Pandemics vii.

Asparagus Porn aka How I Spent $7 a bundle at Local Grocery

Roasted Asparagus Stalks, Chicken Cakes and Horseradish Aioli aka Pandemic Dinner on a Tuesday

Note: Pandemics viii. to follow, a segment Part ii. of my Trifecta Relationship Entries

Didn’t make it back into the computer yesterday to complete the entry that’s been whirring in my brain for some time now, so, thanks to Mr. Garbage Truck and all of his clumsy commotion across the street at 2AM, here I am, wide awake to get some thoughts on display.

Before I begin, a couple of things (not as lengthy a dissertation as yesterday’s that evolved into its own post):

Tomorrow, well, this morning, I guess as it were now, I have a “preliminary” call with a reputable General Contractor’s internal HR representative to discuss a Project Manager position to which I applied (yesterday morning – heard back within an hour of applying, which could mean a number of things: my resume shines, and / or they had to let go of a number of people when this Pandemic took us all by economical, physical, emotional and anxiety-inducing storm in late March 2020 and now it’s time to reassess staffing for New York’s construction industry doors to reopen?) For whatever the reason, I look forward to the chance to discuss the opportunity and the potential of my qualifications to fit the open role.

To that, no word from Rob all…day…long yesterday (I texted him vaguely in the early afternoon to let him know of the call.) Until 10:54PM. I’ve been my own rock (*mostly*) with regard to his seeming emotional distancing since the onset of the Pandemic. In other words, I don’t drink myself blind and text him angrily about his lack of communication these days, or his aloof varieties when he does so choose to insert any sentiment whatsoever in my direction. I’m proud of me for this. I do possess somewhat clingy, needy, desperately drowning SAVE ME! SAVE ME! tendencies, not only with him in recent history, but also in other relationships of previous years. Yet this Pandemic has (gifted me?) granted me a different version of me whose interior and exterior emotional components are hardened and independent in a way I’ve not had to experience in a fairly long time. But last night, standing at the kitchen counter hovering over a smashed wet mound of raw ground chicken, seasoned bread crumbs, Cajun spice, scallion slices, etc. (similar to ground turkey meatballs only with chicken, see food photo and though the chicken “cakes” fell apart upon flipping in the pan, still quite delicious with their horseradish aioli), I couldn’t prevent the torrent of tears. I cried uncontrollably for nearly a full two minutes, angrily wiping the salty wet tributaries from my cheeks with the backs of my hands and breathing to still myself. / So I ate dinner, asparagus was my guilty pleasure purchase yesterday (enough stalks that I can spread the wealth over several meals at least), gulped a glass of milk (my Pandemic comfort go-to for some peculiar reason?) and partially cleaned my kitchen, clambering into bed by 10PM, lights off, phone on bedside table in the event Rob might reach out. / Well, he eventually did: “Sorry, rough day here. I’m ok. Good luck with your call tomorrow.”—10:54PM.*

*Insert this: my first thought wasn’t along the lines of, Thanks for the plain and vague note, you asshole…it was: Oh no, Rob, are you alright? What happened to you today?

“…all the way to New York / I can feel the distance getting close / You’re right next to me / But I need an airplane / I can feel the distance / as you breathe / Sometimes I think you want me to touch you / How can I when you build a great wall around you / In your eyes I saw a future together / You just look away in the distance…” –Tori song in my head when I began to bawl over raw chicken last night.

Last item of note before I push through the double doors of the historical KB relationship room where I will at least skim the surface of what I promised my therapist we’d discuss this coming Saturday on our call: I’m craving, pining for, needing homemade chocolate chip cookies. I don’t have a sweet tooth typically, nor am I a baker, however the purity of the warm chocolate chip cookie (with a chilled dove- white glass of milk!) is something I’m wanting right now. Once (if) unemployment insurance money floats itself in my direction, and after paying bills, that is high on my list of kitchen missions.

In essence, this Pandemic isolation has me thinking on overload hours on end. I’m *always* an overthinker, but without the distraction of daily routine and work tasks and meetings to run and people to make laugh or perform to their commitments, I am left (in an abundance of solitude) with nothing but overthinking to do.

I’ve been focusing most currently on the differences / similarities between my time spent with Greg, Jon and Rob. Greg wasn’t as much a factor (other than the previously posted oddities of the parallels between him and Rob) until today, when I absentmindedly opted to read ancient (6-8 years old so not so ancient) posts I’ve slapped up regarding him and our relationship travels. Now he has become part of this confusing yet peculiarly perfectly placed trifecta of past relationships of mine. And, for the sake of semantics, the entire unfolding would fail to be a trifecta without G’s historical participation.

I want to make mention, first, of the inadvertent approaches I took with each respective individual. To summarize in a few words, each:

Greg: I needed faux film flair experience in my life, to feel as though I were floating through my own B-grade emotionally distorted, sometimes dark yet adventurous and picturesque movie. With G, I had that, until the very severely saddened and embittered conclusion.

