Quit Making Me Feel Feelings

 He sits next to me at the Comedy Spot and we count to three before simultaneously opening our tall cans of PBR to keep the sound to a minimum during the show.  The comic on stage is ridiculous and drunk and she talks to much about her period.  He laughs a lot at the ridiculousness of it along with some other friends of ours. The Comedy Spot feels different since they moved the stage to the right wall but you don’t have to pass the stage to go in the bathroom anymore.  When the comic gets off stage he turns to me slightly and says, "are you coming home with me tonight?"  I smile and say "yeah" and I wish I could touch him or kiss him but we don’t do that in public, even though everyone in our tiny little comedy scene assumes anyway. 

The Comedy Spot feels like home base now, somewhere I can walk in and the girl at the front doesn’t bother to ask me to pay and the chick at the bar knows I’m gonna order a Shock Top.  I’m in three shows this Friday and there’s a good crowd for the second one. I laugh a lot and tell jokes and am happy and excited that my friends are funny and that I’m making art and that even though it’s small it feels big on the inside. I write funny haikus with one of my favorite comics who wears a Puma hoodie and texts me late at night about nonsensical things like what he’s eating for dinner or the sound of cats fucking.  I feel like I know him more in my phone than I do in real life but tonight we’re connecting in the same way we do via text and he says "you were really funny tonight" and I say "thanks, so were you." He already knows that though.

It’s after one a.m. and I’m mingling inside and The Boy is waiting outside, he sends a text that says, "I’m outside." I wrap it up and go meet him there and others shuffle out as well. We say our goodbyes to everyone and walk away from the Comedy Spot.  He’s quiet on the ride home and drives fast and erratic, like always. "Stop lights are just an arbitrary thing," he said once, "if no one is coming you can just speed right through."

His house is empty since one of his roommates moved out and the hardwood floors are never clean. It’s bright, open, lived-in and has a very distinct smell. When we come in his skinny, shepherd mix greets us with a swaying butt and friendly bites. I lean down and pat him on the head and rub his chest. The Boy goes straight to his room and I follow him there. He says, "I’m probably just gonna pass out, if that’s okay with you." This is code for "we’re not going to have sex." I don’t really mind this, more than anything with him lately I look forward to playing in the mornings or running my hands through his hair and the news that we’re not going to struggle to cum is not heartbreaking. I do like how it feels though, and when he hits a certain spot inside me I go blind. Yet I’m confused as to why he asked me to come back with him. I can see the distance in his eyes and feel the uncertainty when he gives me an obligatory touch. It feels like when you touch a check out clerk’s hand when they give you your change. He’s the first and only boy I feel like I’ve ever truly and consciously chased; considered his words and reveled in the affection. While I’ve had plenty of infatuations, fascinations with both boys and girls, kept notepads full or words about people, this is the first time I feel like I’ve watched someone’s eyes so much, their mannerisms and cared, even just slightly, that I play Monopoly too slow and say "like" too much. Since the Ex, with boys, I’ve been confident and careless, I’ll fuck with the lights on and let it go fast if they don’t fall in some kind of deep love with me. But with him sometimes I feel reduced to a school girl, trying to win the Spelling Bee just to get noticed by the boys who play Soccer. 

He has a king size bed and we lay far apart from each other when he starts flailing around.  Part of me knew it was coming, saw it his eyes when he got quiet, felt it in the way the words were coming out of his mouth at the end of the night.  I can call these "episodes" or "panic attacks," but truthfully I’m not certain of what they are.  They’re moments when the blood seems to leave his face and he says things he’ll apologize for in the morning.  I try and get him to get up, "change locations" the internet says, but he’s not receptive.  I kiss his back and rub his head but he’s pulling away.  Eventually, I get tired and frustrated, roll away from him, and fall asleep. Besides, I realized by now that maybe what he really wants is an audience for his misery. Someone to stroke his head and make him feel cared about until he doesn’t need to feel cared about for a while. His feelings, while seemingly normal for all of us in the same age group and of the same intellect, are more visceral, more important, required to be handled with purpose and care the way you’d carefully remove an Easter egg from a cup of pastel dye. Just right; so it won’t break, it won’t drip, and when it dries it will be pretty to look at again.

The next morning he says, "lets just pretend like last night didn’t happen" and that’s typical I noticed. I endure his “episodes” or “bad head spaces” in a way completely different from him. He can emotionally remove himself, disconnect and make it go away, erase a memory and simply promise himself he won’t be there again. However for me they are emotionally exhausting moments when I lay next to him and wonder why he wants me there, why I choose to be, and whether or not he’ll surrender enough of the blanket, or affection, for me to be warm again. And those moments still linger within me even when it’s all over. As it goes, how HE affects ME it not to be discussed– he’s the one who needs comfort, I’m the one “mentally strong” enough to endure feeling alone even when I’m not.

