If a cow ever got the chance...

Disclaimer: This is not an entertaining entry. In fact, reading it over, it sounds like an unedited therapy transcript (with the shrink I don't have yet). I am sorry. If you come back later I may have regained my usual flippant tone.

Anyway:

I haven't seen C since last Sunday; this is unusual. We had a little moment of reconciliation on Wednesday night and agreed to hang out on Thursday night, so I packed all my work clothes for the next day, toothbrush, etc., in my backpack, and then he blew me off to go watch Attack of the Clones with his best friend. I was pissed, he apologized, I was pissed, then I started thinking.

It would be almost impossible for me to blow C off to hang out with my other friends. I have a few scattered around the country (New York, Cleveland, Oakland, Pittsburgh), but here in the city where I live, I know almost no one. I don't like talking to people I don't know. (I don't like talking with acquaintances much, either.) I don't really trust anyone.This is not good. I've become that chick who only talks to her boyfriend, and it's my fault.

Which is why it pissed me off so much when C stood me up to go see the movie. He actually had decent reasons (his friend was determined to see it the day it opened, and he called first to ask if it would be OK), but it deprived me of my chance for social interaction for that week.

That's really fucked up. I never wanted to be in that kind of dependent relationship, where one person has alternatives and one doesn't. But here I am, apparently.

Oh, the car thing doesn't help either. He drives (and has his own car). I don't. I do have a valid driver's license, which expires next year. But I have only driven on the back roads of Wisconsin, where you have to watch out for Amish buggies, sharp turns, and not much else. I didn't have a car, so in college other people drove, and I gradually forgot how. Since moving to Chicago, never. Which means (given all the preceding stuff), that if I want to go somewhere I have two choices. I can either (1): go there myself, alone, on the train and possibly one or two buses, which would add at least an hour and be kind of lonely and annoying; or (2) wait until C wants to hang out (which he does pretty frequently), and, assuming what I want to do is something he also wants to do, drive there in 10 minutes and have a companion at the activity. And some things are just impossible without a car (you try taking your broken air conditioner to the repair center in the suburbs and picking it up a week later).

So I almost always choose (2), even though its cumulative effects have been negative, and I have known that for a while now. It means that in the outside world, other than work, I don't exist without C. My experience of the world is mediated by him, by being with him. (Occasional lunches with Cyril are the like exception that proves the rule.)

When I first moved here, I was terrified of the city. I had never lived in a town with more than 5000 people. I was hanging out in the good neighborhoods but thought they were the bad neighborhoods. There was no way to tell. I would set myself little tasks: go to Clark and Belmont and buy shoes, go to Fullerton and Ashland and buy a taco. These excursions, stupid as they sound, actually helped. They gave me the confidence that I could walk down the street without getting mugged, and that I could find my way around the city--and back home--without getting lost. They let me experience the city firsthand. When I go out alone now, it is so rare that it sticks in my mind for months.

Which is why I'm leaving as soon as I post this. Forget laundry, dishes, the lemon rice I was going to make for lunch. There's a street fair across the city (train, long bus ride). C offered to take me on Sunday, but I think I'll go now. It may be less fun without him. I can't let myself think that. My isolation is putting stress on what used to be a sound relationship, warping the joints, revealing all the fractured places where it was sort of patched together with spit.

There was a lot more I wanted to write, but this is getting ridiculous. I haven't even gotten to the central thing yet...which is the question of whether I should even be in this formerly sound relationship... More on that later.

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