dopamine.

OK, so all that stuff, about keeping perspective and pushing the boy away and being the Ice Queen Girlfriend? Yeah, I've realized over the course of yesterday evening through this morning that this is going to be difficult. What with him teaching me about rugby and earnestly announcing he wants to go to yoga with me (HA), and what with him grabbing me and pulling me into an extremely impassioned embrace in his sleep (no; this seriously happened), and what with the paltry attempts at French back-and-forth.

He left this morning and I was stupid with dopamine. Just really, dumbly happy. This has happened a few times since our recent shimmy (collapse?) back into a relationship. We're together and he leaves me in a pocket of chemical-laden Happy, not the truly dangerous euphoria-Happy, but the kind that sends you off to a horrifically tedious job in a swell mood. A mood in which you might employ a word like "swell."

I remain in my pocket for a couple of hours, happily working and drinking my iced coffee and occasionally replaying the more adorable moments of our interaction. And then I start to crawl out of the pocket. And the Happy comes into contact with the Fear, which gives it a finger-wagging and recounts the recent nearness of the Sad, which, while now vacationing in Iceland, could still return from its holiday any second, bringing souvenirs.

And then I am not really too Happy, because I am nervous. But I am not really Sad, because I don't have to be yet. What I am is slightly frenetic, bouncing from hits of isolated joy to stark realism, taking refuge in knowing the names of the chemicals invoked.

I'm still not in love. I live in the present, I am surrounded in activity I create for myself, I see the end like the lookouts on the Titanic didn't see the iceberg.

I'm just managing dopamine.

Confessional.

June is thick with thunderstorms and heatwaves. My legs are covered in bug bites, which I seem to acquire while sleeping.

I am falling in love with iced coffee. I am following the World Cup with an unusual degree of interest. I am working my way through seasons of Weeds. I am staving off indescribable boredom at work through the use of intriguing audiobooks and podcasts (relistening to old Radiolabs, All Songs Considered, episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher, "Happiness" by Matthieu Ricard). I am reading things about applying for jobs, and cleaning up my resume, if not yet quite actually applying for jobs.

I am also spending large amounts of spontaneous time with F., something which happened when I got back from Michigan and has continued unabated. First it was conversations about our relationship and the nature of it. And about past relationships, which we'd never talked about with each other before. And then it was conversations about everything. Our interactions have been fundamentally different. With nothing to lose, I have been cavalier, more comfortable and more myself. With his classes and the play done, he has had more time and less stress, and has been more interested in spending it with me. Wednesday we wrote together (separately). Thursday he helped me reformat my resume. Friday we shared a pizza, talked, and watched a movie. Yesterday was his birthday and we went out for dinner, which he paid for while I was in the bathroom. Today we sat in the park and read together.

Full disclosure: starting from last night, we are dating again.

I know. I know you just made the look. The disapproving look. The cringe, maybe. And I understand. I, too, would cringe if I were you. Or I might be like my mom on the phone, who at the prospect of my even spending time with F. again, declared breathlessly: "He's just using you for sex." (Which is sort of hilarious, and only demonstrates how little she understands about our relationship.) You are probably worried about my dignity, or my self-respect, or something. I get it.

And you might be right.

But, well, I don't care very much. I can't ask him to be madly in love with me, when I am not madly in love with him. I can ask for, and he has consistently provided, spare honesty. (He and Lady Love Glimmer, for the record, are not in contact, at his request.) I can ask for friendship and respect, and I have that too.

The difference is I'd like to try going into this more self-consciously aware of what's going on. Being in a relationship gives you a feeling of being fundamentally buttressed, as though you are always a part of two people, instead of one person. Hence the physical crush of the break-up. I want to be one person, this time--one distinctly separate person, essentially alone. I'm not sure if I have the perspective for it. But I have been reminding myself that I could be single any moment. I want to spend more time with my friends. I want to spend more time doing things I want to do. I want to continue being cavalier.

And I want to do what I want to do, regardless of other people's opinions, even if it's stupid or naughty or whatever else. Things are sort of messy, I guess. I don't know how they're working better while they've also been dirtied. I think it has to do with my loosening up, his lack of stress, and the new value of openness.

June: hot and stormy, and a decent background.

confronting things.

Today was the Baccalaureate service, the descending of my family and friends on my taped-together and not-quite-celebratory current existence, the slightly-more-celebratory-after-two-Greek-beers dinner, and the sort of woozily-celebratory-after-a-champagne-flute nighttime reception at the Museum of Science and Industry.

