Cathartic
Last night I had therapy, and given the previous night’s incident, I really needed it. I started talking about it, and after about five minutes I started sobbing. Uncontrollably. The tears just kept flowing and flowing and I couldn’t stop them, nor did I want to. It felt so damn good, so cathartic. I felt like I was in a movie.
(For the future, maybe I’ll follow RJ’s lead and start carrying some teargas.)
My number one priority now is to find a new apartment. It’s weird — I think I’ve realized it’s easier to suffer through certain things than it is to move on to the bigger things. It’s easier to worry about HIV and my crappy neighborhood than it is to focus on larger, more complicated issues — such as trying to get up the nerve to really hunker down and write a short story or a short play. Once I move to a quieter apartment in a better neighborhood, and once I find out I’m physically healthy, then I’ll actually have to confront those deeper goals, which in some ways is scarier. Not that the former goals are false ones — for my sanity, I really do need to move.
I just have to decide where. I’m thinking maybe a nice part of Brooklyn; although my current job requires me to live in New Jersey for the next five months, I could probably finagle something. There’s Hoboken, although it’s filled with post-collegiate straight guys who’ve forgotten that they’re not in college anymore. There are some quieter New Jersey towns slightly further west of Manhattan, but that might be too boring, too suburban. If I had my druthers, I’d find a little studio in Park Slope.
Anyway, at one point in last night’s session I mentioned that I really wished that I could sleep at my parents’ house that night instead of going back to my apartment. My therapist said, “Why can’t you?” I replied that I’d feel like I was wimping out. But then I decided, to hell with the self-criticism and the hairshirt, I really just need one night in a comfortable house. So I called my folks and wound up going home for the night.
It was terrific. I got there at around 8:30, had some leftover food for dinner, and then lay down on the couch in the den with a blanket covering me. I just sat there watching TV for almost four hours, everything from old sitcoms on Nick at Nite to snippets of network TV shows to PBS. I watched Diff’rent Strokes; some segments of a program on a music and arts channel; part of The Facts of Life; a terrific one-hour gay newsmagazine on PBS called In the Life, which I’d never seen before; part of NYPD Blue; The Simpsons; a snippet of Friends; All in the Family; and, to top it off, an episode of Quantum Leap, which is one of my all-time favorite TV shows. It was an episode with the Evil Leaper. (If you never watched the show, that obviously will mean nothing.)
Even though I slept on a couch, I slept like a log. And I was awakened in the morning by my mom. “I have sort of a gift for you,” she said, as I was wiping the sleep from my eyes. She was holding a small white envelope.
She said, “What are you doing tonight?”
“Um… well, I have dinner plans… why?” I said, sleepily.
“How would you like to go to the Metropolitan Opera?” she said.
“Really?”
My mom has her own one-person subscription to the Met, and she couldn’t go tonight. They’re doing La Bohème. I’ve never been to the opera, let alone the Metropolitan Opera, and hey, a free ticket, and hey, it’s La Bohème, so I said, sure.
I’m really excited. I’ve cancelled my dinner plans, and after work I’m going to put on a jacket and tie and go to the Met.
What a week — I get an HIV test, I get mugged, I get to go to the Metropolitan Opera.
And it’s only Wednesday.