monday night musings in glasgow

i'm in glasgow. tomorrow morning we get on a 51 minute cross-country train to edinburgh. then wednesday we fly home to new york. it's 9:43 and i'm having a pint of cider alone because why wouldn't i. i don't want my trip to end.

i brought my kindle to the pub, but i'm... feeling weird. i wrote some postcards while sitting here. i usually write to my mom, but she's here on this trip with me, so i've written one to KW, and i've written one to IE. and now i just... want to continue writing. i should have some solo time. like a proper duration. if i only i could impulsively extend my trip. i literally can't, i don't have access to my work infrastructure even if i wanted to. that... does seem problematic actually. i guess i could work on resolving that. something to consider.

i've spent the whole trip texting IE. is it any wonder, when he actually responds and is interested in me? fuck, i'm not being fair. i shouldn't compare them. but i've also texted KW multiple things, multiple times, and he's barely responded to me. it honestly makes me very sad. IE is not my soulmate. i LOVE KW. i love our partnership. i love the ways we see the world, and the ways those views overlap, the ways they don't. and the way we handle those differences. i love the language we've built together. i love the weird we can be. the ways we can do nothing together. the ways we can communicate. about big things and little things and nothing.

and jesus fucking christ, i need to feel wanted and i do not feel wanted. sure, i know he loves me. i know it, i do. but like... does he miss me? does he want me home? will he kiss me like he spent 10 days not kissing me? (longer, even, in fact, since i had strep right before i left.)

...am i using IE, to fill the tracks in my otherwise fulfilling relationship? or... is getting to know IE merely revealing those cracks? can i live with the cracks, or is deciding to plow full steam ahead just careening toward future heartbreak and loneliness? if i don't decide that my unmet needs are significant enough right now, how will i feel in the future? how will i feel if we wind up breaking up eventually anyway and i've let a real connection get away?

i can't compare the two. IE is fascinating and brave and exciting and interesting and reckless and thoughtful and introspective and sensitive... but oh my god, he's no KW. he just... wants me. he really wants me. and he'll talk to me the way i want to be talked to (for the most part). and since he's not sober, we can be mild degenerates together. i want that. i want that reckless running free romance. not long term. i wish i could just... have a break to have this whirlwind affair. but that's obviously impossible. not possible in my relationship context, and not fair to IE, and i sure as shit don't want to explain that to anyone i know. but... oh, the fantasies. the fantasies, the places, the grabbing by the hand and laughing running through a city in any country. oops, am i going to cry?

i had to go refresh my pint of cider because a suicidal fly drowned himself in my glass half-full. so i got an extra half on the house in a new glass.

i'm lonely. not chronically, i don't think. but acutely. it's nearly 10pm now and i have to go back to the hotel soon, and shower, and pack. it'll be about 5pm back home. i think i'll call KW on my walk back to the hotel. ...the troubling thing is, he's standing in for IE right now. i really want to call IE on my walk home, but he's hiking up a mountain in wyoming at the moment. so i'm settling for KW because IE's unavailable. what an awful thing to think. then again, i guess in the grand scheme of things, i've got this whole thing with IE going on because KW's unavailable, in a sense of the word. i've spoken on the phone/facetime with IE multiple times on this trip. i haven't spoken to KW once. i mean, we've texted a bit. but... fuck, that's so sad to me.

do i miss KW? i think i do. i think i do. i think i do.

the pleasures of connection, part two

back on my old blog, the one i wrote when i was 19 and anorexic (and god, reading it back i really do sound so young), i made a post titled "the pleasures of connection" when i met someone new unexpectedly and hit it off with them. i suppose that's not very profound, but... it's what's come to mind lately.

i met someone new. no, this isn't an announcement of a new soulmate or that KW and i are breaking up, or anything like that. i'm not in love. not with anyone besides KW anyway. but... something interesting is happening. this is someone i've chatted with off and on online for a few years now. i'll call him IE. we spoke very frequently for a many months back in 2023/2024, before it kind of fizzled out. i helped talk him through calling off an engagement. we candidly talked about all sorts of subjects, including our respective relationships. in some ways we were familiar with each other's struggles, having experienced similar ones. it was always very mostly platonic. sure, there was some flirting, mostly on his part. he had some qualities i find attractive, if you describe my type you basically described him, but he was also a lil goofy looking and a couple years younger than me and like, we were just friends.

