Do You Remember?

"Don't worry you don't need to remember his name because next time you're here, he won't be around," Joyce said to Liverpool after she introduced him to her latest paramour. I almost hit the floor when she recounted that to me laughing so hard. She's been saying that about him since day one. And day one was months ago. She's gone back to the land of not believing, just passing time. Last night she bumped into L., the guy she tripped and fell madly in love with mere months after her breakup with GG. Now she can't stop thinking about him. Their relationship combusted blew apart after it became long distance and commication went from loving and missing to manipulative to cruel. She ran into him in the street yesterday and is left with the memory of the feeling she had in the beginning. The feeling she had never thought she'd feel again after GG. The feeling she never had before GG. And despite how ugly things got at the end, it's hard for her not to remember what brought them together in the first place and to second guess herself and her perceptions of his nasty long distance emails.

There's been a dearth of romance lately. It's like we forget that we ever felt it and forget what it felt like and don't even aspire towards it we are so far removed from it. ML, V and I talked about it while watching a couple canoodle at Barcade in Greenpoint. We half had no idea what it felt like and half did. We agreed that sometimes we just didn't want to remember. And sometimes the memories washed over us unwillingly, taking us off guard at the most inoportune moments, crippling us. When the moment passes we are transported back to the here and the now, the only believing in what we can see, smell and touch where being in love is like believing in Santa or the tooth fairy. Come on. Simultaneously I have been pining over Brooklyn like it's my job and Joyce is now pining over L.

Hanging out with Joyce and Liverpool last night at Bar Tabac I was reminded of High School and how we were all relationship cynics and love cynics. We didn't get it we had never felt it and even me who was bit by the Brooklyn bee right before high school didn't really get it until he penetrated through my sheild of self-protection when he told me he loved me after high school graduation. Up until that time I was lovin' em and leavin' em and feelings were never something I had. I remember when Liverpool first fell in love. I felt like we suddenly living on two different planets. How could we still be friends when the philosophical cynicism our friendship was based upon no longer existed. The night before a major math test Katri and I were at her house with the pretense of studying but instead had raided her parents' liquor cabinet. We invited Liverpool over to try to drag him back on to our team. We didn't want him to be in love. We didn't believe that faith preceded knowledge. We couldn't feel, see or smell love. Love didn't exist to us. Sex existed. Lust existed but Love? Hell no. So we proceeded to do everything in our womanly powers to drag, pull, coerce, pressure him back to our world. We teased and tortured him into fooling around with both of us to prove that he was still as laissez-faire about all that stuff as we were.

After Brooklyn, I became a love sucker. I was suddenly the biggest romantic ever. I was smart about it most of the time. Or at least D tells me I was. Supposedly I gave good advice and always managed to get who I wanted so I must have had some smarts about it. Either way, despite not always wanting relationships, or usually not wanting relationships I was a romantic. I had feelings. I got caught up in moments. I could turn a night where I hooked up with a random dude at a bar into a story of unrequited love in the retelling. I had it with LG. I had it with 31. 1982 was a magical miracle of an experience. I'm not there anymore. It bothers me that it's gone. The last guy I had it with was New Year's Eve guy. The sex was transcendental. We clicked and I hoped to see him again. I liked him. Nothing materialized and the switch went off - as mysteriously as it had gone on years before. It's like my life went from color back to black and white.

So I think about Brooklyn and I remember all of the flavors, colors, tastes and smells and texture my life had. I think about Brooklyn and despite all of my new powers of not getting ahead of myself or daydreaming even when I don't like the guy, which I used to do to just kind of 'try him on,' like hmmm ...what would that be like; I am thinking about Brooklyn. I can't stop wondering. And that's what Joyce is doing. How can we be staunch non-believers yet be nostalgic for when we did believe all at the same time?

I wonder if that is why I can't stop thinking about Brooklyn. He was my first foray. And I still can't explain it. There aren't words. There are only conflicting theories and emotions that I can't boil down into logic and reason. Once I got stung by him, my protective shield was penetrated. I instantly became my worst enemy. I betrayed my former self. Suddenly I had these feelings that I couldn't explain or understand but I knew that I was drawn to him in a way that I had never been drawn to anyone before, I was completely taken off guard and suddenly got it. I don't know if I miss him or whether I miss the feeling. It's like as quickly as I became a romantic - the Brooklyn bee sting, hearing him say, "I love you,' for the first time; the switch was flipped back the other way just as unexpectedly. And here I remain feet firmly planted in the world of logic and reason and explanation until the next bee comes my way and stings me so hard I am seeing colors again.