called out by name, you should respond to another systematic GOP attack? The american people aren't stuipd, their actually tired of the same old attacks and they've had time to sit with them. Their not going to be fooled again...

McCain needs help.

try this

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php?p=27

Tell me again old man, of the shaving grounds?

God bless the cultural disarray. The badlands between a tanking approval rating and the next election.
In the brutal spaces where no higher power rests its hands on the puppet strings
Of good favor and capitalistic progress.
Where all men’s favor rest on himself, and the ingenuity and the intelligence.
Where luck is the residue of design, where the papers of the universities are scrap
For the ticker tape parade their play at the funeral of parlor room acceptance.

I must scrap all I have know of my paths, the map is to an old world that can no longer be traveled if one seeks to achieve their destinations. The soft cushion of another mans work will no longer climb the ladder for you. It has grown pale and soft, and its voice no falls on deaf and absent ears.

Ignore and deny this ladder, and by your own methods rebuild your own, one in which there is no climb, but by which all others can achieve greatness. Allow them to ascend to the heights you always knew you were at. Let be be the end of seems. Old money sleeps easy if the laurels are kept safe in the vaults of good measure and conventional wisdom.

And the razor may be rusty and my face brittle from the cold but I will shave this tree to the bow that splits the water, I will careen through the murk and feel the wind in my sails, by my own admission I will conquer the seas, I will find a new path and discover new land.