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downward spiral
I liked a boy once who was bad news. When we met he seemed sweet as could be, and spent the entire night saying how unworthy he was to be talking to me. But he was clever and witty and talking to him was like talking to someone I'd known for years and it seemed like exactly the sort of fated encounter where everything just clicks and it is effortless.
He was on his best behavior during our first date too, the best date I have ever had, even though on paper it was disastrous. Rain and frustrated trips to closed clubs and hours to kill with nowhere to go, hopping from bar to awful bar, looking for someplace chill and cool to hang out and hold hands and do discreet things indiscreetly. It all went wrong but we were electric.
We stood at a bar on our second date and he talked about the state he'd just moved from and the girl he'd moved from and all the fucked up things that had happened. "I'm in a downward spiral," he said, and I believed him and I wanted to join him.
I have heard guys complaining that girls only want the bad boy, the jerk, but this is not necessarily true. Yes, there are people, men and women, who want the person that will hurt them, who are trying to heal old wrongs by fixing new ones. It goes on on both sides, and the nice guys and girls who say this are usually the ones pursuing the difficult people. But it is also timing and what you need at a point in your life. You will not always want the difficult woman, the bad boy. One hopes anyway. But you will want someone who lights you on fire in exactly the way you need at that time.
He told me he was in a downward spiral and I believed him and I wanted nothing more than to join him on the way down. To give up all control and pretensions to control and see where it went with him and me and electricity. Long after the fact I realized that what he probably liked about me was that I was not spiralling down, that I might pull him up instead.
Over a year later I walked up the stairs to my apartment with a different young man, a sweet but less electric boy. I said something, I don't remember what the context was, and alluded to a downward spiral. The young man laughed dubiously, still at the start of his exploratory journey. "Why would you want to do that?" he asked and I shrugged and said something about how attractive it is sometimes. And months passed and I heard stories from him about things he'd done and decisions he'd made, and every time he'd come back to visit things seemed darker for him, and I saw him standing on the brink of the spiral and I knew exactly what was going on. You've got to go down sometimes, and hope you're smart enough to come back up.