Ben
I wonder how many people have changed the dedications on their books or looked at a dedication and shaken their heads.
For me changing the dedication to White Life was incredibly healing. It set a lot of things in order. Someone saw the dedication before it went on the market and laughed, saying, "Yes, you definitely should change it."
I thought that it would be big and expansive to keep it to Ben--someone who is semi illiterate anyway and exhausted every goddamned drop of love I had for him. I would have proven to myself how big I could be.... Shit like that. False shit.
I brought up Ben and a friend said, "If you see him again you should punch him in the jaw." Now, my usual response is a little laugh or, sometimes revulsion to that idea, but in the last few days anger has crept up. I think a great deal of punching him in the jaw. I spent twenty minutes thinking about it the other day. Time does not heal all wounds. Time is full of shit. Sometimes what happened years ago can be closer to you than the moment it happened.
I check my feelings about him because I check my feelings about every relationship I've come out of no matter what its nature--and certainly this was one of the stranger natures. The thing that shocks me is the lack of love I have, the zero affection, the fact that I don't look back on any time in those ten months and say, "Ah, but I miss that." Even the good times were twinged with something wretched, his sullenness, his laziness, the passive aggression that led to nothing except his eventual eviction, his endless schizophrenic shifts from how he had so many friends to how he had no one, how he wanted desperately desperately to be loved to how he didn't need anyone at all. How he was so needy that he wanted to love one person, fuck another and when I showed any sign of not wanting him that was a cause for immediate resentment. He was so consuming.
No one lied like Ben. No one lied badly and inconsistently. No one changed the truth of a story with such hairpin wildness as Ben. One minute he'd never had a real relationship, the next he'd had several great ones. He was gay, he was straight, he hated people and was a robot, he sat up in the middle of the night wailing about his loneliness. He hated his own company so much you could never leave him alone. He was only fit to be left alone.
I look back. To be that consuming one must be clever and interesting. One has to be doing something, have a magnetic personality, be engaging. Ben was none of those things and when love and affection died for him it like a bell jar landing over a candle and sucking all oxygen away.
I keep racking my head looking for another way. Looking for someway I could be who I am now, learn what I have learned without having had to go through Ben. It's as if when I learn this way I can retrace those last ten months, erase Ben.
But of course there is no erasing him.
Somewhere between exhaustion and boredom laced with shooting arteries of hatred is how he feel about the son of a bitch who taught me so much about love and brought me to where I am now.
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