pick-up styx

"This [computer] is better than real memory, because real memory, at the
cost of much effort, learns to remember but not to forget."

-- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

I've gotten to know someone lately; let's call him The Roommate. You might remember him from a previous instalment.

I didn't especially like him at first. He was moody and he talked too much. (Just because I do it doesn't make it okay.) I mostly bantered with him politely. I had eyes only for Angel, his, well... roommate.

But things with Angel didn't work out. He went monogamous with someone else, and after a tumultuous but brief upset, with merciful suddenness, I was over him.

After moving into their spare room, I slept with The Roommate.

The Roommate likes Dune. Dune is one of the books that inspired me to study anthropology.

I know four or five Pope jokes, and two about talking Jewish dogs. The Roommate seems to have an endless supply of witticisms concerning farmyard sex and dead babies. (Not at the same time.) For some reason, this makes him rather endearing to me. I like a man who can make me snort-laugh.

Before I took the night bus back to my field site yesterday, we didn't kiss or even hug goodbye. But he lent me Foucault's Pendulum and The Power of Awareness. Not in the way you might lend someone something if you don't like the item very much and don't care whether you get it back. These are valued possessions, and he knows I'm going to a rough sort of place.

But I can't forget Yesterday.

Xavier -- my darling Xavier, who is one of the sweetest and most lovable people I know when he's not inflicting cruel, unusual punishments on scantily-clad consenting masochists -- is the first person I've gotten seriously involved with in the year-and-a-half since The Big Breakup. (Actually, scratch that. He's even more lovable when he's being a big bad sadist.)

Still, I can't forget.

The Roommate knows. He knows because it happened to him. In another city halfway across the world, he had his Big Breakup.

"What really bugs me is no matter how much I've come to hate her, I'm still not over her."

We were sitting on the couch smoking the obligatory post-coital. Though we were not touching, in that moment I felt closer to him than in bed before.

"How would your life be different if you'd never met her?" I asked.

He didn't answer for a minute. Then he said, "I'd have probably come to China a few years earlier. "

I inhaled; exhaled soft rings of smoke.

"What about you?"

I thought of how to render the truth of it: this memory, this love; this new dimension of shame and longing.

"I would probably still be searching for something I now want to believe doesn't exist."

The Roommate turned to me. "I can agree with that."

I didn't fuck him to forget; but maybe I should.