Cry Face

          I don't know what it is about public transportation, but I can't seem to be aboard a bus or a train for more than five minutes before crying.  When I lived in Chicago, there was about a 90 % chance that within a few minutes of sitting on a bus by myself I would tear up.  On several occasions I caught myself making the 'about to cry face' and had to change my thoughts to keep strangers oblivious to my turmoil.  Some people are just ugly when they cry, I am one of those people. 
          I remember when I first saw myself cry. I was in the make up room at a musical theater surrounded by other high school boys putting on stage make up and preparing to preform in our production of Grease.  It was five minutes until the curtain went up and I was attempting to put make up on like I saw everyone else doing.  Stage make up is dramatic and orange up close and I looked like pounded a pumpkin pie into my face.  I had never been on stage before and I think between the nerves and looking like an idiot I just had to cry, and I did.   I didn't cry for long though, because when I saw my lips curl and my eyes sag and my cheeks dimple I was to embarrassed at how ugly my cry face was to continue being scared.
           Ever since then I try my hardest not to cry in front of people, but something about being on a bus made me not care as much.  I still tried to mask my face but if tears swelled I did not wipe them away.  There were times that I saw other people cry on the bus, one instance stands out sharply in my mind, and it was not on a bus but a train.  I was on the red line train going to Kevin's to make dinner, my groceries piled in my lap and secured by a hug.  There was a girl, probably in her mid twenties, wrapped up in a scarf and a big hat, her coat cloaking what was sure to be a perfect body underneath.  She sat in a seat that faced me, the window to her right and it was strange because we couldn't stop looking at each other.
           Usually prolonged eye contact is uncomfortable and as a general rule I avoid eye contact all together, but she looked into my eyes and I looked into hers for a very long minute.  Before she broke eye contact her eye lids quivered and she turned, putting her head against the window with a thud and I watched her fight the cry face. 
          I talked to my friend Nick about this and he said, "Uh yeah, I've had some of my best crys on the Chicago CTA."  When he said that and as we talked, I didn't feel so alone.  I had been in constant shock as to the reasons I found myself crying on buses daily, I didn't know why.  What I've come to know now, is that the bus was literally the only time I was alone with my thoughts.  I was either at home with my 7 room mates, or with Kevin and his room mates or at work surrounded by angry customers; the bus gave me clarity. 
          Before I moved to Chicago I had gone almost 24 years without making peace with a single wrong that was done to me or with the decisions I have made that were detrimental to my heart.  Instead I pushed them aside and let them spoil in the angry parts of my mind.  It seemed that it wasn't until I left Kansas that I was able to face these things, these memories that creeped up on me at strange times in strange places weather it be in a public bathroom, or in the city walking to no where or on a bus.   Every day for six months since I left everything I know about the world I have confronted these memories and let them go. But not all at once, I only have the energy to dissect a singular past situation a day.
           I'll spend an entire day for example, looking deeply into the memory, as I did yesterday, of my step father pushing me down a small stair case the day after my appendectomy when I was 18.  I never forgave him and I can not bare to carry with me memories that I let go unforgiven.  So I will make peace with it, forgive myself and my past and expel the power I've given these distant heart aches.  Sometimes it makes me cry, and in Chicago it happened daily in the seat of a bumpy bus.
          People don't like to talk about how petrifying moving across the country alone is and how it shakes you to your core.  Instead they call the times that you cry alone on a bus, part of an adjustment period.   My mother kept saying to me, "Ryan, this is an adjustment period and you have to be patient."  When people say things like that what they really mean by adjustment period is, "you are going to strip everything you know about yourself away and be left with nothing and that nothingness is what people call a clean slate," which I suppose is what I wanted out of this all, a clean slate.
          The word clean is good, and having a clean slate sounds good and is good.  It is also something that to be obtained takes an abundance of bravery and it is something that when achieved feels nothing like you thought it would.  A clean slate can sometimes be the loneliest thing in the world.   On the other hand a clean slate is under-rated.  The whole, "you can't run from your problems," thing is bullshit, because you can.  Before I left Kansas and before I left Chicago people kept telling me, "you're just running away Ryan."
          They are right, I am running and I'm going to keep running.  I think the people who have said things like that to me are referring to kids, bills, shitty jobs, etc. when they use the word problems.  Those aren't problems, those things are responsibility, and trust me, you cannot run from that.  A problem, a real life problem, is when you are in a place where you've grown as much as you can but stay anyway out of fear.  That is a problem you can run from, and it's a problem that once left, cannot follow you.   I was running away from my memories, and those followed me and I dealt with them with the grace that uprooting myself gave me.  Unfortunately that process is what  Kevin didn't understand and is what ultimately ended our relationship. 
          I've been thinking a lot about Kevin.  When he broke up with me, among many things, he said, "the lack of affection is what first made me start to distance myself from you."  As I sit in this empty house in California I am churning his last words to me, picking out the things that hold no truth and that we said in anger and looking deeply into the things he said that were so true I've waited over a month to confront them; as they are truths about myself so true that to admit their validity is to surrender myself to fault. 
          Kevin is right though, I wasn't affectionate enough for him, I think dealing with my life changing outside of the relationship took so much emotional energy that I didn't have the energy to reciprocate his touch outside of the bedroom.  Kevin's understanding of quantum physics was vast but higher levels of love and emotions and the roots of those emotions floated through his brain in search of a place they could land and be understood.  He always tried to understand, I'll give him that, but he didn't.  I loved how scientific his mind was, he would sometimes read me his multivariable calculus and inorganic chemestry text books in bed while my head rested on his stomach.  I loved his mind but resented it for not seeing the me I kept hidden but was willing to release with even the slightest bit of prodding. 
          Kevin and I cooked a lot together. We were poor so cooking for us consisted of opening marinara sauce and waiting for the noodles to stop boiling.  One night while we waited for the water to boil, he took corn starch out of the refrigerator and and poured it into a bowl partially filled with water.  I had seen this done before, and was one of my favorite science experiments as a child and I leaned it in fourth grade.  It was supposed to help explain to a young mind how molecules fuse together and how they become loose and detach.  Once the water and starch mixed together it created a substance that was tight as a rock when you gripped it firmly and became brittle and cracked when you gripped it to tightly.  When you hold this substance in your fist and recline your fingers, it would slowly turn soft, then to liquid and run down your hand and drip through your fingers. 
          My heart is the result of a similar mixture.  If you hold my heart to firmly I will become brittle and crack under the pressure of your immense love.  Conversely, if you reduce your grip I will bleed and drain out of your life.  I cannot blame Kevin for resenting my lack of affection.  I cannot blame him for that because I am the one who told him to back off, that I needed time to build trust in our love before I was able to reciprocate his.  He listened and pulled so far away that I could not see him; and that is where i do blame him.  I blame him for not knowing how to hold my heart, instead he squeezed the shit out of it, then flattened his hand and watched me turn to putty and then to liquid that dripped away from his fingers and onto the floor. I blame him for that and for causing me to show him my cry face.

