life is a compromise anyway

final departure from laguardia airport. i see manhattan out of my little window, bathed in warm sunrise. it's massively tiny. just three minutes later we were over forests, then ocean. i am a giant, looking down on a coral reef exposed at low tide. the little buildings are just brittle stalagmites and calcium deposits, and i could sweep my hardened hand down across them, cracking and crumbling a rolling wave of bricks and asphalt and street signs and taxis.

ex-boyfriends are like zombies - they always, always come back to eat your flesh, just when you think they're gone for good.
my friend says i have to stop using the 10-point word. fine. but anyway, there's this guy slavoj zizek who wrote a whole book on, like, zombie theory, late capitalism and the eternal recurrence of desire - which he calls "the fundamental fantasy of mass culture". our unresolved desire leads us to wreck havoc, not because we're specifically or individually evil, but because we, too, are victims, we're constantly suffering, we can't rest amidst the torment of unrequited need - whether we're talking about the lure of soloflex infomercials to the insomniac, or the unresolved angst of the jilted lover.
even if i do the dumping, it'll take me about a season to get over someone - i'm still terrifically win-back-able for at least four months. my own sense of romantic nostalgia has a half-life of about six months; by one year they're usually, for better or for worse, out of my system. and infallibly, that's when the dead start to rise from the grave.

er...this is going a little too far. yes i'm the self-proclaimed commitmentphobe and leave the impression that i go through guys faster than i go through my diesel jeans, but i do get attached. once in a while. and those are usually the ones that really kills me.
alright. i think i said too much. i mean, i drank too much. and this confession may just be something that would haunt me. but who cares...i'm leaving soon...i'm just going to complete the confession.

so my phone rang. and it's the Taken Guy, who was the reason i went to parties every weekend to drink my life away for like 3 weeks - i wasn't ready to pick up the pieces of a broken relationship, so i got the hell out before his girlfriend found out. of course, she found out anyway, about a month later. let's not talk about the episode when i ran into her at walgreens on shattuck.
"i miss you," he says. "but not in the old, let's-make-out-in-an-alley kind of way. i just miss you." that's always nice to hear. but...i don't..i just...i haven't thought of him in a while. i've been too concerned making new mistakes to worry about the resolution of the old ones. the conversation was pleasant enough, though, He tells me he and his girlfriend have borken up. he's living in the city with three hipster girls, he says he feels like their 'faggot older brother' (the Taken Guy fits squarely in my pattern of dating men who spent more money on hair and skin products than me). he wants to thank me, he says, for the part i've played in the dissolution of his relationship. that's the first time i've heard that one. no problem, dude. any time. we hang up and i'm more bemused than anything else. no harm, no foul.
the zombie attack does not always end so well though. but it's too late and i'm too drunk to document that.
we're not alone. we all have our zombies, stalking the ether waiting to come back and avenge their misplaced desire on the living. and when it happens, it just sucks me dry, like i've been...well, sucked dry by a zombie. and, for a while, i just have nothing left.
so that's how i felt, before i left the apartment this morning. and i'm not saying it excuses what happens next...it probably would have happen anyway. i'm just saying - i wasn't exactly in the best shape...