June 29, 2013

Pillows


I feel like my life is about to take a turn. I don't know *what kind of turn* but some kind of one.

Greg comes here in less than 48 hours. I'm terrified about this. He rented a car; he will be driving to my home base Sunday morning. He will be standing in my midst. His eyes will be just as copper as ever, and he will stare right into my soul as he does. And his hands may grasp mine (or maybe not?) And we will embrace as if we're good friends, or we will embrace as if we are long lost lovers. I'm not sure which (and that scares me.)

I will want to touch his cheek, that sweet part of his face that is so completely cute when he likes something, when he smiles. Maybe I will, or maybe we will be distant. I don't know yet. I do know that he wants to stay with me, which is a great thing. He is part of my home, always.

I'm already in disbelief that he will be on a plane to LA in so few hours, and that he will be landing at LAX and texting me that he is here, and that he will grab his rental car, and that he will drive to Los Feliz, and that he will park that car and will find me and that we will find each other again.

(WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE FIND EACH OTHER AGAIN.)

I'm nervous.

He wants to ask me many things that I do not want to answer. He wants to *help* me. He wants to take care of this small soul. He is so meaningful. He means everything he says.

I am *filled with butterflies* to see him. They are fluttering like a storm in my belly. They're colorful, beautiful, wonderful, magical. Painful, though.

June 27, 2013

Nights



up top, bone marrow at black hogg (photo credit kb; instagram credit kb) 
down low: pho ga at zoia (photo credit kb; instagram credit kb)

So I tried to be normal tonight and go meet my new friend Marie for dinner and have a nice normal time. And, well, we did. It was normal. And awesome. She is a hugely warmly embracing person with pretty blue eyes and a want for new growth within her social life. I met her at my National Women in Construction meeting last week, and she's an attorney in construction law, and we will be great friends. We had a super nice time with brussel sprouts hash, bone marrow, wine and some mushroom concoction that was incredible, all at Black Hogg in Silver Lake.

So I feel like I'm living in some bad indie film these days. I do, bad. It's like a regular serious every day occurrence. Right now for instance I just woke from a 3 hour awesome slumber that should have been a full night's rest to feeling the freezing A/C in my apartment and wanting to warm some leftover Pho (which I have not done) to thoughts of Greg's visit to thoughts of my texts with Neal earlier before I met Marie to thoughts of WOW HOW IS EVERYTHING SO DISTANT from me. Everything. My friends, family, emotions, loves, everything. Yet I've come so far as to add Los Angeles and its intricacies to my repertoire.

But it's seriously a trial. I mean. I do love LA. I've made that abundantly clear here. I love the sunshine, I love the friendliness of the people, I love the ease at which living in Los Angeles has provided me. I do love LA.

But it's a bad indie movie. I take a taxi to Dodger Stadium in the morning and fumble around in my purse to find 14 dollars to pay the guy. I jump out at the fence at the main gate and walk up to my construction trailer only to enter into hostility there, since those guys find me to be...I don't know. They aren't like my awesome guys back in New York who actually cared about me, like a sister. These guys are just mean spirited.

Then I sit and hate my life, all day, wanting so badly to have a new construction job to go to versus closing out this strange one. Filtering RFI's. Looking at close out spread sheets. Yuck.

And I peer at my email, waiting to hear from Greg, and perpetually don't.

And I suffer from not having a car syndrome, which means lunch is whether I grabbed a packaged sandwich in the morning or not, or do I want to walk for tacos for lunch, or do I skip lunch. Normally, I skip.

Which means I'm losing a ton of weight, which means friends and family (if and when they see me, if at all) notice and ask about it.

I haven't had my hair cut in oh, years, so it's long and stringy and hippy. And I hate taking care of it day after day. I shampoo it and it smells nice when I leave the apartment but it's a pain.

What else? I'm just...I don't want this fucking isolation anymore. I don't want to wake up at 4 in the morning and feel so alone.

Bad indie film. Walking around like a fucking zero. Strange Muse song in my head. Feeling dizzy over figuring out who I can count on. Blah. Etc.

So yeah.
Bad indie film.
Me wandering East LA like a silent someone.




June 24, 2013

Movies

Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California 2013 (photo cred: KB, instagrammed by her, as well)

So it goes. Life shape shifts. And that is currently the status of this girl sitting on a couch in an apartment in Los Angeles with so much fear.

Life has me breaking my back, emotionally. Breaking my emotional back. My backbone. Spine.

I acknowledge here that I'm not alone. I know, I know. I know. I know. But it feels like isolation anyway. My poetry isn't coming to me at the moment so I'm sounding lame. So let's just play a quick game of exclamations, because that will make me feel nice.

I've been sporting a ponytail for 4 days now!
I watched like 6 unbelievable movies over the weekend!
I cried a lot!
Like, a LOT!
I have a new niece! Born last Monday!
Crying over good movies is INCREDIBLE!

Alright, over that finally.
What's funny is that my body temperature affects my mood a lot. Like, if I am steaming hot, sweating profusely and just awkward, I am pissed to all hell. I cannot *stand* being overheated. But if I'm *cold* I get a little cuddly, want to dive into my emotions and sink into life, sink into my thoughts. And over the weekend, I launched my Central Air A/C and it turns this home into an arctic land. While watching movies yesterday, I wore a hooded sweatshirt...hood on, and everything. It was amazing.

