Tag Archives: creepy boyfriend obsession

Happy Birthday, Jack!

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Happy birthday to my wonderful roommate/landlord/former co-worker/BOYFRIEND, Jack!

Last year, I decided to plan a birthday party for him, asked him where he wanted to have it, didn’t like the place he chose, secretly decided we’d move it to a place I liked better halfway through, made everyone trek through a snowstorm to get to the new place, lost half of the group on the way, and got to my place only to find out they were closing but stayed anyway with my half of the group while Jack’s half of the group went to another place across the street. What a super friend I am, right? But he seems to love me, anyway, and I love him. But I’m wisely not planning a party for him this year.

Making Up Stories About Men

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Via Gothamist‘s “Ask a Native New Yorker”:

Dear Native New Yorker,

I moved to Fort Greene about six months ago. Surely I didn’t move to Brooklyn to find a significant other, but it would be nice. Even some make out sessions! Anything! Why is the dating scene here so rough?

I have met interesting, attractive, not insane people but they all seem to be flakes. What should I do? Give up and accept my fate as someone who ogles hot New Yorkers on the subway but goes home alone? Or keep trying?

Signed,
Room for Two

Dear Subway Ogler,

Many newcomers find themselves loveless or friendless for a time when they first arrive in New York, but they rarely stay that way long. E.B. White perhaps put it best: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” So the question, really, is this: how do you get lucky in New York?

The first step is an internal adjustment. You say you’re looking for “Interesting, attractive, not insane people.” Take it from a native: in 37 years I have never met a person in this city that embodied all three of these qualities at once. Perhaps this is possible in a simpler town—Minneapolis, maybe, or Vancouver. But you chose New York, a city so expensive that it drives the sane mad just trying to make rent, tempts the attractive with cronuts until they become morbidly obese, and forces all the interesting people to discuss real estate and careers until they kill everyone with boredom.

If you’re lucky enough to find someone who’s attractive and interesting, but insane; or interesting and sane, but ugly; or attractive and sane, but boring; hold on to this person like grim death: they are a rare jewel. Remember: New York rewards those who tolerate imperfections in others, like crooked teeth or a minor felony record. Open your heart, and you will find yourself bum rushed by potential suitors.

Or you could just join one of those kickball/bowling/parkour leagues in Williamsburg; I’ve heard those are basically swingers parties for hipsters.


Obviously my whole life revolves around what I’m eating and who’s showering me with attention, so those were the two main topics of conversation yesterday when my friend Kim and I took the Long Island Railroad from Penn Station to Long Beach for the day. I don’t have a job, and she has one that she can either show up to or not depending on her desire to pay bills, so we left my apartment at 10, took a comfortable train an hour out of the city, and arrived on the beach while there were still only a handful of other people awake. It was a glorious day spent alternating between swimming past the huge breaking waves to the calmer waters where we could just float and getting so tan on the beach my family wouldn’t recognize me as not-Latino at this point. We also went into town and intended to eat dinner for a half an hour before heading back into NYC but somehow ended up spending three hours at a pub, talking about our friendship.

Long Beach, NY

Long Beach, NY

The most important thing that happened was that at one point, Kim informed me that we had somehow stumbled into a jellyfish nursery and were being cuddled/choked by a thousand baby jellyfish that weren’t old enough to have their stinging tentacles yet and were basically just swimming breast implants at the moment, and while this seems adorable and awesome in retrospect, I freaked the eff out at the time and swam at one thousand miles per hour toward the shore.

The second most important thing that happened is that Kim told me one of her friends told her to stop making up stories when it comes to men. So, like, if he asks you out to coffee, the only thing you know is that he asked you out to coffee. He didn’t take pity on you because you’re single and jobless, but he also didn’t ask you to marry him. He just wants to drink coffee with you. (Don’t worry; no one is trying to drink coffee with me.)

Can you imagine? Basically all of the writing I did in college and beyond were the stories of which boy said or did what to me and what it meeeeeans. On one hand, it’d probably give me so much relief to just listen to what men actually say and watch what they actually do and not infer anything beyond that. To not have to stress so much about what hidden meaning there is in this touch or this word. To wait until someone explicitly says “I like you” before I start imagining our future penthouse apartment with the infinity pool on the roof. It’d take so much stress off of relationships. Either there are no feelings, or there are all the feelings, and you happily date for six years or maybe even longer.

On the other hand, how boring is that?

So I’ll Never Die Alone

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Sometime in the past few months, Kings of Leon became my favourite band. This is sort of a big deal for me, because my favourite band all through college was Jump, Little Children, and I saw them live more than fifty times (and probably more like sixty or seventy) and followed them all across the country when I should’ve been at class, but then they broke up, and I grew up, and now their sound is just a little too polished for my grown-up music taste, which prefers a raw, gritty sound to counteract my sunny disposition. So Kings of Leon.