It was also the first day I didn't sob. It was also the night I received, while in a happy, post-three-drinks state, a text message from F. Saying he's sorry he hasn't given news the past few days (this confuses me, I admit; don't you typically leave people alone when you break up with them?) but if I'm not angry he's on campus tonight (brilliantly put--it neither implies that he wants to see me, nor that I want to see him). I texted back, basically, "I will get in touch with you in a while, hang on."

Then, at 10pm, back at my apartment and with everyone tucked in bed, I grabbed my bag and (clandestinely?) slipped out the door to go meet him down the block. (This is the part where, if you're watching a movie, you scream "NO!" at the heroine and wave your hands frantically to stop her.)

But fear not, fair observer of my life--this didn't end with intense apologies and begging, or sex and the status quo.

Here's the great thing about meeting him tonight, though: I looked good. Nice dress, haircut, new earrings. And he noticed. This is far preferable to yesterday, when my eyes were raw and my body was crumply and exhausted. Today I am tired, but I was three-drinks bubbly and ready to see where our conversation would go. I was protected and enlivened by my Shield of Tipsiness, ready to have our first talk with a syringe-full of not-so-nice Reality injected.

What ensued was two hours of remarkably therapeutic talking. In which we both came to understand the current situation of the other, the reasons for our reactions to the relationship's ending, and each other's historical relationship landscape. We went from the bakery to the lab to, memorably, two empty chairs in a sea of many thousand on the quad, in preparation for graduation. Here we sat and talked the longest, alone and emotive in the midst of what will be tomorrow's massive spectacle.

And, wonderfully, for the first time during or after our two-and-a-half-month relationship, I felt able to communicate. I talked and talked, without the self-conscious and rather idiotic editor floating above, and was able to feel finally articulate and open and freely expressive. It happened the way conversations are supposed to happen, the way thoughts are supposed to just appear on the air, not stifled or confused or disappearing on the way out. Perhaps the pressure of our relationship was gone and I could access something that was a bit too nervous before. Perhaps the excessive pressure of my emotions and the added confidence boost of the evening alcohol triplicate (although understand: I wasn't sloppy or seeing in film slides) had given me what I needed. Or maybe it was a combination of the two. The stars aligned and I am proud of the way I spoke tonight about how I felt and what I think. It was radically honest.

He explained himself and spent a fair amount of time taking me in. His story goes like this: he met someone and felt a sudden glimmer of falling in love, but come to find she has a boyfriend and is leaving town. He broke up with me following the realization. Now he doesn't have the girl, or me, or know what he thinks about the love glimmer, which he had learned in his youth, perhaps wisely, not to believe in. He just feels like a big mess.

I made it clear that he better appreciate that while I haven't had a love glimmer in years, our relationship was no less substantial and left me a similarly big mess. And that love glimmers aren't always the be-all-end-all. I explained my long and painful journey of following a love glimmer, which was only about 1/44968ths joy and left me with the cold realization after many years that this guy after whom I had pined was wildly self-involved, totally disinterested in me and frankly, not that great.

I didn't ask him to reconsider our relationship. Because being told that you're jello and he's just tried creme brulee (to borrow a metaphor from My Best Friend's Wedding) is hardly an aphrodisiac.

But after some long string of something that sounded a lot more like what I might write than say, he looked at me for a long time and said, "You know I don't not like you, right?"

To which I replied, "Yeah. I mean, I don't think you dislike me."

And he said, "No. I mean, I don't not like you. I mean--the way I felt about you before, I still feel that way now."

Which caused me to stare into space for a while. It wasn't an invitation. It was information.

"The nature of our relationship--as humans--is now completely different," I pointed out. Because it was, after this conversation, this conversation following two months of our greatest moments of intimacy being uncommunicative. After knowing that I'm jello and he's tasted creme brulee. After discovering that our relationship histories are the inverse of each other, even up to this moment (a climax after which a kind of denouement will necessarily ensue).

Here's what's going to happen: he's going to take some time and dig in to his emotional Stuff, analyze it and figure out what he wants to think about it. I'm going to take some time and consider why I may have reacted so strongly to the break-up, and what I want and expect from a relationship. We will reconvene, and update. But I don't particularly want to be someone's jello, and I don't think he wants to go from creme brulee back to jello.

But here's the interesting thing: he wasn't my creme brulee either.

The nice thing? We heard each other out, and we were honest and kind.

- - - - -

At one point I said, like the words had been whispered to me, "I think there are different ways to reach love, whether by falling or crawling."

the damage.

I'm taking this physically.

Here's an account of the damages: my heart is still floating somewhere up in my throat, making talking difficult if I'm not well-distracted; my appetite is non-existent: yesterday I subsisted on a croissant, handfuls of dry Cheerios, a pear, and, at 9pm, a few bites of some fettuccine Alfredo I ordered, while today I've had a bowl of Cheerios (with someone else's milk I'd pilfered), a bar of chocolate Pex brought me, and a few more bites of the same pasta (the same leftovers might stretch over for days, which is at least easy on my budget); and my body is downright exhausted, as if I've been exercising or awake for two days straight.