He has a show this morning and I try and get him to go over his set in the car but he says he "can’t” and I don’t press it. He has a good set but the audience is sensitive. He looks good on stage, I like what he’s wearing. He’s so fucking adorable it makes me want to scream sometimes. As a fan or art and esthetics I couldn’t ask for something more comely to gaze at. Tall and fit, Italian, with deep brown eyes and long eyelashes. A well kept, full beard with dark pink lips. His physical appearance while initially noticeable was not, and really still isn’t, what made me want to fuck him. It was simply in the way he carried himself; a confidant gait, a casual and careless style, a dirty, inexpensive watch around his wrist. The kind of boy who can wake up in the morning and pull on a wrinkled band t-shirt, a pair of cut offs and lace-less Converse and still have a fair chance at fucking any girl at the first coffee shop he walks into. When he gets off stage he sits next to me and asks me how he did and I say, "you’re so fucking cute."<span style="font-size: medium;”>

He’s a little upset, anxious, tense, disconnected, fidgety he keeps saying "I’m sorry I’m a difficult person."  I’m not interested in what he’s saying anymore, I tell him that, I tell him he’s in one of those "head spaces." That’s what he calls it anyway, he calls it "being in a bad head space" and he says "don’t take it personally, it’s me, I’m broken." He notices my apathy towards him and instead of taking me home, like we had planned he tells me to just grab some stuff and come back home with him. I smile finally. 

His bedroom is tidy and somewhat nondescript. A desk, a king size bed, a vintage Saturday Night Live album tacked to the wall, Chinese symbols that he can read but I can’t.  A book case stocked with great literature, school text, childhood favorites.  A masculine bedspread with a fuzzy body pillow under an over sized window.  I like it here.  We fuck and I get so rough he gets a bloody nose.  Sex with him is the most bizarre I’ve ever had.  He likes to be dominated, degraded, tied up; he prefers suffocation while he cums, likes me on top and asks me to cover his mouth and nose so he can’t breath.  We don’t use a condom and he cums inside me, then apologizes right after.  He says, "are you  mad?" I say "no."

We go to a mutual friend’s birthday party that night, a Jewish comic who stands in his untidy kitchen and spreads pizza sauce on dough and says, "I’m glad you guys came."  The house has a lot of character but is surprisingly messy considering he’s having a social gathering.  There are people there who, when I ask them how they know the birthday boy, they say a Jewish word and I only half know what it means.  There’s a girl with a British accent and she asks what I do and I say "I’m a comic" and I think maybe that”s the first time I’ve said that and I think that maybe that’s not entirely true. 

Oddly enough, there’s a magician there. Not a hired magician, just a boy there who happens to be one.  We all sit around the messy living room and sink into the couches and chairs and he impresses us all with amazing card tricks.  He goes quick, makes jokes, and picks the right card every time.  The Boy doesn’t seem impressed, I laugh and smile and talk to strangers.  Everyone ends up doing a set of comedy and the birthday boy reads an off the wall essay that adds a blanket of awkwardness to the room. I drink three or four mojitos and by the time we walk home I’m feeling wobbly and open.  I talk to The Boy about how I feel, we talk about sleeping or NOT sleeping with other people.  I say, "I wouldn’t, but I think you would" he says "how do you know that?" and I say, "intuition" and he says, "I wouldn’t." 

I put on his University of Florida sweatpants and meet him in the backyard where he’s throwing the ball for his dog.  I curl up on the chair and fold my arms, it’s cold outside.  I watch him watch his dog, chuck the ball far and fast across the yard. I watch him, watch him, watch him. Later, I drape my legs over him on his tiny couch and we both fall asleep watching season one of "Girls."

The next morning we make bagels for breakfast and play Monopoly at the kitchen table while he watches Basketball.  He gets annoyed when I don’t count the money fast enough and beats me pretty quickly. Later, he makes me cum with his mouth three time and then rolls over and plays Words with Friends on his phone. I say, "I’ve been patient but it seems like this next level for us is never gonna happen" and he says, "What did you think? That I’d fall in love with you in three months." I say "no." I think about that scene in “Girls” when Adam says to Hannah, “What do you want from me? To be your boyfriend? You don’t want that. You want me to fuck the dog shit out of you and then go home and whine about in your diary!” Seems fitting now.

He hugs me at the door before we go to his car and says, "you’re very important to me." And I don’t doubt that I am, I just doubt the reasons why. We listen to jazz on the way back to my house and I kiss him on the mouth, the cheek, the forehead before I get out of the car. I sit on the couch at home and feel sick and pathetic. I don’t text him and when I do I’m “terse,” as he might say, and distant before he finally say, "I like you okay? Quit making me feel feelings."