Well, first things first: I'm (o horror!) totally psyched that I got promoted at work. This information I announced to a room full of H*rv*rd grad students with unrepentant glee. This information was received by said grad students with the stony look of a mid-nineteenth century Presbyterian Clerk of Session in a drag bar.
I, perhaps too smugly, told them they'd all sell out, too, sooner or later, but I didn't believe myself. I wouldn't have been so wounded by this encounter had anybody -- anybody in the room wanted to go out for a round of drinks to celebrate with me when I offered: self-righteous and wilfully miserable, they started whining about the papers they had to write.
In other news, got a shock when a long buried Memory of Love showed up in my inbox. Deo gratias, it was a mass-mailing to a list to which I'd forgot that I was subscribed, but for a few seconds I felt as ghastly and as exhilarated as I did in college. I'm glad I'll never have another relationship as awkward, as unguarded, as emotionally manipulative, as mis-directed, or as well-scripted. (Do I have to spell out that he was--mostly--straight?) And yet he still feels like a dangerous and beautiful drug, and kicking the habit of him still feels like running away from home.
Curiously, on the T tonight coming home from academia, I ran into the last person who gave me hell about this particular subject. I don't know why she brought him up -- I was over at her apartment for dinner, and, well, I said something suitably bitter and skin-crawly about the Memory of Love, and she, since she keeps up with him, tried very hard to crowbar the him I loved and hated from the him she knows. She and I were on different planets. It might have been the cheap Chilean merlot, which always reminds me of spring nights at college, but then and there I needed to feel the reality, the validity of what I felt for him back then. Not a wise social choice. She and I haven't really made the effort to see one another since then.
This falling-out-let was totally unnecessary and, like, tragic, o my droogies, since, in all other places and times, and with any other taste in the back of my throat, I would be the first to admit that some loves are not worth the poems they're written on.
God, I haven't thought about him in years. It's years, which is incredible since I only really knew him for a couple years, and the doppelg�nger he sent with me when we parted company has nearly outlived the time I spent with the real him. And when, as tonight, I take it out of the tissue paper to look at it, its colors are just as fresh as they ever were, even if they are last season's.
Never give your children Dante and Petrarch to read. My parents should have gouged my eyes out rather than give me the Canzoniere for Christmas. Had MLJM not steered me towards the Spectator in that dark hour of the soul, I would have sacrificed all my dignity to that fat-arsed Paphian bitch and her sick sense of humor.
Love's a lovesome thing, god wot,
but Prose is thy salvation.
"love",
a