And the tears. It's been great waves of sobbing, until I'm wrung out, followed by a chemical stupor of calm in which I read or make calls I have to make while stable or fact-check an article. Then I last usually a couple hours before another thunderous wave comes crashing from out of nowhere--when I think about my toothbrush in his bathroom cabinet, or the movies waiting in our Netflix queue.

I feel a massive clusterfuck of emotions; eroded self-esteem topped with depression glossed over with a heavy veneer of shame and humiliation. The thing I keep saying to my friends, over and over, is It's Ridiculous, like I don't get to be this upset and I'm violating a deal I had with myself wherein I got to have a fun little fling type of relationship with an attractive Frenchman on the condition that I would not get too emotionally involved. Or, I was cavalier about the effects of that involvement, because goddammit I was going to have a relationship and going to experience all these things you're supposed to experience--heartbreak, large or small, didn't seem like a legitimate concern. Didn't even cross my mind. Because I hadn't sobbed before.

I am not inconsolable; I am casting about for healing mechanisms. I bought "Eat, Pray, Love" on a magnificent impulse with a sort of extraordinary need. I need things that metaphorically rub my back and bring me tea, things that tell me not to be ashamed, things that start making little repairs. (The phone conversation with my mother, the manhater, didn't particularly help: "Well really, I think all men are bastards.")

Meanwhile I am taking a reprieve from replying to his follow-up apologetic email which was basically the French version of "It's not you, it's me." I know he means well; he's not a malicious guy. But what I want him to see of me is not a human puddle of emotions. We didn't even exchange talk of love, and we kept a steady and consistent emotional distance, in speech. But I was burying a lot in him, silently. I was building up capital. I was preparing to love him.

But you know. He never called me beautiful. I want to be with someone who not only thinks I'm beautiful, but tells me so... at least once.

Doom.

Yep.

Newly single. I feel humiliated, stupid, and deeply uninteresting. I don't want to leave my room. I knew this was inevitable; so why am I so upset? It was two months. I wasn't in love with him.

Why is the whole world descending on me this weekend? Why is RIGHT NOW the time for intense simulated joy?!

Meh.

Meh.

Some interesting things happened but today all I feel is meh. A descendant mood. A malaise.

Rain, a headache, an out-of-contact boy after a strange and fragile conversation spelling (at least in my head) doom, a long movie about humans not connecting, a cap and gown to buy, upcoming celebrations when mostly I feel like decompressing.

(This, in favor of writing something.)

Summer Reading.*

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself - (Conversations between) David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky [almost finished]

The Color of Magic - Terry Pratchett**

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie**

The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow

Freedom - Jonathon Franzen

Fortress of Solitude - Jonathon Lethem

* * *

I've also been eyeing DFW's "Infinite Jest," but that would take serious dedication. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a possibility. I have some intense Russians on my shelf, but just now doesn't seem like the time for that. Could work on my Updike by moving onto "Rabbit is Rich." Thinking about maybe a Marquez too.

If anyone has recommendations, I'll take them.

------

*Subject to (many) additions and alterations

**As recommended (insisted upon?) by F.

cupcakes and skinny-dipping.

In the few days of school being over, things are not exactly crystallizing, but are growing into a strange and comfortable chaos, an absurd kind of closure.

Last night I went to three separate parties, and talked at all of them with great enthusiasm to people I had either just met or barely knew. I greeted acquaintances with disproportionate excitement and joy. I had two beers at the first party, a potluck; a cupcake at the next, a bonfire at The Point; and some small vodka-cranberry thing at the third, a cast party for the play F. is in. Even he was a bit wilder than normal, drinking and introducing me to the cast and disappearing and orbiting people he seemed to find very exciting. Around 1:30AM I realized he was still glowing with energy and said I'd leave, only to find myself sitting downstairs on the porch talking with an old friend and then suddenly joining a mass exodus of fourth years back to The Point for skinny-dipping. And here's the thing--honest to God, I wasn't even drunk. I am this aimless right now.

Everyone is loopy from the sudden, warm June, and so The Point was far from deserted, even at 1AM. I almost held back, but seeing everyone else stripping I realized it was unlikely that I'll have this sort of opportunity again for a long time, and that the last time I went skinny-dipping in Lake Michigan (at 17? 18?) on the opposite side of the lake was unforgettable. I thought of F. and decided to maintain a shred of propriety (seriously) by keeping my underthings on. Not sure how that validated my faithfulness; he didn't seem shaken when I texted him moments later in a sort of "HA!" fashion (i.e. "HA! Your girlfriend is insane! You thought I went home to bed but really I jumped into the lake in my underwear!") -- shoulda just gone Full Monty.