I wish that face was not his last image of me, because it is such a profoundly ugly face.
     

The Craft of Falling

          Someone asked me the other day what I write about.  I've answered this question a thousand times before and usually say something to the effect of, "I write about all of the stupid shit I've done."  I say things like that because the truth about what I write is devastating to my ego, because what I really write about is all of the men I have dated, loved, slept with and who have wrecked my heart.  It's hard for me to give that much power to these people and to love in and of itself. 
          I believe in and want love so much I have nearly destroyed myself in the pursuit of it and that makes me feel weak.  On the other hand I don't think most people really appreciate the strength and composure it takes to wear your heart so far outside of you body that anyone can pick it up; and when they do, to have the courage to fall in love with the same intensity and faith in another person that you blindly had with your first love.  I think I have had my heart crapped on so many times I don't feel angry anymore, I just feel grateful for the love however big or small, long or short that was given to me.  I think that takes strength and I think it means I've learned something even though I don't know exactly what that something is.
          Through falling so hard in love with so many emotionally starved men, I have experienced  love in a very different way than most people understand.  Instead they think I'm stupid, or have low self esteem but really the idea of being in a relationship with someone who has a good paying 9-5 job, a college degree and who's idea of a good time is renting a Red-Box movie and drinking a glass of wine, absolutely putrid.  I'd much rather date someone who is as unstable and impulsive as I am, and who's idea of a good time is to get bombed in a dive bar and make friends with the most worn down souls we can find in the dim lit brick corners, or who's idea of saying I love you is an apology.
          Ben once told me while he was breaking up with me, "I wish I could see the world through your eyes."  Over the course of three years Ben dissected my heart and broke it everyday that we spent together.  Ben belongs to the type of people who force themselves to be normal.  He is in law school in hopes of becoming a political leader and I want to paint pictures and write words.  I know Ben loved me, but I didn't fit into his life.  People like Ben have had their lives planned out before they finished high school and do not hold the bravery to deviate from the box they put themselves in before college.
          I think most people are like Ben.  And what that means in relation to love is that most people choose their lovers on how conducive their partner is to their life they have created in their head, in the future.  Further, it means that people like Ben are destined to a life of disappointment, because when you live in the future you become stagnate, and life and love do not thrive in stagnate waters.  I choose my lovers not by our compatibility in the future but by how they make me feel in the present. 
          I do not think by any means, that by me not having a plan and choosing unconventional lovers, that I have done myself any great homage, but I do think that the paths of love that I have followed led me to a type of love more powerful that your typical relationship.  I'm not saying that most people will never love or have not loved as immensely as I have, but something devastating and beautiful and profound happens when you love crazy.  For instance, living with Aaron in a cocaine den with a transsexual whore as a roommate wasn't exactly a recipe for a healthy relationship but we loved each other.  Aaron and I were two people thrown into the world with no plan and for a year we shielded each other from collapsing under the weight of such a gross uncertainty.
          Something beautiful happened wen I fell in love with a psychotic alcoholic.  Instead of sheltering each other, I gave my everything in order to shelter him.  I once found Justin behind a dumpster outside of the porn store he worked out crying because he knew I was going to leave him.  He begged me not to give up on him and as I held him in my arms rocking him and kissing his head knew that I wasn't going to leave.  I needed him to need me and he needed to love.  I realize now that perhaps I mistook extraordinary potential with love, but it felt a lot like love and it opened my eyes.  It gave me insights about life, love, substance abuse and of myself.

