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Erin asked me if he made my head fuzzy and my stomach do flips and I told her no, that was the problem. I liked him fine but didn't feel that way around him, so I was confused about what to do next. It was almost two years ago, and we stood in the club sipping half-price drinks, waiting for her band to go on. I knew what she was talking about. I knew because I'd had my head fuzzed and stomach flipped the year before. The memory had faded in the ensuing months, allowing other crushes to build and ebb, but I'd recently run into that person and was right back in stomach-churning, head-pounding emotion within seconds. I'd resigned myself to the fact that it was a fleeting moment--I knew it wouldn't ever work with that one--but weeks later I was stuck in the aftermath. I didn't feel for this new guy and that confused everything. I didn’t know if I was wasting time pursuing something nice and different and not electric, or if I was holding on to an unworkable fantasy. I wondered if you needed the electricity after all.
Three years ago, or nearly, I started working for a book publisher, proofreading and copyediting the kinds of paperbacks you find in airports and at the top of bestseller lists. I worked on fiction and mysteries and military books, but I also worked on lots of romance novels, and this was much more fun to tell people about. Historical romances and cowboy romances and vampire romances and fantasy romances. As though "fantasy" wasn't already implicit. Whenever I'd tell a guy what I did for a living, he'd invariably ask if my job changed things. Did it make me expect more from relationships? Did it skew my perception of love and romance? I considered it when they asked, but my answer was always the same. No, not really, because I didn't believe those things happen in the real world. I believed in love, and was a hopeful romantic, but I didn’t believe in the fantasy. Only on film or on pages do people fall in love at a glance, are drawn inexplicably to each other, complete each other in indefinable but indispensable ways. Only in fiction is the sex that earth-shattering. That's why we write the fantasies, I said. For the electricity.
Two years ago, or a little over, I started this site. Originally I wanted to get in the habit of writing regularly, and intended it to be a diary for myself, a way to keep track of the minutia of life as well as the momentous events. Reading Austin Mike’s site made me want to aim a little higher. I started to mix in stories and essays along with the day-to-day reports and one-liners and emotional tangents. I started to aim for storytelling. Being a romantic, my preoccupations were obvious; most of my stories were about love and relationships. What it was, how it worked, finding it, keeping it, maneuvering all the complicated human interactions it involved. Searching, really, for that electric feeling that Erin described. Wondering if it existed outside of fiction written by bored housewives and the hearsay of people I knew. Wondering if it was important.
Two years ago, and a few months, I met a boy. A friend of a friend. “You should meet him,” my friend told me. “He has the same tattoo you do.” I went with her and her group to the Siren Festival and afterward back to her house where I was introduced to the boy in between getting drunk and getting food and crushing on one of her other friends. Eventually it was 4 a.m. and time to leave, and my friend said I should take a car service back to my part of Brooklyn, the boy would go with me, he lived in the same neighborhood. Absolutely, he said, and offered to pay for the ride. We talked as we waited for the car and through the drive, him all high energy and excitement. I was surprised how easy it was to talk to him, as though we’d already known each other for months and years. I saw his tattoo, nearly the same as mine, on his forearm and asked about it. He covered it dismissively, as though he was embarrassed. No, no, I said, and pulled down my sock so he could see the same thing on my ankle. “Why did you get it?” he asked. I told him as the car pulled up to my door. “Why’d you get yours?” I asked in return, and he smiled mischievously at me and said he’d tell me next time he saw me. The car sped away and I walked into my house wishing the ride had been longer. I thought it was strange that I’d thought that. It was her other friend I’d crushed on after all.
Two years ago, almost exactly, my friend invited me to see some bands play, one of which the boy was in. It was a fun night out, but a weekday, and I had to leave early. The boy was heading out too, so we walked together down to Delancey to hail a cab, him carrying his makeshift bass with him. “So,” I said after a block or two, “why’d you get your tattoo?” He laughed and deflected, surprised I'd remembered our conversation, but eventually told me. Our reasons were not exact, but had their roots in similar places. A cab pulled up and we talked through the ride back and again I found myself wishing the trip was longer, and again I was confused by it. I was pursuing other people, he was not my type I thought, and yet something pulled me. I wanted to hang out more. “You should come to my holiday party in a few weeks,” I said, and he said yes, he wanted to. We were at my house. Our mutual friends would pass the info on to him. I closed the door and the car sped away. I looked for him online the next day but he didn’t believe in the interweb, had no profile, no webpage, no way to get in touch. Our friends never delivered the info, the party came and went, and I continued on writing about boys and girls and adventures and relationships and figuring out all the things that were mysteries to me and wondering if there was something more than settling.