Jon: I hungered for attention: sole focus on me, only me. G had become (well, always had been, I believe, in hindsight) quite self-centered (not in a cruel way) and more about his wants and needs, whereas the moment I would enter one of our Midtown Manhattan happy hour bars to meet Jon back in our barfly “friendship” days, no one else in the occupied space, actually, really no one else in Midtown Manhattan, for that matter, existed except for me. I was the proverbial “only one in the room” for Jon. And that lasted for quite some time, to the point where I opted to choose love with Jon over eternal emotional imprisonment (sorry, G) with G, and all the while, I wound up neglecting Jon, his needs, his desires and impressive personality characteristics and underlying selfless nature, which broke us apart in the end. I didn’t realize any of this during any of that. I just thought I was being an attentive and loving girlfriend, when, in actuality, I was sucking his pure soul right down a dirty love drain.

Rob: …well, it’s now Thursday, early morning (I’ve been going to bed around 9:30-10PM out of sheer despair at each torturously isolated day) and I’ve mentally labored over how to summarize my feelings for Rob. (Insert: no texting again all…day…not…once…until 12:32AM: How was your call today?) We met in the unconventional / now-conventional online-dating-site-way back in, I suppose it was late February or early March of 2019. I hate those sites but I think I was tipsy to the point of teetering on a lonely edge one evening and signed up, uploaded a vague profile and like *one* pic (or two) and referenced myself as something of an outgoing loner and shot it into the virtual ether. And Rob was only the second actual profile that caught my attention quite specifically, the first being my dear friend Alex who is polyamorous, married with four children, lives on the side of a mountain in deep Jersey and now also houses his wife’s boyfriend under the same roof.*

*Not my mode of love speed, as I am a quite monogamous human being though I do not judge others’ choices therefore Alex and I have remained friendly.

So, Rob and I exchanged “messages” through the website for a week or so (he knows better than I, as he evidently took screen shots on his phone of every exchange – not sure if he still has those saved?) but at some point I grew extensively weary of the site “app” itself and brazenly sent him my actual cell # and basically requested that should we retain an interest in one another, that we move on to texting, and within under an hour he had texted me from his cell and even did one of those “—Rob” signatures at the end of his first text.

(*KB pauses to review year-old screen shot text exchanges with Rob saved in phone:

May 27, 2019 (after he disclosed to me that he was in the depths of a separation from a wife):

KB: Am I stealing you from a life you should be in?

Rob: Or are you stealing me to a life I should be in?

Also May 27, 2019:

Rob: I was going to guess your eyes were greenish-blue. Perhaps gray, depending on the light. Whatever the color, I will stare into them until it hurts.

June 1, 2019 (because we had this ongoing discussion about how we seemed to be / believed ourselves to be the same person):

Rob: Should we make sure we’re not related or something?

…ha ha.)

And in my KB / Rob historical research, it was confirmed that June 14, 2019 marks the anniversary of our ever first in-person date. Insert heave of love sigh.

Byway of memory and re-reading of old exchanges and feeling the deep depressions permanently pushed into my heart and brain, I can recognize how Rob captured me with his words and shared music from the incredibly early onset.

From a KB Elements post dated August 25, 2019, re: Rob:

You…adore him, right? (Blushes furiously.)

I’m madly in love.

So what do I do?

Just…keep falling?

Those days…the days I’ll never forget: walking down the streets of Midtown Manhattan protected by headphones, listening to songs he shared with me, or, I with him, blushing furiously, smiling like a mental patient or like a starving person just served a steaming plate of cheese fries; the moments piled around me like cozy pillows, reminding me that people can and do find one another in an otherwise sloppy choppy sea of dissonance and unrelenting relationship hardships. / I was (am) utterly taken with this man, Rob.

I realize we’ve had our share of shared missteps and confusing undertows. Much of that circles around his pending divorce, which has him agitated, hurt, in fear of how it will pan out in the long run, and some of it circles around his local contingency, none of whom I’ve met and most whom do not know of my existence because he’s embarrassed, ongoing, by the feeling of “failure” in what has evolved into a failed marriage (even though she was the moron who cheated on him in multiple calculated instances, leaving in her wake a precious, kind, caring, handsome, hilarious, sensitive, understanding, literary, innocently alive and relative-to-the-world man.) (She’s not on my top 10 favorite people list, though I’m sure in a different lifetime we’d get along given that we’ve both loved Rob at our own respective capacities.)

(And it is my understanding that at a minimum, his best friends Nancy and Brian know that I exist.)

I’ll revisit my earlier posted Elliott Smith lyrics and how they feel so relevant to what I want him to understand from my side of things:

Wish I knew what you’re doing / And why you want to do it this way

He’s requested countless times of me that I respect his space while he proceeds with the filing of paperwork and the actual forward motion of divorce. Some may judge me and feel that he has used me, but his sincerity is too potent and unimaginably tangible for me to believe that. And were I to accuse him of such abuse of us, it would dig into him deeply and it’d be unfair. After all, aren’t we all using each other in some respect for, at a minimum, companionship? He and I just collided our worlds in a time frame that, while not ideal given circumstances, still granted us with very meaningful love, respect, compelling physical attraction, tons of blushing, flooding of intellectual exchanges and the potential to sculpt something miraculous with one another in the future.

And if our paths don’t curve in that direction, I will never regret that I got to have, see, touch, feel, live, dream, have this.