we're so over / we're so back

When you have a crush on someone, you kind of just decide that you like them and everything else falls by the wayside. For a couple weeks, I had had the suspicion that Zane might be dumb based off the strange earnestness of some of his texts and the fact that in 2017 he had still thought that Humans of New York was a cool concept. "What does it mean to be smart?" I had asked the people around me. As a result, when we went on our first date after meeting at Theo, I had avoided listening too deeply when he spoke. My crush was firmly rooted in the exciting and spontaneous way we met and the fact that he was super hot, and I wanted to maintain the delusion, as Claudia jokingly described it. Because I had no idea what expectations either of us were bringing to the table, I was just treating the situation as if it were a given that we were dating. How else do you forestall the anxiety that comes with trying to discern whether and how much someone is into you? "What do you think is the difference between manifesting and being delusional?" I had asked Stacey on Thurday morning as we ambled in slow loops around Brower Park. He replied that if he had to compromise some critical aspect of himself in order for something to fit congruously into his reality, then it was a delusion. We talked about Robby and how it felt like I had willed that relationship into being. Despite how insane I had felt during my crushing stage in the spring when he was traveling and giving me zero sign of reciprocated interest, and despite being predisposed to talking myself down to avoid rejection, I had also felt some crazy intuition that I was right. During the span of our pre-holiday situationship, I would have dreams telling me when things would begin and when I should let them end. I remember waking up after returning from my Eurotrip on the morning of his and Alexa's birthday dinner with absolute conviction that something was going to happen between us, even if later that night as we sat on the concrete benches outside the Lot until 4am I was unsure whether he was romantically or just platonically interested in me. When we were seeing each other, I recognized that he didn't have some of the traits I was actively seeking in my next serious partner, but I felt such a strong unspoken connection with him that ultimately I still wanted the situationship to turn into something more concrete and committed. The fact that he thought The Strokes were British became irrelevant. Wasn't my pointing out of his flaws ultimately just a defense mechanism against acknowledging that I wanted to be in a serious relationship with him? "Smart people can rationalize themselves into thinking anything," Shalma comments as we eat pizza in Fort Greene Park. I tell her that I've been mulling over whether I should talk to Robby about giving things another try, and we joke about how guys always talk about how "they need to be single and work on themselves" when they have no idea what that means and end up doing nothing differently. Already I've been frustrated with him in some of our text exchanges over the past few weeks, and the things that I didn't like about him when we were seeing each other stand at the forefront now--I feel like I have some sense of what we would probably fight about if we were in a relationship, and I'm irritated with how un-novel and un-fun they are, issues that I've already experienced in previous relationships and am uninterested in dealing with again. Things I decided I really want(ed) in my next partner after Ethan and I broke up: not white, hottie, laidback/spontaneous/unpretentious, nice style; someone who likes going out and has an active and varied social life; interested in a lot of things and has developed many of those interests independently; emotionally intuitive; has a creative streak. "I've been talking to one of my friends about what it means to be smart," Zane says as he makes breakfast for us on Saturday morning, and the synchronicity is hilarious, I wonder if he might have been discussing this because he thought I could be dumb. I've decided at this point that I actually really like him, and I sit cross-legged facing him at his dining table as we talk shop about breakfast foods and what I would have made for breakfast if we were at my place. We walk to Head Hi to see the lamp show before it closes, and I stop as we pass by a magnolia tree with yellow-green flowers, something I've never seen before. When we stepped inside and were greeted with surprising friendliness by the baristas behind the counter, I realized that we probably looked like a hip Asian couple, a romantic/interpersonal/aesthetic cross-section I'd never experienced. This surreal sense of watching myself only grew as we walked around Brooklyn Heights and down to Carroll Gardens. Like in giovannisgroom's mood ring, I felt like I was watching a movie about my life. The sun slanted charmingly across the brownstones and blooming cherry trees, and I was continuously shocked by how great of a time I was having, how I sometimes kind of had to try to keep up in conversation?, how easily we were doing all of this. When we stopped to check out a menswear store, I considered pointing out a shirt that I thought looked like something he would wear; later, he paused in front of the same shirt and debated whether he should buy it. Even the diner where we had a late lunch was too accidentally picturesque. I felt like I was getting everything I could have wanted and didn't realize was actually possible, and when he turned to me after he called our shared Uber I knew immediately from his expression what I was about to hear. The following wave of disappointment was swift and undeniable.. How is this happening to me AGAIN, I kept thinking... In Tom McCarthy's Remainder, the narrator is preoccupied with the feeling of realness, which he experiences through the recollection of an unplaceable memory, spontaneous accidents, and violence. He buys property, renovates buildings, and hires actors to recreate these experiences that he has latched onto in order to get a hit of what he felt when he originally lived them, and the stagings get increasingly ambitious and risky until (spoiler) people die. Before all of this happens, he is sitting in a coffeeshop when he sees a group of young people passing in front of him: "They reminded me of an ad--not a particular one, but just some ad with beautiful young people in it having fun. The people with the screen in the street now had the same ad in mind as me. I could tell. In their gestures and their movements they acted out the roles of the ad's characters: the way they turned around and walked in one direction while still talking in another, how they threw their heads back when they laughed, the way they let their mobiles casually slip back into their low-slung trouser pockets. Their bodies and faces buzzed with glee, exhilaration--a jubilant awareness that for once, just now, at this particular right-angled intersection, they didn't have to sit in a cinema or living room in front of a TV and watch other beautiful young people laughing and hanging out: they could be the beautiful young people themselves." In The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder's biggest enactment uses the scheme of Remainder to recreate the conventional later-in-life dream: a nice home, a partner, a child. Despite the meta-contrived scenarios and his attempts to insure against any lapses from some believable semblance of the real thing, conflicts erupt which cause him to reflect on his past relationships and his own morals--real shit. When I was in high school and wasn't allowed to do anything and would make lists of what I'd be doing in the idealized version of my life, I was molding everything according to images in the media I was consuming: Lux Lisbon smoking on her parents' roof, Palo Alto teenagers sneaking out to drive around aimlessly in the suburban nighttime, the moon in the first third of Melancholia and the disquieting stillness of the golf course landscape beneath it. Even though little of it came to fruition, I felt so much in relation to what I *did* do and what I wasn't able to do, and these emotions, according to Rookie Mag, were quintessentially adolescent: alienation, deep-seated anger towards my environment, and nostalgia for the time I was already currently living. In our most recent session, I talked to my therapist about how my life has the image of what I think the ideal early-/mid-twenties life would be. The image is blurry, or maybe it's a montage, and it's of me running from one thing to another, always with friends. Maybe it's nighttime and we're smoking outside a bar in a space that looks like the Nowadays or Mansions backyards, or we're getting dinner at somewhere that looks like Birds of a Feather where the lighting and atmosphere makes everyone look animated and attractive, or it's a warm summer evening and we're lying in a sprawling public lawn that looks like Prospect Park as dusk drapes over us. "It looks like everything I've ever wanted, but I don't know that I'm any closer to the feeling that I thought I would have," I tell her, "or that all of this will turn into the life in my thirties that I want." I guess I never even thought about what I wanted to feel, except adrenaline and some general happiness. What happened when Nathan tried to provoke and simulate real emotions in his rehearsals? I don't really know what the lesson is here, but we have another session tomorrow morning so maybe I'll find out what I'm supposed to do then...