Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2001-12-23- 2:18 a.m.

Where I Ended Up and Where It All Began

I can’t believe she still trusts me. But, that thought passes quickly, because with a moments thought I realize that she almost certainly doesn’t. She wants me, which I know for a fact to be something completely different. And the fact that she still wants me is what I find surprising, even though analytically I can make perfect sense of it. We all have at least one person who we were with, and who we wanted with all of our being, and who left us without any explanation. And we have all lost a little sleep here and there, wondering what was wrong with us that we couldn’t see but that person so clearly could. And just like her, we all thought about how that person just might come back, and want to be with us, and show us that there really wasn’t anything wrong with the world.
See, it all does make perfect sense. Not that it surprises me any less.
It is three years since I stopped making late night booty calls to Aillie’s room, just stopped making the calls around ten o’clock, and disappeared from her life without an explanation. For the next two and a half years that we were in college together, I wager she barely even knew I still went there. And now I am in her dorm room, about to enter her for the first time.
I am beginning to appreciate the fact that my life seems to travel in a lot of slow lazy circles. I hated college when I went here; couldn’t wait for my chance to go out on my own into the real world. And yet, here I am, spending my weekend visiting. I hated the Drag Race when I went here, didn’t even go the last two years I was in school. And now it is the highlight of my weekend. I didn’t care at all about Aillie when I would call her up late at night and walk over to her dorm; I just was horny and she was an outlet for that and not too hard on the eyes. For a little release I would listen to her say sweet things and echo a few noncommittal ones myself. I guess I saw it as a bit of massage for her conscience. And now I am hovering over her naked body, trying to convince her that I am not an asshole while she patiently waits for me to let her put the condom on me.
It feels strange to be learning how to do this all over again, to be reentering the world of sex without love. It feels unnatural to be naked, hovering over a body that I am not intimate with. This used to be my specialty. I used to feel more comfortable in new bedrooms than in my own. And now I don’t know what to do. I want so badly to be able to love her. I want us to be two people who care for each other, want to feel a sense of joy in addition to lust. I want to feel at home here, here inside this crappy dorm room and inside of this girl.
I can see on her face that she wonders at my hesitation, and I run my hands over her body to assure her that my desire isn’t waning. Like a mongoloid child invading a Mensa meeting, the desire to say “I love you” forces its way into my thoughts.
This isn’t the first person I’ve slept with since Lynn; that was easier and much more awful. I was eager, and it was lusty and desperate and painful. The next day, Lynn slept with her first person post-me, and bravely and tearfully confessed it to me on the phone. I didn’t do the same; I didn’t want to exonerate her by revealing my similar ways.
In this moment though, I can’t seem to get started. It isn’t for a lack of interest; to be truthful, my entire body tightened with desire the first moment that I saw Aillie tonight. But I can feel the moment becoming strained, and bite the proverbial bullet.
It goes well, much better than I expected. Strangely, after all this time, I find myself plagued for the first time since my first time with doubt. But it goes well, and when it is over, we both lie there satisfied.
And then she pipes up with a reminder of who I used to be, when she asks if I’m going to run out in ten minutes or so. The strange thing is that never occurred to me, but I have to use a voice I only vaguely remember to assure her that I will stay the night. And as I lie there, smoking my cigarette, I think about how apt that question used to be, and how bizarre it seems to me now. As I look out into space lit only by the tiny pinprick of light from my cigarette, I feel her curl up next to me and realize that I have no idea who this person is lying in bed with her. I think about all the places I’ve been, and how it came to be that I ended up back here.
And I am still surprised.
It sucks, but I can’t really define when it all began. I can’t reconcile it; a person should be able to know where things happened in their life. There should be well-defined markers, like mile markers along the highway. But life refuses me; and things happened at first without my really noticing.
I didn’t mean to come here for college. Up until two weeks before the first day, I was utterly convinced that I would be matriculating at the University of Toronto. It was everything I wanted; the largest group of undergraduates in all of North America. All of the college guide books spoke of schools where students could go and not feel like a number; I, on the other hand, wanted to be less than that. I wanted to be a fraction, a decimal. I was sick and tired of being noticed, of underachieving. I craved anonymity. And then I ended up at a college with a total student body that was less than half the population of my high school.
I don’t know when SHG and I first became friends. I know I met him sometime during the first week of L and T, the three-week seminar freshman students had to attend before the start of regular classes. I wasn’t a freshman; I was coming in as a sophomore transfer student, but due to a failure of my school in Jerusalem to transfer my credits in a timely fashion, I was forced to attend.
I’m not sure how we met either. I remember one of the first times I saw him; we were outside of the dining hall (God, it’s funny how we never really went there again). He was still looking like some sort of outdoorsman, still wearing the outfit he had become accustomed to during his year of drug counseling. Somehow, we ended up throwing a party together the second week, picking up four-quarter kegs to help enable the other kids for whom this was their first time living under a roof that didn’t belong to their parents. But we weren’t friends yet, and we didn’t see much of each other. Living on the opposite ends of campus was a large part of it.
But the truth of it is that there was something about him that frightened me. He was massive, six foot four and two hundred forty pounds of former high school All-American linebacker, covered in scars and radiating an intensity I can’t really describe. His eyes belied his soft-spoken speech; they burned with a quiet ferocity. He ran against what I thought I wanted from college. He didn’t seem capable of frivolity. And I worried about what would happen to me if I became his friend.
He didn’t tell me until much later, but he felt the same about me in the beginning. I didn’t realize it, but I had much of the same in me. My skin was darkened by months in the Negev desert, my muscles taut from marching up mountains and a summer spent training in martial arts under a former Marine drill sergeant. He saw plain on my face that I was trying to run from something, and he could tell that it was a place he’d feel at home. And that wasn’t why we had come to school, we wanted to get away from ourselves. I can realize now though that home isn’t a place. Home is something inside of you, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t truly run away.
But in the beginning, we stayed true to our natures. We fought it.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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