anyway, as i said, it fizzled out eventually. just sort of naturally drifted into talking less, and then hardly ever. for about a year, maybe? closer to a year and a half. and he lived abroad when we started talking, from the US but living in europe. he moved back to the US earlier this year, and wound up basing himself temporarily out of maine. he was coming down to the city for a couple events one weekend and was like hey if you're down we could meet up and hang out. and even though it'd been a bit since we regularly chatted i had every confidence that it'd be a fun, cool time. i really felt virtually no social anxiety about it, which is rare. i felt like we just had a guaranteed good rapport. and i was right! we got dinner and drinks when i was done with work on friday, and had a fantastic time. near the end of the night, after a few drinks on both our parts he asked pretty directly and respectfully, are we meeting up as a friend thing or like is something more on the table? because i'd told him in the past as online friends that KW and i had had some troubles in our sex life and also had been discussing open relationships, but those waters were uncharted for us, but the possibility was sort of abstractly there someday. and i knew he was attracted to me, and i think he figured on some level i was likely attracted to him too, but i wasn't sure tbh. so, y'know, fair play to IE to ask. i told him let's just hang out as friends, and he accepted that.

we parted ways on friday night with optimistically tentative plans for him to come out to my neighborhood for trivia on sunday. come sunday, those plans changed because of his timelines shifting, but i made an impulsive decision to go into the city for a couple hours to hang out with him sort of aimlessly, just wandering around chelsea/midtown with his camera. during our walk, i was aware sometimes of our hands brushing, of him teasing me that i couldn't be a hot girl if i didn't know plants, and him even telling me outright that he was trying to thread the needle of sufficiently downplaying his crush on me while still leaving it obvious. god, his boldness is so alien to me. anyway, this all contributed to a palpable vibe shift at the moment of farewell. there we were, on the corner of 14th and 8th, my old stomping ground, having hugged goodbye but both lingering, just kind of... looking at each other, so clear that neither of us wanted to end our time together when who knew how many months it might be til we got to see each other again. so clear that there could be a kiss between us, so clear we both felt it. eventually he hugged me one more time and planted a fat kiss on my cheek, and we finally said goodbye. i got on the bus to union square, and he went back up to his hotel for his date that night. emboldened by farewell, and partly driven, i suppose, to let him know that my telling him that friday was just as friends wasn't down to lack of interest, i texted him that he was much cuter in person than i had anticipated. and i guess that broke the barrier - now our mutual attraction was acknowledged. he tried to get me to turn around and come back, but that seemed unwise. so i continued home. he pitched the insane idea of me joining him for a sunrise photoshoot in DUMBO the next morning and i was like nah man that's not happening, and besides i have work. eventually we decided he'd come out to my neighborhood to grab lunch with me and see me one last time before he went back to maine. he said he wasn't sure why he so adamantly felt the need to see me again, but that he tries to listen to gut instincts.

i started to talk to KW that night, because after the almost almost kiss with IE, and with the irish guy last summer, clearly lingering in this "we've talked about being open but haven't pulled the trigger" zone is a recipe for disaster. i'm going to take something too far, and this isn't sustainable. but he was home from a long demanding work day on not enough sleep, so it wasn't really a good time for the whole conversation. but when i said that it's been confusing being in this position where two people have tried to kiss me and i'm really not sure if it's an option for me, he said he does think that's an option. but we left it there, bookmarked to return to with more bandwidth.

that night i had a dream in which KW told me after that conversation that he'd kissed someone else, and in my dream i kind of leapt straight over offense or hurt to "sweet, this means i can kiss IE at lunch tomorrow." and i woke up very disoriented by that whole thing having not happened at all, and therefore my conclusion not being true. it left me in a very strange headspace. and then i met him for a bagel on my lunch break. i don't usually even take a lunch break so he already had me breaking patterns for him. and he was waiting for me outside my local supermarket. i approached him and straight away, he kissed me. and i didn't stop him. i kissed him back, and not a little bit. i was quite in my head though, and it was so strange to be kissing someone who wasn't my partner of seven years. i was kind of yelling at myself in my own head that i wasn't sure this should be happening. after, we started walking toward the bagel place and both unsure of what to say. he said "yeah, i need to let the butterflies settle." and i thought to myself but did not say out loud "butterflies, huh? i felt that lower." because while i had not had butterflies and had mostly been going "!!!!!!????!!!" in my own head, there was definitely some kind of physical response occurring iykwim.

so we had bagels, and chatted for the better part of an hour, until reluctantly i had to get home and resume my work day, somehow, impossibly. we kissed one last time, chastely, at the train, before saying a final farewell so he could go back to maine and i could go back to my mundane monday.

but then we never stopped talking.

