9 Woodside Park Road, London, England N12 8RT.  It’s a flat, a long hallway, really, with a door every two feet.  I walk up and down the hallway, a model with low self-esteem on a runway without an audience.  I understand Eliza Doolittle more than ever: “what’s to become of me?” I ask aloud, but not in a cockney accent, acknowledging my own dialect limitations, and respecting my neighbors. The houses are so close together, someone could hear – although probably not, because each one is surrounded by enough shrubberies and flowers and trees and vines to muffle a live heavy metal band.

I ask, but there’s no answer.  It will come soon.  It must be stuck in traffic.  Or on holiday.  Or in a queue. 

This all started because I’m going to see Pygmalion tomorrow afternoon at the Old Vic.  That’s all.  Except that it’s not.  I’m just fine and then I’m just far from it.  I’m better at this now than I have been, I know that, but it can’t happen anymore.  It’s a choice – I can be grateful or have great expectations.  One means contentment, the other resentment.  I’m starting to sound like a slam poet and a preacher in one.  I don’t have the strength for either.

My father is refilling his wine glass, this time not with Chardonnay, but cereal and rice milk.  He’s applying an absurd amount of concentration to it, and some’s going onto the table, some into the glass.  It’s a Kix Commercial.

And it’s very funny, except my mother told me earlier today that he’s drinking more than usual.  Nothing is effortless for him right now.  She was driving my car while I ate gluten-free pancakes with tofu cream cheese.  I kept reaching over to operate the windshield wipers.  I couldn’t decide if she didn’t know how to do it or didn’t care.  Life is a telethon of trouble for everyone I know.  There are dandelions of questions, and no killer answers.  I know God’s good, but he needs a better marketing campaign.

I apologize for all this, which is the literary equivalent to TJI Friday’s frozen hors d’ouevres – small, cheap, leaving you hungry.  Like Hannah Warren in California Suite, I seem to be incapable of an honest thought or emotion. 

All right.  I’m mad, and worried, and scared, and sad, and tired, and out of ideas.

You can’t expect anything from people. It’s like sitting them on a stool, saying, “hold still” and trying to paint them. They’re going to blink, or start slouching and eventually they’ll have to go to the bathroom. And anyway, it’s your image, not their identity. You are prioritizing your perception over their reality. This is not true love.

Emotions are the result of unfulfilled expectations. God gets angry, jealous, happy…so He has expectations, doesn’t He? Yet He’s capable of true love.

This all came up as my friend Jason and I sat in his living room, lit only by the extraterrestrial glow of the TV set. I was playing with his son’s literally brick-sized Legos, separating them by color, then building something that resembled a hawk’s talon, and after a few alterations, a neck brace. I told him I couldn’t make sense of things because I have compulsive sympathy – I believe whoever’s in front of me. I decide something, then undecide it because I resent having to decide to begin with.

Today is Thursday. Not Wednesday or Friday. Thursday.

I know that.

“The Way You Make Me Feel” summarizes most of human love.

We expect our partner to be a main supplier, keeping us stocked with self-worth. We expect them to be an electric blanket and a roller coaster and a slice of cheesecake. I want them to want me, so I feel wanted. And yet – that’s not all of it – I want to return the favor.

I’ve always thought of friends and lovers as synonymous concepts. I don’t have acquaintances, I have commitments. If there was a more masculine equivalent to those heart friend necklaces, I’d hand them out to the critical few. But, this is my main mistake – assuming the sincerity and seriousness is mutual. I don’t think it has ever been. I tried to tell her the other night, but I ended up saying I didn’t want to lose her. It’s just the opposite – I do – I want to drop her like a cigarette down a sewer grate and never see her again. She has hurt me like no one has.

The truth is something we have to live with. We shouldn’t have to be told it as well. That’s a cruelty I’m perpetually unprepared for. And she did it.

I don’t have grudges, but I do have memories, and they always play back at the most inopportune moments; right when someone’s criticizing or suggesting, their voice becomes white noise, and their past actions become a siren increasing in volume and pitch, canceling everything out. I don’t resent, I just remember.

I cannot, and will not, possess people. There are not pets, or pieces of art, or precious stones. Whether there are near or far, I will abide. But I am done pretending I invited loneliness in. He decided to invade and sit on my couch and hog the TV. It must be because everyone is already or is going to be married. It’s making me feel like the lone survivor of a plane crash. Everyone’s staring, saying, “Oh my word, how is he alive? What’s he going to do now?” I’m this statistical impossibility, or novelty, or something. It seems like there’s no room left in anyone’s inn for me. They did it to Jesus, why wouldn’t they do it to me?

“No one thinks that”

“You’re making it all about you”

“Lots of people don’t get married”

“You haven’t me the right person”

Why thank you. That didn’t make it go away.

Caffeinated tea creates this craziness. It’s 3:30 am and I think if I write until dawn I’ll reach a solution. Untrue, but seductive nonetheless.

I would have waited in line (even longer than I did for a free Prince concert in Bryant Park) to hear this one sentence: “The essence of sin is rejecting our dependence on God.”

Self-reliance is the ringleader. It promises a flamboyance of elephants, clowns, scantily-clad women. Then it raises its whip and enslaves us.

Every challenge is a chance to cuddle closer to God. I’m much warmer when I do it this way.

“When you dig down deep
You lose good sleep
And it makes you
Heavy company.”

I wish some horrible hodgepodge of sounds would go off when I start my egocentric analysis. A combination of babies crying, Jimmy Buffet songs, motorcycles revving and Fran Drescher laughing…I mean, maybe then I’d stop. “Egocentric” isn’t strong enough. It’s satanic.

New York. She’s a bitch, but she’s not to blame. It was my brain. I velcroed mind and metropolis together, so when I moved away it was an illusive retreat from the inescapable.

Now of course I’m doing the sticky-crackling detachment. Understanding that they’re two things. And I owe New York an apology. I’ll be doing it in person, May 2nd-5th. We’ve been lovers, maybe now we can be friends.

God. Give them the courage to put an index finger to my mid-sentence lips and say, “I accept your intellectual armor. I admire you for something else.”

God. Give them the carnal creativity to leave NC-17 post-its about my anatomy on my computer screen so I know I’m loved for superficial reasons.

God. Give me restless curiosity to ask about every axiom, pet-peeve, hidden delight and phobia they’ve ever had, or are having, or think they will have.

God. Give me the stamina for selflessness, so at every situation, I understand what they want, what they need, and what I can do.

God. Give us one another.

I know two people – they seem to fly five thousand feet above life. I stand down here and hope they’ll skywrite my name, or hello, even goodbye, something I can identify as decisive. But nothing.

Their philosophy? Friends, promises, memories, these are concepts to be considered occasionally, but they do not need to be called, or kept, or remembered. They won’t visit you when you’re in a mental institution, but they will when you move to New York. They’ll loan you five hundred dollars, but they won’t attend your wedding. They won’t return calls for six months, then they’ll show up at your Halloween party. They aren’t unreliable so much as unfathomable.

The cashier at the grocery store has spent more time with them then I have. I feel like it’s Charlie’s Angels and I’m Farrah Fawcett and they just kept going without me, and it’s wrong, and weird. Do they have new friends? Do they need friends? Do they need anything but themselves? Because that’s beyond understanding sad.

I only had a few spare keys made, and they’ve still got theirs. I can’t get them back, it doesn’t work that way. I’m on their key ring, attached, always. And every time they open their car door, or apartment door, they look at it for a second, and say quietly, “what is that for again?”