Notebook

He argued the Moleskines notebooks were not white enough. "The pages were too gray, not enough white. Hard to take notes." 

He bought the last batch of Dutch journals by Henzo. Then he moved onto Leuchtturm. It was OK he said, it was decent but still, the paper were not as white. 

He wrote meticulous notes, some were for his projects, some were for his trips. He got out one book, a Henzo journal that was written from January 2001 to March 2002. He dated three women during that period. A naughty nurse, an actress and a young woman who was pretty but volatile. He inserted their photos in his notebook, alongside of his designs and trip journals.

I had requested to be no photos of me, of any sort to ever appear in his notebooks. I insisted on it - it was important that I remained anonymous in his world.  I existed as a friend, not a lover, not anything more.

I needed not the attention nor misconception of our relationship.

Earlier that evening, we went to the Avenues for food. It had become a tradition of a sort. He called them "our dates".

"It's our date thing. Our own thing." He would grab my hand and say to me, as if I were someone he dated. He did not date me. I did not consider him my date.

"It was just a thing." I said.

He was like a little dog, ready to ride in a car with the window down. I did so because I knew he would enjoy the ride, and the Avenues, also known as the Sunset, was foreign to us and unoccupied by yupmeisters, it was still stuck in the 90s. I liked that anonymity where my social life was concerned. We often ended up at Taraval, or Noriega, sometimes Vicente.

"I took on my projects, to try to find meaning. I am obsessed with it because then I won't get so depressed." He confessed over chicken and rice, sipping a Hong Kong milk tea.

"Did you ever get depressed? I did not know that." I asked as if it was the first time I met this version of him.

"Yes. I do. Often." He admitted it while looking at me. From an angle, he was not a bad looking man. Certainly a lot younger than his true age, younger than most people who were ten years younger, even. He was fit and lean. He had dark unruly hair and extremely tall nose. He had that northeastern side of him that he could not shake off, even though he's been living in the West Coast since the 90s. I half expected his Bostonian accent to slip out sometimes, but there were none.

"Hmmm... I did not know that about you." I should have but I did not.

He advised me to find someone, to be physically intimate with.

"I thought that I found that person." I argued.

"But then.. it just did not happen that way." I sighed.

"There must be thousands of people who would want to have sex with you. Have you looked?" He asked genuinely.

"No,  I have not. I thought that I wanted that. Just some fun. But I did not. I couldn't. It is the best to be alone. I had no idea how I went from who I was to who I am."

Reading his notebooks gave me a slice of his inner works.

We read together lying on the couch. Friday night, we read. He shined flashlight over his notebook, I tried to decipher his neat, small handwriting. He did not write cursive notes. They looked like neat prints. He wrote left handedly, like my father, like my grandmother, like all my ex boyfriends.

I knew he wandered into Ground zero. According to a notebook from 2001. I knew that he vacationed in northeast. He met up with one of his girlfriends in New York City and they took trips to Brooklyn. There was an old subway map, before the re-routing of A, C, 1 and 2 train happened. His uncle lived in the Upper West side, they visited him often when he was a kid. Boston to New York. I used to take that train, first regular Amtrak, then came Acela Express. I thought I would live my life, Boston to New York, train ride every other weekend, but I ended up in San Francisco, two children, two houses, one of which a white picked fence Victorian. Now I just wound up running into people who escaped their Northeastern life to be here, voluntarily and happily. Like him.

I knew the comings and goings of his women. He described them emotionlessly like his projects, like things, like hard cold metal objects lying on the work bench. Women were objects that he occasionally stuck his penis into. They were not friends. He bonded with them superficially. He pretended to listen to them so that he could get into their pants. He wanted to control them, to feel the intellectual supremacy over these ordinary women with decent, but not intellectual jobs, with limited exposure to the world, but dreamed of settling down with an intelligent man like him and raise smart babies with, they dreamed with such a strong determination that one day they could change his heart so that they, not the women before them, would be the one he would marry. 

I wish that I could tell them that they were sadly mistaken. He had never ever felt that bond with women. He used them until he got tired of them. He treated them as his projects, he was passionate about them until he finished building them, then he would be onto other things, other inventions, other women with nicer boobs, blonder hair and wider smiles.

I wish that I could tell them, but then they might just say to me, "He did not want you. You were just jealous." I wish then I could contradict their theory, "No, that's actually not true. He liked me. But he liked me liked a friend. Someone he respected and someone he cared. That scared him. So he could only be a friend to me. As for me, I never loved him. I loved someone once, but he was not that person."

I read his stories, his emotionless count of journey back to Providence, and back to New York, and then I looked at those pictures of his women in scaly clad clothing, like a porn inserts back in the day.

I wanted to go home. I was becoming bored. But he wanted me to stay. So I read some more of his notes and stories.

I was in pain and I needed to head home. I had been sick from a non cancerous growth. Inside of me an alien was forming and it was going to eat me alive. I needed to see a surgeon, not an inventor.

He wanted me to read more stories. He wanted my company, I could tell. Platonic company that kept his mind off depression. A woman he actually liked, respected, and perhaps secretively attracted to.

I wanted to go home and cry. I missed my intimate relationship that I had once with someone.

I did not know how to handle an intimate relationship. I did not know how to love someone half way and not all the way through. I did not know how not to be a drama queen and how not to freak out when he started to ignore me. I did not know how to be turned on and then off. I could only stay on or stay off. I figured that I'd need to stay off, this time, for my own sake, for good this time.

My heart belonged to someone else. And when that someone left the scene, it did not matter who was in my life. So I cleaned house. First people then thoughts. I had cut out every thought that led to my yearnings for that physical and emotional intimacy. I had to stop thinking. Processing. Craving. My mental capacity was extremely limited, as it turned out. It was easier to shut it off then to keep it half open, open for lunch but not dinner; open for coffee but not for happy hour.

In that gap of lack of possibilities, I met him. Since then, he and I had formed this really strange relationship. More than a friend but not quite a lover, some sort of platonic relationship yet not exactly without sexual tension on rare occasions. When he was drunk, for instance. At which point, I would simply get up and take off.

I liked reading his notes and stories. I liked discussions we had. I believed that he liked me like a friend. A rare, platonic friendship that we had struck some months ago, had grown like wild mushrooms in the dark forest where Snow White was last seen hiding, after a storm. You did not know if it was poison or not until you took a bite at it. And if you did decide to venture out, it was almost certain that your fate was sealed at that moment. 

I wanted to see him again. Maybe in a few weeks and we'd get drunk and then I could ask him to hold me so that I could cry. Cry for all the lost hope and faith, cry for the lost love, cry because I wanted to fall in love again and be loved again. And it would be impossible.

He would refuse to hold me, instead he would stand far away from me, behind the kitchen counter, and he'd shake his head and say to me, "You won't listen, will you? You can't fall in love. You have to let it go. Grow up." Then I would walk up to him and wipe my snot off by running my nose over his velvety shirt, to piss him off. 

I would tell him, "Shut the fuck off and leave me alone". 

He would look at that pathetic version of me, and start to laugh, and then say something stupid like, "Why does the cow cross the street?" 

And I'd be like, "What the fuck are you talking about?

And he'd say, "To see a moooovie. Get it?"

I would start to laugh. That was the exact joke my son told me the other day.

Then he would say, "I should get a cat."

I would disagree. "But you don't like responsibilities. You fear commitment."

He agreed with me but then said, "But cats are cute. I like cats."

I would then say,"But you are allergic to cats. just like me. Unless, you get one of those ugly hairless cat. Yuck!"

I would have stopped crying. 

And I would have forgotten why I was crying to begin with.