Water was warm, surprisingly so; scene was bright with public lighting and full of reactions of hilarity and approval from a big group of African American neighborhood folk--they seemed to enjoy our ridiculous and irreverent display of public indecency. You'd think 30 naked white asses in the moonlight would be more of a shock to the system, but the thing is, nudity is not terribly offensive. There's nothing violent or violating about it; a naked-assed college kid in the moonlight is as silly and vulnerable as a kitten.

The police eventually drove through the park, as they are wont to do, and caused us to retreat, but they were harmless enough and didn't even get out of the vehicle or yell at us; their goal was to get people out of the park--which closes at 11pm. In fact, they didn't even seem to care about the obvious skinny-dipping. While the audience cried, "Hurry up and getcha clothes on!" in anxious anticipation as the cops slow-mo'ed toward us with a big beam of light, we ended up dressing and leaving without even a minor incident. The world is gentle, sometimes.

Picked up F. and we went back to his place and slept to the sound of rain pattering on the window. It's alright, this being-alive thing.

Dive dive down.

Today was my first free day, and a mixed bag of emotions. I worked cheerfully for four hours, still euphoric from last night; got a haircut on the North Side at an Aveda salon called "Blueberry Moon," based solely on the name, and felt increasingly self-conscious as I was made to stare for an hour at my baggy-eyed, lopsided, awkward mug (why can't I look at a painting while my hair is being cut? I trust the hairdresser!); bought a plum-colored camera + couple of necessary cheapo accessories and felt the money draining out of my account like blood from my veins; watched a few funny and poignant episodes from the first season of Weeds on my new Netflix account; lay with my head on the boy's lap on a bench in the sun, before we parted ways for him to act (and die) on-stage in front of an audience and me to go home and scrub the bathtub and toilet with bleach; sifted through and acquired some of C's wardrobe castoffs; did 40-60ish crunches; and felt, appropriately, aimless.

I am down and up, simultaneously full of dread and hopeful. For so many months I have been in the state of dreading. Dreading the end of my undergrad and the nearness of finding a job--having my worth determined in a way even more disconnected from me than through grading (cover letters, interviews, the slick veneer of being the Professional Everybody). Meeting F., kissing him, and feeling an hourglass flip over somewhere.. dreading the quick and inevitable end to what is, in many ways, my first real relationship. Dreading the slow dissolution of college friendships. Dreading socialization with primarily people I want to kick in the eye. Oh, the dread.

But then... the promise of a life is open to me, too. Piles of books I will have time to read. Goals I can pin on a wall and work through. It's not as if the world has ended--I am still young, still curious, still want to do XY&Z. Who's to say things won't be better than I expect? But it seems only fair to expect the dismal. No one starts out wanting to sell insurance or stand in an assembly line or be a receptionist.

These are the thoughts of first-day freedom.

Help, I'm Alive.

Holy exploding Jesus in my brain, I just completed my undergraduate education.

I have no homework. I have no exams. I have no non-joyful readings.

I have no anticipation of any of these things in the near-future.

I am liberated. I am being swept toward the cage of mirthless adulthood. Please do not say the words "resume" or "cover letter" to me for a few days. I am going to exist in a suspended reality with things I want to do, like attack the bathtub with bleach, and pin up on my wall the giant list I wrote during class of summer goals and motivations, and kiss my boyfriend, and buy a camera, and get a haircut.

I'll get back to reality... soon enough.

Snapshots.

Something is telling me to record June.

It is summer in Chicago. Little insects are finding their way into my room and buzzing around my arms. Gangs of cockroaches patrol the sidewalks, bathed in streetlights. Walks home at night are comfortable. Gone are the chilly gusts that haunt Chicago three-quarters of the year. Nights are too hot to crawl under anything but the lavender afghan and mornings begin showing their face at 4am, if you happen to toss and turn and look out the window. A greater compulsion to shave my legs. Everyone walking a dog.

And that general unease with it all, partially as a result of still being in school (for one more day), partially because I'll never do this again. This is my first summer that hasn't been bookended by another school year... since I was four. It is at once freeing and confusing and panic-inducing. It is a break from the comfortable, static hum of my education--like a refrigerator hum--constantly filling the background. The hum is shut off. It is a question mark. And frighteningly, it is the commencement of the next stage of my life, in which so many lay down their subversive ideas and surrender themselves to American Idol.

Hopefully I can carry through the summer. I have a lot to record.