Monday, October 1, 2012

Love & the Interregnum

Living one's life so as to avoid meaningful companionship is the vermouth of the self-loathing cocktail.  The gin or vodka portion should remain proportional.  One goes about their day the same, but certain conversations are curtailed and ideas tempered lest they interfere with tortured notions of manifest destiny.  Considering that a great number employ this as their modus operandi for the entirety of their lives, seven months shouldn't be considered too bad. 

This latest loveless interregnum is a product of the decision to move to New Orleans and the requisite time frame to wait out potential hurricanes and save some seed money.  It has been a semi-fulfilling  rebuttal to any aphorism in the vein of carpe diem or 'no day like today.'  There is more of the present I could be seizing, but it's some comfort to be in my third decade and following a dream while so many see their own expire years earlier of SIDS.  That's the sexy part.  The nuts and bolts of this life pause are not worth growing rubbery over.  There's the extra job, for one, cutting into Free Time.  Living transiently is another.  Anyone over the age of thirty with stacked boxes in their bedroom who tells you Life is Great is nothing if not entirely full of shit.

Playing a bit role in the whole production is the avoidance of intimacy.  It's not as hard for me as it would be for most.  Being overly sensitive, fiercely independent, brashly entitled, and frustratingly insecure does not hurt.  Neither does alcohol and contentment with sitting in front of a football game.  But even I know this is no way to live.  Because the books and songs all seem to point to something, that something that comes with giving oneself up for another.  And while I haven't felt It, necessarily, over the past few months, there have been hints and suggestions.  Every now and then I've reached the point in conversation where She would look at me with this-is-the-part-where-you-ask-for-my-number eyes.  Someone a little more involved in the day-to-day will occasionally do Something that makes me think a how-bout-that.  I always play aloof. 

It's not because there's no interest, because there is.  I want one of these Hers to burnish a signed contract good for Brainless Fucking that will expire at the end of this calendar year.  We'd get the occasional bite to eat and send a few texts in between for good measure.  But do I want to take some girl out on a Date?  Do I want to get to know someone and let them know me?  Most certainly not.  I don't want to spend the money/go through the history/relive the insecurity/avoid the Questions, and God forbid I actually grow to Like this person.  That would be a disaster.  Because I have plans.  And they don't involve Here, and that most certainly implies that they don't involve Her. 

Before every physical departure is a mental and emotional one and it's already hard enough to pack the luggage I already have.  Even if her smile is nice and those eyes are kind, they're sure just to take up room and I cannot sacrifice the space what with all the baggage fees nowadays.  The surest way to give something up is to never take it up in the first place.

So it's give nothing.  Take what's mine.  Earn as much as I can, spend as little as possible, then head for the exits and leave everyone else behind.  You can't say New York didn't teach me anything.  And you can't say I'm not a Carpetbagger.

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