i'm not unfaithful, but i'll stray...

i've quite clearly inherited the neurotic belief from my mother that my inner turmoil is directly reflected by the state of my external surroundings. in short: if i feel like my life is a mess, i should clean the house. that somehow will tend to things. mind you, in my recent campaign to make sense of myself and my life, i've discovered there is some direct truth in this. whatever you're feeling or going through will somehow be "responded to" or well-accompanied by the world at large. every day is beautiful when you're in love. everyone's an asshole when you've had a bad day at work. so forth and so on.

so it should go together like wine and cheese that i'm feeling like ophelia on acid today, and my apartment is an absolute nightmare. i mean, i've more or less tolerated this place for the last eleven months or so, but i swear to god, today, i hate every little thing about it. i want a nasty divorce from this apartment, replete with thrown dishes, screamed expletives, and doors slammed off the hinge.

one time, during the tumultuous marriage of my parents, my father came home with flowers, i assume as a sort of peace offering for something so much more awful than flowers can heal. my mother was in the kitchen chopping vegetables for dinner. my father, with some words of warmth, offered her the bouquet, and my mother, without missing a beat, took the flowers, threw them down on the cutting board, and chopped the blooms from the stems in one fell swoop, then reached for another carrot.

i want that with my apartment.

so what am i going to do today? clean, of course. i hadn't been food shopping in weeks, and officially had nothing left to eat except maybe some frozen corn, so i just got back from whole foods. and so--once again, much like my mother; honestly, oedipus--that will spark cleaning out the refrigerator, which will lead to cleaning out the entire kitchen, and of course, tending to the pile of dishes in the sink that, for once, are not mine but now have flies wandering in and standing water fermenting. really, it's like a completely unappetizing version of "if you give a mouse a cookie." he's gonna want to have a nervous breakdown.

i suppose it doesn't help that the furniture is slowly disappearing, and with it, any sense of domesticity about the place. jay gave away our living room furniture about a month or so ago, and just sold off his entire bedroom yesterday. besides a mattress and box spring on the floor, and a multi-purpose ironing board, my room is and has always been a little tragic looking. i don't know, i never wanted furniture for my room, despite having the space for it. maybe it was a subconscious realization that i shouldn't have too many material ties to this place. i never truly committed to a relationship with this apartment. it was essentially a rebound home that lasted a lot longer than it should have. but where could we go? we stayed out of necessity, and because time, like everything else, moves so much faster in new york. our lease would be up in no time, and, we once thought, we would move to a nicer neighborhood, maybe further down the island a bit...

now jay leaves in two weeks, and i leave in three. a week later, i'll be in the air, flying towards australia, and completely enthralled with the idea that my entire life is packed up in a handful of bags. i may never live on the upper west side, and i'll certainly never have that quintessential gay new york life in chelsea or the west village or wherever the gays end up congregating next. (lately, it's been looking a bit like washington heights, even.) there was a time i really wanted all of that. it was this sense that being gay (and rich and successful and in good shape and possibly in a relationship or at least having boatloads of great sex...) in new york was bit like being in the vip club. perhaps that, to me, was what it meant to "make it" in new york.

but lately, it's been a lot like a versace t-shirt. it costs a hundred bucks and doesn't look or fit any better than what you could get for a fraction of the cost at h&m. so why waste all your money?

the label, of course.

i'll never be that, and maybe that's part of the reason i'm also leaving new york. y'know, that list of questions that i don't really have an answer to? this is a partial answer. i'm not new york. i was "seeing" someone months ago, in that way that i "saw" a lot of guys in new york: with the horse blinders on. he asked me once, "where are you from?" i told him new jersey, originally.

"yeah," he said. "i figured you weren't a native new yorker. you're too nice."

i never called him again after that, so go figure.