new crush

fall again.. i feel that i'm coming into myself, my true powers. i walk home on bedford then carmine from dinner and drinks with my coworkers, mildly stoned from the pre-rolled j that alex and rahul and i smoked while everybody else headed home, the pleasantly weak weed throwing the facade of a building near carmine and bleecker into glassy focus, reminding me of the cover of led zepp's physical graffiti. apparently the real building is in the east village on st. mark's, symbolic of a whole generation of tenement living, how old must this building be, what reconfigurations have its insides seen. i'm so infatuated with one of my coworkers on a sister team who is elusive and mysterious and who i sometimes speculate about being a pathological liar because the only facts that he ever delivers about himself seem designed to inspire intrigue, like the narrator in leaving the atocha station. tonight i learn he smokes and/or walks and/or reads in central park in the mornings before work, which is so hot and which i don't buy at all - maybe he does it once a week at most. he is trying to finish up a kafka book and a calvino book, both also hot choices... several weeks ago at dinner with catherine, we discuss him and she shares that he's talked to her about being open with his long-term, long-distance girlfriend because she's bi and sometimes wants to feel free to explore her sexuality. this fact allows me to feel zero guilt about flirting with him, although if i'm being honest, i wouldn't have felt guilty either way, i want to know what he's hiding, and i'm trying to employ all my charms to find out. at dinner my attention is focused so obviously on him, i ply our entire table with alcohol to make things looser, sloppier, and although none of us ever get truly drunk his hand brushes against my shoulder when he gestures while answering one of my questions, and i'm pleased despite being fully aware of how innocuous and accidental it is.