i talked to KW about the kiss that night, and that cracked the conversation about openness open properly. but clearly neither of us really knew where to begin. but one thing was clearly stated by both of us: our relationship as-is does not have a future. if we remain in a monogamous closed relationship, we will implode. neither of us are happy with our bedroom life, and it's going to lead to bad places unless we try something. yeah, openness might be catastrophic, but doing nothing would be heartbreaking. and god, i'd feel so bitter if something as "petty" as sex broke up such a fucking solid relationship. but... we didn't really get to the point of defining the parameters of an open relationship for us in a practical sense, but we had to sleep so we put a pin in it and knew we had to once again circle back to it at a later date. leaving things uncertain clearly doesn't work.

but after certain things and permissions being granted in my relationship when i was talking to someone online hot and heavy earlier this year, i've sort of been running with that as license to have some fun with IE over text, talking about some possible - and like actually possible? - future where KW and i have figured out what will work for us and i can actually like legitimately sleep with IE. and god, do i want to. GOD do i want to. the possibility is... so tantalizing. he's told me a couple times to come up to maine and see him. he's really trying to get me to do it. not in like a pushy or domineering way, but... he really does want me. how fucking phenomenal that feels after so long not feeling that way.

even talking not-sexually has just been intoxicating. it's hard to put my phone down. i've been so unproductive at work. it's so... fulfilling to get to hit it off with someone new. it's so hard to not get addicted to this feeling. why is learning about someone sometimes so much more satisfying and addictive and... a rush than actually knowing them in an intimate and sustained way? i suppose it's likely the possibility left in the unknown. the sort of dopamine hits of new levels of knowledge being uncovered with more conversation. i... don't know how to be smart about this. i should be smart about this. i'm feeling too many echoes of ZM/KW, even though the title is a callback to HB way back in the day.

what the fuck am i doing?

existential crisis time

we've signed the lease! the direction is forward, now. packing, logistics, all the shit i don't know how to stop obsessing about until it's resolved.

should i have KW make a zipcar account just for the month of April so that we can run apartment-setup errands without having to lug stuff on the subway or pay for expensive ubers? IKEA is so far.

see, that kind of stuff. i'm just not going to have a resolution for that yet. i want to solve all the problems but it can't be done all at once, by myself.

it's hard not to feel distant from KW right now. he's busy, i have only a sketchy idea of his schedule... i should check in and see if he's put in for the friday post-move off. see? logistics take over my brain. as i was saying... i texted him a time or two yesterday and didn't hear back until late, to learn that he had actually taken the day off and done nothing. why that didn't mean he could answer my texts, i am still unaware. sigh. it'll be less of a problem in 2 weeks. texting has never quite been his forte.

the rest of my time has been an existential crisis on a few levels. one, i decided to take the enneagram test (the free ones online, of course). i really tend not to buy into personality-descriptor type stuff, knowing that my birthday may class me as an aries but god, nothing about that sign describes me. and having taken online MBTI tests a few times and consistently getting different answers. do i have no personality? or poor self-awareness? it seems to have low test-retest reliability, to reach back into my college-brain for some psych research methods terminology.

anyway, as i was saying - i decided to take the enneagram to have another personality type indicator to reject. i got typed as a Nine (or 9 with a 1 wing), which i guess is the type that strives for peace and harmony in all things, including internally. which like... idk if that sounds like me. none of them sound like me. but apparently part of the Nine type can be poor introspection and therefore thinking that none of them sound like me. so that's been too much introspection for the past few days. i don't think it really has any implications on my life, but it does cause me an odd sense of anxiety in my chest to think about it.

the other existential crisis is that KW wants me to be more useful to the world. a job recruiter reached out to me on linkedin - and then followed up, which caught my attention - for a position in a truly frivolous industry with a starting pay of $100k. naturally, i followed up with the recruiter (unfortunately it didn't go anywhere), and i talked to KW about it. he was like, "wow, that's awesome, i'd definitely be happy for you if you made 6 figures... but also it's ridiculous that i save lives and am paid dirt." (i'm heavily paraphrasing here.)

he wound up calling me to chat about it and said that he feels like i don't respect the work i do - i disparage it by describing it just as "arranging rectangles". and he wants a) his partner to respect the work they do and b) to respect his partner's work, which is easier if they do. there's probably a good amount of imposter syndrome at play, and my own lack of self-confidence (it must be easy, if i can do it), and i told him as much. he said that he'd like to see me make a difference in people's lives, that i have a skill that is still (for now) relatively rare, and i could use it for good. i could help make websites for small woman-owned businesses, for instance. maybe that could be my job and i could take a step down in pay for it, or that i could do that volunteer work on the weekend or something if i still wanna stick with a high-paying, less-useful job.