Last year I wrote a zine about all the boys who'd caught my attention, the uniqueness of each one. There weren't many, only six or so. I wrote about the boy Erin had asked me about, and the one I'd compared him to as well. I wrote it after I'd had my job for a year and had grown bored with the formulaic structure of every romance novel, and ceased to believe in even the fantasy of electricity itself. I wrote it and exorcised every one of those boys and all romantic ideals and went on my way.
This year my friend asked me if I wanted to race shopping carts across the Brooklyn Bridge with her boyfriend’s team. The Idiotarod. My knee was torn up so I couldn’t race, but it was mischief so I agreed. “You’ll know a couple people there,” she told me, and named the tattooed boy as one of them. I worked on sabotage and helped make elaborate plans and stood in the cold doing my best to help our team win. We didn’t come close, but still won a prize. At the finish line I saw the boy for the first time in months, since a party our friend had in the summer. For a minute I didn’t recognize him; his signature odd facial hair was gone and he'd lost some weight. But then he smiled and said hello and I knew who he was. I knew who he was and that impulse to talk to him came through again, and we followed the soundbike to the bar and drank and talked. We both intended to go home early but were the last of our group to leave the bar. We began making excuses to stay out longer. We decided to go to a party that night (“Well, I’ll go if you’ll go”), we decided to visit our mutual friends’, we decided to stay out until we were too exhausted to keep going. When I said I had to leave he walked me out into a snow that was just beginning to fall, and I thought he might kiss me. He hailed me a car and asked if he could call me. Of course, I said. This time, he had my number.
Months ago we started dating, finally, and everything fell into place so easily. It was effortless. It was exciting. It was all the things the storybooks had promised and everything I had written about and questioned. All the questions answered. I was surprised and happy, finally. Everything fit. It had never happened before. It was like coming home.
“I haven’t been updating my site lately,” I said one night on the subway. “Of course not,” he teased. “Now that you’re happy with me, what will you write about?”
It was electricity and good luck and butterflies and magnetism and fun and effortless, until it wasn’t. Neither of us had wanted a relationship, we both had other plans, but the pull was too strong and we threw caution to the hurricane winds that sucked us into the eye of the storm. We were safe there for a while. Until bad timing and old patterns and misunderstandings and insecurities and the future intruded. All of it avoidable, fixable, except for one. The rocket ships headed for the horizon.
This month I decided to stop doing this blog; it was too much time taken away from other projects. It was time to move on to new things. I sorted through old entries, thinking about putting together a chapbook, a zine, compiling the better stories. And when I read the things I wrote over the last three years, about relationships and love and boys and all that silliness, I realized what I was trying to describe and aim for was what I’d found, however briefly, with the boy. The sailor. This site and my little articles were a narrative of someone striving for that something exciting and more with someone neat, that electricity, and the adventures that happened along the way. Once it's found, the narrative's ending is natural, even if it's lost again.
Erin asked a question and I can finally give her an answer. I can say that the stories the romance novels tell are fantasy, but they are also true. Not the part where the headstrong man pursues the independent girl through trials and tribulations brought on by headstrongness/independence and relevant plot contrivances, where everything works out and the sex is always and forever exceptional. But the part where there are people you are inexplicably drawn to and there are people who you feel stronger things for than words can ever express and there are stomach flips and fuzzy heads and butterflies, always. Even after it hasn't worked out at all.
I sat in the Indiana club run by high school students next to one of the night's performers. She asked to see my zine and I gave her a copy. She flipped through and read this and looked up at me. "Did you find someone to make you feel like that?" she asked. "Yes," I told her. "And what happened?" I shrugged. "He left for the sea," I said, and put the zine back on the table.