September 27–October 2, 2004 — Afraid to know

Now that I’ve lived for one month without windows or a home phone, I can say with certainty that of the two I miss windows much more. I guess sometimes I miss having a phone a bit, but this is easily overshadowed by the lack of natural light and fresh air. Phones seem pretty insignificant by comparison.

The difference being that not having a phone line would be an easy thing to fix; I could just call and have one installed. When my parents visited a couple of weeks ago, my dad said he’d pay for me to get a cell phone. I told him I didn’t want that and he seemed surprised. It just seems a waste of money. When I’m at home, I don’t normally want to talk to people, and the people I might want to talk to I’ve already made plans with.

Anyway, there’s always email, and it’s not as though my social calendar has been so full that people would need to get in touch with me. Aside from shows, I haven’t been out with large groups of people since the end of July, and I still think it’s for the best.

For most of September I didn’t even go to shows. I didn’t see many people, and I tried to get used to things being the way they are. It’s been months since I’ve seen any of the girls whose names I reduce to single letters when I talk about them here. There’s no one new for me to reduce to a single letter and to talk about behind her back, either; I could say I wasn’t looking, but that wouldn’t be true.

Now that it’s October, I’m going to more shows again. I saw Kerry twice in three days this weekend, at two different shows. She’s a confusing person for me to be friends with. I’m torn between seeing all the reasons I’ve always been attracted to her and remembering everything that went wrong. I end up somewhere in the middle where I guess friendship is a sensible outcome, but whenever I’m tugged towards either warmth or bitterness, I end up feeling and thinking things either too familiar or too malicious for me to be thinking about a friend.

So I don’t know.

There are a lot more shows this month, but I’ll be going to most of them alone, so I’m not sure how much they’ll change anything. Also, with all the effort I’ve put into not spending time in large groups, I worry I’ve been cutting off the people I might have spent more time with if only I’d seen them often enough to make plans. So I’m trying to be more proactive, to make an effort to walk to the pay phone near my house and to call people. Or at least to email them.

Still, it’s nice never to sit and wish for the phone to ring. It’s nice to be able to pretend that a lot of people might be calling if only they could. I am really very popular for someone who spends so much time alone in a basement apartment without windows or phones, I think.

It’s just a matter of setting up the rest of my days so as better to savour these illusions.