12/13/98
and if you’ve read this far god bless you. i suppose this is the absolutely wrong thing to do. but i don’t know any other way to try and explain to you how i felt while i was waiting for you to decide. and in the words of a wise woman, anasuya, who knows me and loves me, “caito, you are not a lease to own program”. i love you. and i don’t know when that’s going to stop. but whatever this is, it has to.
caitlin
12/22/98
oh the taking stock of our lives. oh the examining under intense scrutiny the minorest of details. like the time i slipped and fell at the christmas holiday party and fell in the ice bucket. and then i felt young and pathetic. like i was a drunk shame faced teenager who couldn’t handle the alcohol. and i was anxsty over it for days. oh the intense scrutiny.
and now beckah is home from london. and i didn’t even realize how normal it was, it is, to have her in my life. it feels like it always felt. like this is someone who will be with me forever. the kind of friend who you’ll forgive, no matter what they do. because there’s that much water under the bridge. and there’s something to be said for that water. really.
sometimes it runs crystal clear. sometimes it runs so smooth you can see every rock on the bottom and you watch their colors change as the sunlight moves.
“with a shorter path, there’s a greater hurry. let the moment last, no need to worry… cause just when you’re sure, life can change right before your eyes.”
and the times you were sure you never wanted to let go. and the friends you thought you’d never leave, or stop understanding.
“oh caitlin, my caitlin” i miss his voice. i want to call him captain back. i want to give that to him. let him lead, let him steer, and trust that he will do well with the responsibility. maybe i get to grab the wheel when he sits down. when he gets tired, when life feels old. i want to be an old woman with him. i want to be ninety and sit on his lap. knowing no one would dare tell a ninety year old empress what to do or not to do. i want to be so old propriety doesn’t apply to me any longer. do i want to do that with him? do i want to go swing dancing with him when i’m sixty? do i want to skinny dip with him in a brook at 45? are these all things i can see us doing? what would ian and i do at 60? i don’t know him well enough to tell yet. i don’t know what he would be like even at a party over new years. and i know how jonathan would be. is that me falling back on what i know? or is that me looking forward to my future and liking what i see. “i still like who i am when i’m with you. i love it that we laugh so hard in the middle of discussions.” god i really miss him. i still wake up with him in the morning. not every morning now, but many mornings.
god here i am deciding things about myself and the two of them, and they could be thinking anything at this moment. maybe i’m too high strung for ian. maybe he’s sitting around at this very moment, 3000 miles away, and thinking that he’s not compatible with a girl this high strung. maybe jonathan is thinking the same thing i thought about him: if she doesn’t recognize how valuable i am, do i really want to be with her? do i really want to keep chasing after someone who’s already turned me away. “i’m gonna win you back caitlin. i’m not letting you go. what do you want from me?”
“i don’t know. i don’t know what i want.”
“yes you do. you know.”
“no, that’s just it. i’ve never asked myself what i want.” i’ve never let myself the liberty of answering that question. why should i be worthy of the answer? why not just try to be the girl he needs me to be? that’s why they stay in my life. that’s why i break up with them i suppose. and on my christmas card. opening it with a chill in my gut. “[Merry Christmas] i wish i were spending it with you, either curled up by your fireplace or showing you my hometown. good luck with this weekend’s parties. i hope you get everything you want and deserve. this christmas. all my love, jonathan.”
wow. how can i stay with ian? how can i pledge my love to him? goddamn it, i don’t even know the man. who he is, what he’d be like when he’s ninety, he can barely handle my freak outs now. shit. what right does he have to deman this of me? what right does he have to demand my instant love? i suppose every right. i suppose he’s thinking thanksgiving should have been enough. but didn’t i tell him, no, i forgot to tell him, what thanksgiving does to me? how i long for that person over thanksgiving? how i wish i had found him already, every year? franz, rob & steven o’donavan (different years.. consecutively) god and don’t forget cindy’s cousin david. shit, thanksgiving is my ho day. ironic isn’t it? ho day at daddy searles house. i never even thought of that. thus all the long walks. thus all the hide and go seek and sardines in the basement, or out doors if it was raining.
i’m taking a shower. i need to be with him now.
1/3/99
wow. 1999. who’d a thought? it’s kind of surreal. everyone we ran into this weekend agreed. how bizarre is it that we’re living now, in this time? when we thought it was so far away? and no calamities, no doom impending, though we all have our various thoughts on new years for next year. whether to spend it alone or with the ones we love. and who are the ones we love? hmm.
i have to call kyra, hang on a second.
