Regression
<<2003-03-23 - 6:13 p.m.>>

Every time I talk to him I am more aware that he is not the person who he is pretending to be.

He just called to alert me to the fact that "Chicago" won the Oscar for art direction. We seem to have reverted to the trivial, the banal, the superficial.

And I said "I love you, too," when he said "I love you," but all I could think was Who are you?

Who is this person who flings my life into a turmoil I had specifically told him how to avoid and who subsequently falls apart, then baldly refuses to deal with the consequences, instead choosing to hit some kind of cosmic RESET button that catapults our relationship back to square one as he attempts to insinuate himself further into my life by befriending several of my closest friends?

Chloë, whom he was already ignoring and who thus had nothing else to lose, called him to tell him that he was handling the situation selfishly, making it all about him and his drama. He was furious and upset, that was most of what he would talk to about me that day. It therefore stands to reason as far as I'm concerned that upon receiving the email she recently sent him, an email that not only drove home that point but mocked him with something he'd said about her and that I'd passed on, he would be upset. Very, even.

There he is again. "Chicago" won for costumes, apparently.

It hurts to talk to him this way. There's no life in my voice. This is no good. No good, no good.

But you'd think I'd hear about his response to her email. Especially since it displays her possession of information that I had passed on (though it's very possible that he doesn't know that). Instead, John is manic and ebullient, cheerful and stubbornly impersonal.

I've spent the past week so involved, so intimately involved in him and in our relationship and in my feelings for him and his for me that this less intimate connection feels flat.

And it doesn't help that I'd been insisting that we needed to deal with the whole thing further and he'd been deadpanning that he couldn't deal with it, had nothing to say, felt nothing, wanted to forget about it.

This is no good.

And I'm sort of tempted to say "I want more than this from him," but I'm not even sure. I don't even know if I want that anymore. He has displayed himself so neurotic and immature over the course of the past week that I don't know if I want to remain close with him.

And if I started to end things, he would be shocked and hurt, and I—well, wait. I have said so many angry, indignant, hurt, true things over the course of the past week. I have proven my ability to protect myself, to tell people things they don't want to hear.

But right now, this is the path of least resistance. This perfunctory friendship.

Last night, when I was eager to get off the phone with him but trying to make it look like I wasn't, I said that I had to take some things that I'd packed for Rowen back to her, which was true, but that "I don't want to get up," which was not. He sounded serious when he asked me what kind of friend that would make me. I said "A tired friend," and he shot back, "Wrong answer. Try again."

I would love to ask him what the fuck he was talking about when he said "Stop trying to be noble—You're bad at it." But I am worried about stirring things up again. Either that or just exhausted. Totally worn the fuck out.

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