in the backseat of my car, my love tells me i'm a mess

A spider of nontrivial size is crawling along the ceiling. Unless it wanders down to a height low enough where I can kill it with the Kleenex box on my nightstand, I'm sleeping with the floor lamp on. My roommate doesn't know I'm not in NYC right now. Last night she texted me about deadbolting the door and I couldn't think of a casual way to mention that actually I hadn't been home in several days. Tonight Juhi described how recently her social life had turned her house into the site of a nonstop party. When I got to her place on Wednesday night people were stoned and playing board games after their weekly trivia; Thursday night I woke up from a two hour nap to her date from earlier in the evening, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey's boyfriend playing Dominion in the living room; Friday night was an actual party; this morning Shuta broke in through the window at 9am and spent essentially the whole day loitering around with us. The continuous social presence is mostly fun--hanging out with people like Catherine, Juhi, Ori, Marc, etc. is conducive to evolving bits in a way that feels so specific to their friend group, like how we'll spontaneously break out into a game of Contact or Botticelli while walking from one place to another or create dumb acronyms and shorthands for shared points of reference. I don't know if I laugh so much when I'm around any other people, maybe the only comparable experiences in recent memory were when Bum and I walked to Nitehawk Prospect Park together or when Eric, Pau, Bum, Claudia, and I spent hours drinking together before Ashwin's party. I find myself missing people I barely know when they're not around, like this morning when I was super excited that Marc showed up for dim sum even though I don't think we've ever had a real conversation. In other instances it gets so tiresome to not have a break from certain people that you never even asked to be around, like you're on day three of a vacation with close friends and starting to go crazy. Tonight I was in a conversation so predictable that I knew what the trajectory/dynamic of the conversation would be until the bitter end, and it was so irritating that it made me realize it had been months since I'd been in a conversation with this kind of dynamic where someone continuously draws attention back towards themselves in an uninteresting, un-self-aware way. It reminded me of when one of Catherine's friends had described some of the conversations as being "about unimportant things," and even though I'm generally pro- being young and frivolous right now, I deeply felt the gripe. Today Someone posted a meme to his Instagram story about Easter that involved Ramona Singer; I really hit the jackpot with meeting this random person that watches both Survivor and Real Housewives. I've been having this weird feeling that I dreamed him up because I have no coherent perception of how close we are with each other. We only met five days ago and talk inconsistently, but he's also direct and communicative and open in a way that makes me feel like we know each other better/are more comfortable with each other than we actually do/are. Three days ago when I was so congested I felt like I might be dissociated forever, I sat shotgun in Juhi's car as we tried to find a CVS that turned out to be in a Target that turned out to not be the CVS I was looking for then accidentally ended up in Japantown as we tried to drive to the Trader Joe's across the street that ended up being inaccessible due to a parade of one-ways and no-left-turns. "We've lost the plot," I said in despair as we watched the day get away from us. Amidst all this I was having a non-dtr over text as he asked me what I was looking for--I provided the unenlightening and honest answer that I was just trying to have fun--and he restated his position as someone in an open relationship. It was a pointless conversation because there was no new information given by either party ("Maybe I should respond with something really stupid like 'yay!!!'" I told Juhi), but it also felt like a milestone of sorts. Being in that state where you can ponder over someone's (internal) life because you don't know them very well is fun, if a little dangerous because of the proximity to delusion. But ultimately it's the concept of continuously seeing someone you're interested in without ever having to be responsible for their baggage that feels so, so good.