 I guess that's why I write; to reveal those insights.
        

Jen and I have been having fires every night for almost a month now for two reasons, neither of us has lived in a house with a fire place and neither of us want to turn the heat on because we live in California and are both stubbornly clinging to the idea that California is supposed to be warm all year.   Last night we were burning text books in the fire place over one of those fake logs made of compressed saw dust and oil, "Fuck you College," Jen said, throwing ripped up pieces of a used Geography book into the flames and laughing as the pages folded into themselves in coils.  She says she's not going to college next year and I believe her this time.  School smothers artists which is why I left and which is why Jen plans to leave. 
Last night Jen pulled out a book from the pile of paper by the fire place, it was Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.  "Ask the Mein Kampf a question," she said holding the book with her right hand and gesturing with her left hand for me to place mine on the book and ask it a question as if it were an 8 Ball or a deck of Terrot cards.  Resting my hand on the Mein Kampf I asked, "will I finish my book this year?"   Jen opened the book and fanned it's pages in front of me, I could smell the age of the paper as a small breeze tickled my receding hair line, I took my pointer finger and stopped a page; my finger landing on the sentence, "You can see how totally inadequate the historical education of these people is." 
"Maybe that means you need to educate yourself more about the book buisness before you get published," said Jen.  "Okay now it's my turn."
Handing me the book I took it and held it for her to set her hand upon.  "Is it going to work out with Brianna?" Brianna is the Jewish girl Jen is currently falling in love with.  Jens pointer finger dive bombed the Mein Kampf and stopped on the words, "Damedable Alliance."
"Uh oh Jen, I think that means it's not going to work out."
"Whatever, that guy hated Jews of coarse he's not going to like Brianna," she said covering up her fear that the Mein Kampf was correct in it's fortold outcome of her relationship with nervous laughter. 

We have been consulting books for years for anything ranging from relationship advice or weather or not we should go to a bar or stay in and watch Netflix.  "Should we go for a walk?" we may ask Burning in Water Drowning In Flame by Charles Bukowski.  "I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly and knew that soon I would have to get very drunk." 
"Looks like we aren't going on a walk, we're getting drunk instead."
Sometimes I think we put to much stock in the universal signs that seem to come our way. For instance Jen and I were in the San Francisco Bay area at a coffee shop when Jen said, "This would be the perfect place to open a book store." No sooner were those words poured out of her mouth, we saw a sign for the retail space next door that said, "For Rent."  Jen was on the phone with the realitors within minutes, "it's a sign!" she said. 
I feel like it was more of a coincidence than a sign from the universe, but then again it's hard to ignore such a relivent coincidence. 


"it was entirely in our power to make the movement eternal on the very first day by blindly and ruthlessly fighting for it." - Adolf Hitler.