IN LIKE
I like the person I’m seeing right now. We just started talking. I just met him last week. I like him a lot and like matters. A grand high love is wonderful, and I think grand high people get to have it, but it’s for the rocky moments, for the terrible times. For the other times like and a very strong like is necessary. Liking the person you’re with will sustain you.
Ben I loved. I loved him terribly, terrible being the operative word. I always said you would have to love Ben to be with him. He wasn’t a fun person. He was unreasonable, unresponsive, unavailable, unreal, unsympathetic, unemployed and, most important—unstable. He wasn’t a person you’d just want to casually hang out with. As my friends would say, “He’s good looking, but he’s crazy.”
And so it was required that I love him and I did to such an extent that it never occurred to me that between the hours of listening to him tell his hard luck story, talk about hating humanity, and how alone he felt despite the fact he had more friends than anyone that hapless had a right to, and a crazy whore who drove an hour just to fuck him and make him feel like a heterosexual I loved him, yes, but didn’t really like him.
He may read this. And so here are some things he should know because in his vanity—he always thought he was the center of the universe, and what a small universe that must have been—he will think, “He is obsessed with me. He writes about me. He is not past me.”
I am writing about my life, and he was part of it. It isn’t about him. People who get little love throughout their lives once they get a drop of it spoil it. They think, “It’s all about me.”
Even on my most loving day it was probably ten percent about him.
If I weren’t past him I wouldn’t write this. When a writer begins a story he says, “It WAS a dark and stormy night,” not “it IS a dark and stormy night.” We tell from the past tense. We tell what is done.
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