1/16/99 had to arrange the formulation of a plan. we must be together for new years. to realize in one moment with rebecca sitting across from me that we’d never been in the same room together. to realize that in the book i’m working on, neither had our characters. rebecca, me, shalini and kyra. i don’t think we’ve ever been in the same room together. if we were it was at packards.
no, that’s wrong, oh my god, graduation. but maybe that doesn’t count. because it was a full on blood relation event. wow. hmm.
went to a house party last night. friends came up from la la land. they were interesting. though will i ever be old enough to not have to worry that someone in the group isn’t 21? do i care? though she really was stunning to look at, and a very wonderful girl from what i could tell. tonya. the kind of girl i still find myself attracted to. whad’ya know.
had a talk with ian the other night about our sex. the sex that we have, or rather, don’t have. ok, first off, he hasn’t had sober sex in quite a while. and let me say, arousal issues? i can’t ever tell if he’s turned on, because he needs so much physical impetus to be hard. it’s really difficult for me to guage. secondly, i had no idea how angry i was. that i felt he forced me out of my relationship with jonathan. so much of me wishes that jonathan and i had been left alone on our own path with things. i wonder what would have grown. i had the same anger towards ian that i felt towards juanita for interfering. for letting her opinion be so damned well known. like she had any right to say at all. guess that serves me right for yelling at her man, or was that after she had said shit about jonathan? that is one thing, and it will never happen again, i really hate it when any of my friends assume that they matter that much. i suppose that’s a good thing.
but anyway, back to my angel, my iwam (i want a monkey). i didn’t realize how much i sabotaged our sex. and i didn’t realize how many hang-ups he has around it all. performance issues etc. “that wasn’t too awful was it?” clearly i don’t let him know how attractive he is to me. or maybe i’ve grown used to him already? at any rate… i feel like he’s mad at me. for not finding in him a fabulous lover. but what am i supposed to do after jonathan? i don’t know that i’ll ever find that again. truly. i wonder. and i really appreciate sex. not oral sex, not fingering (though god knows i enjoy all that immensely). but sex, god, sex. making love to someone. and not being able to with ian. him not being able to stay hard in me, not being able to use a condom. you know i feel really shitty saying it, but i won’t stick around if it takes much longer. not because i don’t love him, not that i mean to be a horrible person, but because i know myself and it’s simply true. am i disappointed? it just seems like a fact of me.
ok. i’m going to try and call him now. god knows i’d be mad at me after some of the things i said about the sex we don’t have. i hope i didn’t cause any permanent damage. at least to us. but we’ll see.
iwam. ian. angel.
2/20/99
it is my thing with men.
they will leave me.
why then is death not the same thing?
would you be with a lover if you knew ahead of time they were dying?
that’s not forever either.
why then is it ok?
because he didn’t leave me because he wanted to.
not like my father.
is it really that simple?
is this where all of this shit comes from?
my father leaving?
or is it all people.
women and men alike who i hate
they leave. why bother?
what makes it worth it?
especially if they’re leaving because of me. something i did, something about me was not satisfactory. so they’re gone.
3/24/99
wow am i fickle. i write about men one after the other, and at this point, no matter how much they mean to me, they all seem so temporary.to keep you posted, i’m with jonathan again. ian and i had a passive aggressive weekend. you can laugh now if you want to, but i hadn’t realized that i am passive aggressive. i hadn’t realized that all this testing and pushing away, and taking rejection to heart (even when i was looking for a way out to begin with) i hadn’t realized that this is what they call passive agressive.
putting on my shoes in ian’s apartment, after he’s asked me if i wanted to stay, saying no, i just dropped by. don’t mean to disturb you. i’ll go. knowing i’m waiting for this fight we’re about to have. heading to the door, finding something to start with. “you know… the other night…” wanting to run away from the fight, but knowing that it has to be had. i have to learn how to ask for what i want, how to respect that what others want may or may not be something i can give. i’m just never sure.
at any rate, we’re over. and i can’t say how disappointed part of me feels that all that he promised wasn’t true. or is it that i wasn’t the person he thought he saw. i wanted him to be right. but i knew from the start he wasn’t . but we’d have never come to know each other. never become friends.
i would have never walked out on jonathan. that night after sushi. a wonderful sushi dinner, and feeling like i was home, like i feel every time i’m with him. (not so much recently, it’ll take awhile, i think, for jonathan and i to fall into the our pattern again, and probably, this time, it will be very different. i don’t know much about how i feel about him. i know after all this time, there have been very few mornings that i don’t want to wake up next to him. very few nights when i don’t want his “substantial” self next to me keeping me warm. he is so calm. even when he is upset, i can barely tell. i have to mention that to him. let him know that he can’t rely onme to guess, that it’s safe to be honest with me, that he’s so reserved, i don’t want to lose his needs.
his needs. now that we’re equal. he mentioned that actually. after i left him that night, i guess it was three weeks ago now… “please stay” “no, i can’t. i’ll end up in the same place i was in before.” after i left him, feeling like all was equal. like we’d played out that final retaliation that i needed to play. and not knowing if i was coming back to him or not, he broke up with the 3000 mile relationship, for himself. and here we are now. the only thing i’ve left to think is that it has to be this way. i never envisioned it otherwise. now it sits right.