This is the song that’s been killing me lately, “Cold Desert”:

I’m on the corner
Waiting for a light to come on
That’s when I know that you’re alone
It’s cold in the desert
Water never sees the ground
Special unspoken without sound

Told me you loved me
That I’d never die alone
Hand over your heart let’s go home
Everyone noticed
Everyone had seen the signs
I’ve always been known to cross lines

I never ever
Cried when I was feeling down
I’ve always been scared of the sound
Jesus don’t love me
No one ever carried my load
I’m too young to feel this old

Here’s to you
Here’s to me
Oh, to us
Nobody knows
Nobody sees
Nobody but me

What got me at first was the “no one ever carried my load”, but what’s been getting me lately is the “told me you loved me, that I’d never die alone”. I know it’s almost senseless to talk about wanting that kind of love, because everyone wants that kind of love. It just seems poignant for me specifically to recognize that I want that kind of love after just having been abandoned by a six-year relationship that I thought was The Relationship on which all other relationships could be based.

Looking back, I realize that despite all of the near-perfection of that relationship, the one really imperfect part was that Kamran kept my heart in a cage. Because he was afraid of commitment or was at least of afraid of committing to me, I tiptoed around him and held back my true feelings, which were, “OMGGGGG, my heart is bursting, and I’ve never felt this way before, and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with yooooouuuuu! Hearts, stars, ponies, butterflies!” Not that I didn’t tell him I loved him every day, and not that I could really help myself from being zealous, but I took my cues from him. If I mentioned our continued life together, or someday having a house together, or being laid to rest together in an eternal embrace in the burial plots my dad has ALREADY PURCHASED FOR MY HUSBAND AND ME, he got itchy, so I tried to stop myself from ever accidentally mentioning those things. But every now and then, he would ask me if I’d still be with him and take care of him when we’re old, and only then I’d feel for one second like I was allowed to share my feelings. That’s not fair.

I want my next relationship to of course involve nonstop laughter, as my relationship with Kamran did, but I also want it to involve, like, super-intense threatening to slit our wrists in the hidden park overlooking the East River if we can’t be together forever. Am I just imagining myself in a high school relationship, though? Maybe these borderline creepy obsessive feelings aren’t supposed to exist in people over the age of 17. If the lead singer of Kings of Leon is looking to be told that he won’t die alone, though, maybe I just need to fall in love with an artist and not a scientist/lawyer next time.

In fact, yes, I know I should, because listen to this:

Apparently the singer was so drunk while recording “Cold Desert” that he didn’t actually remember doing it. And the amazing part, the sort of chilling part, is that he had only written the first verse to the song when they started recording it. So the loving, the never dying alone, the no one ever carrying his load–all unplanned. He said he ALMOST CRIED when he heard it later.

So he’s an alcoholic. I still want that.

On Living Gently

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I saw this on Pinterest last night:

I hate unattributable inspirational quotes in general, but I love this one specifically.

how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you

I’ve been arguing with so many people lately (Jack) about how I have to be faking how well I’m dealing with Kamran’s physical absence from my life, but maybe I’m just gracefully letting go of something that wasn’t meant for me.

And if we’re being honest, the level at which I’m dealing with things varies from day to day. Sometimes, this life I’ve been living for the past almost-three months seems so normal to me it’s hard to remember that there was a time before I lived in my own apartment 100% of the time, before I did everything with Jack and Nik and Ash and Kim, before I had to wonder if I’ll ever find such a match again. But sometimes, I think about how I spent more than SIX YEARS knowing who My Person was, and now I don’t know anymore.

I mean, I guess My Uninterrupted Person is Tracey, my BFF since 7th grade. But we live states apart. And there was this moment on our Puerto Rico vacation last month when she wasn’t there and I thought everyone wanted to go horseback riding but me, and I just felt so alone for a moment, remembering that two months prior, I belonged to someone, and he belonged to me, and if I told him I felt weird about work animals, he would understand and would go to the pool with me instead, and he wouldn’t even mind missing out on the horseback riding because nothing felt better to him than supporting his Person.

I’ve loved so much, though, and have been so lucky in who’s loved me. How can I not gracefully accept my current circumstances when I’m so grateful for my past ones?

The First Love

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You know what’s annoying? Waking up one morning and realizing you’ve had your First Love and you’ll never get it back. Not that I regret who I gave it to, and not that I would change anything. It’s just that I saved that thing for so long from boyfriends who didn’t quite have the stuff to wrestle it from me, and it feels strange to know I can’t have it back to give away again. Every relationship after this will be built on the dead body of KamKat.

Emo Katie is emo.

Emo Katie

Tell me about your first love.