The real reason for my presence to this post is that yesterday I watched a movie that reminded me so distinctly and immediately of me and Greg. The guy in the film even resembled G, physically, and emotionally. And all I could think was that he is coming here this coming Sunday, and his mom got married this past Saturday, and our lives have taken such a massive shift over these months and I want nothing more than for us to live out this life movie that we've launched, even with all the pain included. Everything. So much.

I'm going to say it again. I am way deep in love with him. It may not pan out, and we may bid farewell because I have illness and he's somehow charged into life in a way that I can only channel sometimes, not as often as he. And I...I want EVERYTHING for Greg. I want him to have every every thing. He's such a kind and willful soul. His heart may be the most amazing of anyone's I've ever met. He hates taking credit for being so awesome because he feels like we are all on even territory. It isn't true! Some of us aren't there, we cannot all be such pure professors of honest love. He is, though.

Um, so he is going to be here in something like seven days. In LA.

I can barely imagine what it will feel like opening my apartment door to find him standing there. He will have this look in his eyes that I know all too well, this passion for being upright, this drive to be alive. And he will help me, somehow, conquer life's incessant pains.

In so many, many, many ways, he is my raison d'etre. 

June 16, 2013

Things

I've written and re-written this next post right around 4 thousand times in the past handful of days in my brain. I have wanted to purge so many thoughts, so many incredible small moments of my life coupled with so many awful ones: it's all a blend, a hearty cocktail of life stuff. Right now it's Sunday (and I am in agony over how much I love this new singer / songwriter I located this week who covers "Easy Like Sunday Morning" in this series called the Van Sessions) and so because of my instability of control over my thoughts at this juncture, stream of consciousness is to ensue. Apologies in advance of it.

Laundry day must happen today. I'm in grief over it because I hate doing it here in LA. In New York, it was so much simpler. Drop it off. Pay twelve bucks. Pick it up. All folded. Done deal. Here, there are maybe places to do that? But none as convenient as riding the elevator downstairs to the parking garage where there are machines and pumping in quarters and coming back upstairs to wait idly then go back down and switch it over to the dryer and pump more quarters and add linen awesome scented dryer sheets. My first world problems just seem so insignificant. Well.

I'm in a giant slump. One of those that yields nothing but the desire to clamber around my pillows in my bed and shove my cheek into any number of them and flop my arms around like ribbons. I have been having some fairly severely passionate and intense conversations with Greg here lately about depression. I may just be making an assumption, since neither of us has outright said so, but I think he and I both believe respectively that we are not respectively "clinically" depressed, rather suffer tendencies toward. And I respect that we respectively rather insinuate that to each other.

Yet, we both suffer from something. Not the same something. And when I mean something, I mean many somethings, each, for both of us. My somethings are an elephant-sized conversation that we keep not having because we're both in search for the right moment. And evidently, he is coming to Los Angeles in like two weeks. This was unexpected (it's for a family excursion but I am also a factor, it would allege) and yesterday, and this is an intro to a whole new stream of brain dump, we discussed the possibility of laying in a park, me with my eyes closed, prepared to discuss. In person. Not said, but hopefully his hand in mine. And even today I emailed him a huge mountain of important, which is that I am afraid of him. He peers inside to my very essence in a way I cannot say I've known anyone else to have done, ever.

So our plan, earlier in the week, was to FaceTime with each other, schedule it, own it. Late in the week we opted for Saturday at 11KBST (KB Standard Time) and it evolved to include burger lunch. We are so funny and awesome. That never goes unnoticed by either of us. But he had gone to his office and was running late getting back to Brooklyn and I was running late too blah and it finally wound up starting around 12:30KBST instead, and we ate burgers over FaceTime and it was fun and light but then things got serious.

Maybe it was that we desperately needed to stare into each other's eyes. I'm stating it now that while FaceTime isn't the same as being next to someone in real life? It's a fucking close second. And we just looked at each other. For what felt like forever. His eyes are uncontrollably unbelievable. They tell me so many things. They changed, through this experience, and I could read every change. Sometimes we would share smiles. Sometimes I cried. Sometimes he would rub those eyes with his fist in this way that I have so so so grown to love - it's so endearing, and beautiful. And other times, our lashes would just blink, sometimes in unison, sometimes not. And the entire time I felt so very compelled to say every single thing I want to say to him.

I don't really stake the claim that we are the most amazing two people to have collided, but I kind of do. We have so many things to wade through. I know that. But I cannot imagine us never not knowing each other, at least in some capacity. We have tiptoed into this conversation, and it feels real, regardless of anything that may leap into either of our lives and become higher priority.

So this whole thing sent my entire Saturday into a whole new sphere. And Johnny texted me and asked if I had Saturday plans and I was like, No, J, come to Los Feliz, and he did, and we drank wine and ate cheese and bread that he brought, then Seamus joined us and we all headed out for dinner at Home on Hillhurst. And in my heart, in my heavy heart that is filled with so much misery and so much poetry and music and fear and doubt and life and love, and emptiness, I feel solid. For the moment.

Hmm.
Off topic, recent amazing reconnection with Neal. From St. Louis.
He just got back to Chicago from Florida and has been texting me since, he's a saint, and I wrote:

"And today is KB day which pretty much means I basically rule the Universe."
and he replied,
"Don't you rule the Universe every day?"

Ha ha. Cute, Neal.
(Neal is a story for another post.)