As fuck.
Sunday, 08.28.2016 - 9:28 am.

Any day now, Andrew and I should be getting our monthly allowance, and we will take the cats to the vet and we will stop surviving on toast with butter and coffee (me) and tea (him). Neither situation is too dramatic, as we have a shampoo for the cats, and we do have some food in our fridge and a few pennies left to buy staples. I am, though, a bit desperate. The trip to Scotland left our budget gasping for breath. I shouldn't complain, I know, as we will recover anytime soon and it was worth it. But yeah, desperate.

I've been making progress with my story, which we will call AF from now on, the initials of its name. I refer to it as as fuck, but just for kicks, the name is in Spanish. Anyway, the amount of joy I get out of immersing myself in that world (still under construction) is incredible. If it was to be published one day, I like to think other people may enjoy it, too, but most of it is a delusion of grandeur. It's not that good, as anything I publish (from blogs to short story books) is. It's good enough, I suppose, to be floating out in the world and get me one or two compliments, no more than that, and that's about it.

Anyway, it's still therapeutical for me. My last two short story books were about Joseph, a lot. If he ever read them, which he never will, he wouldn't miss it. Or would he? This may be again my delusion of grandeur, thinking that people will catch every reference I make in a story, or will notice a detail that makes a comic strip especially significant. Well, they don't. So, ok, Joseph would not miss a few things that are obvious, but other things would just go flying over his head. But I digress.

I'm meaning to say that I wrote a lot about him, no matter that it was in the form of fiction. Now, AF is not about him at all and it feels good. I'm writing about bigger things and with that I'm stopping being pathetic, babbling on and on about my heartbreak. I've been pathetic for way too long, I may even feel embarrassed for all those short stories about him.

(I was reading an article one of these days, about how Justin Timberlake does not stop talking about Britney Spears even though they broke up over a decade ago, and he just keeps milking this story. Luckily I'm a nobody and hardly anybody would pay attention to my writing, but I indeed come across as not getting over my bitterness until relatively recently. Which is true, but the milking of my heartbreak was just to escape from my own desperation and feel I had some control over it. That may be also be defined as being pathetic and bitter but there you go. Who's to say that JT was not being pathetic and bitter in the same way, except he got rich in the process).

I keep digressing! What I mean to say is that even though AF is about bigger things, there are always lines or behaviors from characters that go back to something about him, or something about him and me. But in a passing way, it's there and then it isn't because the story has more important things to deal with.

That's why it's been therapeutic, writing this. I've been able to digest what was left of my bitterness and insert it into a bigger scheme where it doesn't matter so much, where it is not the center of attention. And now I've reduced to one simple explanation why I was so hung up, so crushed, so enamored, so devastated with him, and that is the reason to remember him so passionately:

He was nice to look at.

Which is pretty objectifying, perhaps. I would be heartbroken if he attributed the same claim to fame to me as an ex, but I suspect I don't even get that merit, because quite frankly he was the prettiest out of the two of us. Also, it doesn't mean that's all he was. I'm just taking all he was to me and shoving it under my bed because I, as the story goes, have more important things to deal with.

prev / next