Thursday, July 1, 2010

Almost Twenty-four Hours

Almost twenty-four hours.

    This last weekend I went back to Saint Louis to visit everyone. The Saint Louis Pride celebration was happening in the city, which was my official reason for deciding to get away from Columbia. I was also running out of clean clothes, and I was very much looking forward to spending more time with Jeff. He must really like me. There is, however, a chance that he’s just really desperate and adept at feigning excitement and arousal. It’s hard for me to judge physical attractiveness because I’m drawn to different features in different people, so I’m not going to say that Jeff is any more or less attractive than other people I’ve been with, but he is certainly more intelligent, which I find incredible sexy.
    I think I mentioned before that he talks more than I do. I still sometimes feel overwhelmed during our conversations because Jeff seems to possess an intellect that’s able to jump from subject to subject, seemingly able to converse endlessly. I like to listen though, so unless he finds my lack of conversational input off-putting, I’m fine with the imbalance, as long as it doesn’t fall into a professor-student dynamic. I’ve wondered perhaps, that as a result of having spent so much time alone, that I’ve trained myself to trim my thoughts so that I’m able to share my viewpoint before the person I’ve managed to corral into conversation with me loses interest and moves on with their day. Perhaps that explanation has less to do with reality and more to do with my insecurity. Okay, that’s definitely what it is. I’ve long known that my verbal abilities, keen as they might be normally, are pathetic the day after a night of drinking. Jeff has had the pleasure of witnessing this a few time now. However charming I might have been before and during my nocturnal drinking session, the next morning I will barely be able to offer a comment on rather normal subjects, or even on subjects about which I would normally find myself spilling over. There were several times I woke up from a daydream with Jeff still talking, wondering if he noticed, if he was wanting me to say more, or if he way happy just talking to me. I wonder if he just talks to everyone, like that’s just his personality. He has repeated a couple of things to me already, so maybe he’s not having someone who is good at listening. Haha. Last night I tweeted “Half the fun of having a new boyfriend is lying awake in bed analyzing our relationship. not.” It isn’t fun at all. Is Jeff thinking about all of this too?
My biggest point of tension with Jeff is the huge amount of experience he has regarding men. I know he’s had sex with many more men than I have; besides Jeff, I’ve only been with four guys. And I knew all of them before I had sex with them. I think my anxiety is justified: having sex with that many men exposes you to more risk. I wonder how many of the men are more attractive than me, more intelligent than me, more interesting than me. That has to be a normal question. I just want to know who I’m competing with. I wonder, too, why he did have sex with so many people. Was it all just for fun? How many were one-night affairs? How many did he think he was in love with? How many of them were just like me, expecting to enter into a relationship that had the potential to last more than a few months? I think he said that when he was in New York for his year of graduate school, he had three boyfriends. Three?  At least one thing is certain: I’m not the only one who finds him sexy.
I got back on Friday night, spent most of Saturday with my parents. I met Jeff at a gay bar on Manchester Avenue in the city. Before Jeff showed me them a few weeks ago, I had no idea there was an entire street of gay bars in the city. Jeff was already a little tipsy. He introduced me to a couple friends of his, both of whom didn’t seem interesting or attractive enough for him. It probably wasn’t even a minute after walking into a bar called Just John’s that I got a heavy touch from a man the same age as my father. There were more young guys of course. Jeff and I stayed at the bar the whole time, talking about ...I don’t remember. Jeff told me that my eyes were glowing under the black lights. I acted like I had no idea what could be causing it, knowing full well that I had put on Aveeno cream all around my eyes earlier that day, having no expectations of being examined by my boyfriend under a black light. Ha! It didn’t help that I had spent time out in the pool earlier, wearing my sunglasses, so that all of my face was slightly red except for my eye area, making them seem to glow even more. At one point I went to the bathroom on the opposite side of the bar, and I was so impressed with the cleanliness of it. A single-style bathroom for a couple hundred men and the place was spotless. In a regular bar, especially with that many people, that bathroom would have been a mess, complete with a urine-covered floor and broken beer bottles, and most likely a faulty lock.

No comments:

Post a Comment