i just... don't know what to do with this. i don't feel useful, i never have, and in all likelihood i never will. KW has always talked about his drive to feel useful, how that helps him feel better about himself - no matter how low he feels, he knows he's helping people who need it. and that's just never resonated with me. i don't know if it's that i'm selfish, but i think more so that i just feel innately useless. there's nothing i can do that someone else can't do better, and it would be a disservice to do something for someone when they could get someone better to do it for them. all i would do would be to come in and fuck it up and complicate their lives when i should be doing the opposite. like making a website for someone - no, they should have someone who's good at that do it. i can't take that kind of pressure. to know that if i fuck up there's actually something at stake. i will not rise to the occasion, i will not meet the expectation, i will let everyone down, and someone will suffer because i suck. that's why i don't want to do anything useful. like i said in a joking tone (but fully seriously) during a classroom mock interview during my coding program, my primary goal anywhere is just to not fuck things up. i can either have no effect, or a negative one, and i don't want to have a negative effect so i will aim to move quietly through the world and leave it undisturbed. i want to not make a place worse for my presence.

one of the things that drove me to choose KW instead of running from my feelings way back when is that he really does make me want to be better. he's always seen potential in me. in my most insecure moments i've described it as him seeing something incredible in me, falling in love with that possibility, and then being let down and leaving when i show him i'm too fearful to be what he wants me to be. i think to describe this as being fearful would imply i see a truth in it i'm just too timid to reach out and grasp. that's not the case here. i have no idea what i could possibly offer the world, and as such my life philosophy is basically the macroscopic equivalent of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

i guess this will have to be another thing i strive for to keep him. i try to be braver, i try to be less insecure, i try to be more interesting... i'll have to try to be useful. i thought i could get away without it, but i guess i was wrong.

there's a place for us

a zillion zillow tabs

god, this apartment search is weighing on me. i know it doesn't need to. i'm sure we'll be okay. i just cannot stand all the uncertainty. i literally do not know what my address will be in a month. i know i'll be paying too much rent, though. i don't know if i'll have to pay a fucking broker fee. i don't know where i'll be living, and i don't know how the lease will get finished out here. i don't know if AZ2 (yes, that's not me) and FB will still live here after may, and neither do they. will i get furniture out of the deal if the apartment needs to be emptied? i can't count on that, and likely won't be able to nearly until may begins. i just want all the answers, and i don't get them yet.

i need to calm the fuck down though, because i'm even getting insecure about KW. and that's just fucking dumb. we don't talk enough, because he's busy, because he's tired, because he's stressed... probably in at least small part because he's resentful that he can't see me. at least besides when we go on apartment tours together. and that's where i know i'm being stupid - there's no reason to be insecure. he loves me, and trusts that he will continue to, or he literally would not be searching for apartments with me. shut the fuck up, demon brain.

i'm nervous. i've never lived in a place that's just me and a partner before. i lived with ZM, sure, and that was delightful. but that was a) a very different relationship dynamic, and b) we still had roommates. i am worried i'll put too much pressure on myself to entertain KW, with no one else to sweep him up into interesting things when i feel boring. i am, as always, concerned about being enough. about being entertaining enough, and about giving him enough space. i'm so glad that he's taking this leap with me, given that i know he did not like living with a past partner. i, on the other hand, loved living with ZM. we were best friends, being around him was as peaceful as being alone and as fun as being with friends. KW and i have not gotten enough opportunities to truly be alone, to be outside of outside pressures. we've never been on vacation together, really. he visited me in Boston, maybe that counts. i don't remember doing a lot with him, but i don't remember feeling unfulfilled. i remember wanting down time with him, because we missed doing nothing.

maybe living with him will encourage me to be more consistent about my attempts to be more. maybe i'll do more art. maybe i'll study more, learn more. invest in being interesting.

it's been about 3 years since we began falling for each other again. how many more years til i don't feel like i have to strive for his love? if i get to that point, will that be the beginning of the end? i worry sometimes - backed by my therapist's hypothesis - that things with ZM being so easy is part of why they didn't last. i think i took him for granted. i was never worried about doing things to keep him, and it kept me complacent. in choosing KW, i chose a certain amount of instability, and i knew this at the time. he made me (and makes me) want to be better, want to be more than i am, more than i've been. i want to be the best that he sees in me. and i don't know where he'll take me, never staying anywhere long. there will be no settling, with him.