The Last Week.

The battery in my phone died Monday, so, with 8 days left on the warranty, I took it to the Apple Store, which is at The Domain (for the record, the most depressing place on the whole fucking planet – it’s a mall where people live in apartments above the stores), and they gave me a new phone. I thought I had backed up my phone in the last day or two but it turned out that the last backup was June 6. So 9 days of text messages (the only record I have of communication with M during that time) is gone. Is it a small kindness or a cruel joke that in the last few messages I have on my phone, everything was fine, that there’s no record of when everything turned bad?

Less than two weeks ago, he was calling me “sweetie” in his text messages. Then, in a matter of days, everything changed, and he doesn’t want “to be boyfriends, like we were” anymore. “Like we were.” 10 days ago.

I’m too sensitive. That’s what people, adults – my parents, teachers – said when I was a kid: he’s too sensitive. I was easily embarrassed, hurt, I cried a lot. I’d like to be a little, a lot, less sensitive right now because this hurts like a holy motherfucker. Why am I taking this so hard? I think I was fine 7, 8 months ago, before I met M. Fine. Well, all the money/job/career stuff was fucked up then too, but I had no desire for love and romance, didn’t want any part of it, didn’t need it, didn’t miss it. So why am I falling apart now? Why is it that I feel like I literally cannot bear losing him? I feel hopeless. I can’t stop crying. I’m too sensitive.

J and I used to watch a show years ago, one of the very early Discovery Channel reality shows, I think it was called Operation TV. It came on when we were having dinner. One memorable episode followed a woman, who had a particular type of epilepsy, through a surgical procedure which they hoped would cure her. Her seizures did not consist of falling on the ground and foaming at the mouth; she would just start repeating the words, “I know really I know really I know I know really I know I know really I know,” over and over. The surgery consisted of removing a piece of her skull to expose her brain, then prodding around in the brain tissue to find the lesion that was causing the seizures. She had to be awake during the surgery so they could tell when a seizure was triggered. The surgeon poked at various spots in her brain until she started saying, “I know really I know,” etc., and then he just cut that section out. She was cured. So I’m wondering if it’s possible to locate the section of my brain that falls in love and cut it out. I want to be cured. I don’t want to live in fear of this happening again.

I don’t want to go back to porn and drunken blowjobs in the car at 2 a.m. To STD clinics and telling everyone who asks that I don’t have a boyfriend because I have no use for love and don’t believe in it. I do believe in it. I just don’t have it in me to bear the sadness. Not again. I try to remind myself that there’s beauty in sadness – you’re an artist, write a song about it – but I don’t really believe that anymore. I think it was only something I used to tell myself so I could get through it.