Ten minutes later, a man came bursting into the apartment, singing some R&B song in a high, piercing voice. "You know I'm a diva," he exclaimed. As it turns out, he'd happened to be in the area, spotted Jo's nephew at the store, and decided to call her to invite himself over. I can't remember his name. He introduced himself several times throughout the night, but always without saying his name. He'd say, "You know I'm for real." "You know what'ch I am!" These phrases I remember, but his name is an utter blank. So I'll call him "For Real."

For Real sits between Jo and me at the table. He's to my right; to my left stands Joe's Christmas tree. He starts off talking about "you know me, I'm for real," then says something about how he sees life (he'd go on to say many things about how he sees life). He talks quickly, lots of slang; I can barely understand him. And this is before I got stoned. Jo invited me to the kitchen to smoke a joint. I hadn't smoked in five years, but I puffed when she offered and even remembered how to re-light a joint when it went out (spark, inhale gently but swiftly, then blow out the tiny flames crawling up the wrapper).

Seconds later, I was high. My eyes shrunk, my shoulders tensed up, my feet stepped on top of each other as stamp out nervous tension. My knuckles kept feeling like they needed to be cracked.



But back to For Real, who I'd completely forgotten about. He "invaded my space," although that phrase feels too harsh to describe what he was doing. He sat closer to me than I generally prefer being sat next to. When I told me I was feeling bad - going through shit - because my boyfriend (ex-boyfriend) of 12 years had dumped me, then he got going. Pulled up closer in his chair. And this was still before I was high. Joe invited us into the kitchen; she shared a joint with me. ("Not For Real," she cautioned. "Don't give the joint to For Real.") Then we returned to the table in the living room with For Real on my right.

For Real keeps talking. Jo exits to her bedroom because she and her girlfriend just broke up and her girlfriend keeps calling, wanting to come over when she hadn't been over for the last two nights. And For Real keeps coming closer. He's talking about me, what he sees in me. He says my boyfriend is a bitch. "I give you 12 years of my life and now you say you don't love me? Let me ask you something: Did you know for 12 years your boyfriend was an asshole?" I defended Ex for as long as I could make sense of what For Real was saying. In a matter of minutes the language started flying at me, quick and indecipherable. I hung onto each word like a rope being yanked into the heavens. I'd lose my grip on this word, rush to that one and try to grab hold of it before it too disappeared into the sky, but it was already gone, so I'd move on to another, then another...)

I was convinced half of For Real's words weren't in English. He talked about his friend. A male friend from childhood who hated, hated him today (or maybe it was For Real who hated the childhood friend?). For Real had kissed his friend. His friend had said, "how could you never tell me?!" The friend's father was a Professor; For Real kept saying that. The friend's father knew For Real was gay and said something about it to the friend, and the friend said to his father, "I don't care if he's gay. He's my best friend."

Then For Real pauses, waiting for me to react. I say, "that's beautiful." And he says, "no, it's not beautiful," and I think to myself, "Holy shit, I'm stoned. I just missed the entire point of what he was saying. He may have just told me a horrible, tragic story and I responded by saying, 'that's beautiful.'" So I started to qualify my answer, but before I could get out three words he'd started again. About the friend. The kiss. The "why didn't you tell me?!" And then it goes somewhere else. He's talking about love and trust, and he unzips my hoodie and slips his hand under my shirt and pulls up my shirt and touches just to the side of my nipple and says, "nice titties." (I can't tell if he was complimenting my pectorals or suggesting I do more toning around the chest.)

He keeps saying, "you're cute." And I keep thanking him - not merely because I want to be polite but because I sincerely need compliments right now and will take them pretty much anywhere I can get them. And then (I'm skipping forward a bit) he asks for my number. I say I can get his number from Jo. He says something that leads me to believe he thinks I'm being unkind, so I give him the number, but not my real one; it occurs to me about halfway through speaking the number that I shouldn't give him my real one. So I combine my boyfriend's (ex-boyfriend's) and my telephone numbers and swap the last two digits. And I tell him my name again, which he's asked several times and now wants to enter into his phone. And he's resting his phone a few inches from my crotch, both hands on his phone and leaning into me, and then the side of one of his knuckles is brushing against my groin.

Jo may have come in. Or I may have disengaged myself somehow, although I didn't have much space to work with, sitting as I was beside the Christmas tree. (At one point, For Real says, "I'm gonna push you unda that Christmas tree." Or was it "put you under that Christmas tree"? I don't remember.) And at some point before the phone number episode, the part where I said I was skipping forward, I'd insulted him by guessing his age (I guessed 38). He went to the bathroom and was speaking/screeching to Jo, but I couldn't make out anything he was saying. It took me five minutes to conclude that I'd genuinely insulted him, and even now I'm still not sure. He'd guessed my age: 26. That may have been charitable, but I appreciated it nonetheless. He asked what kind of a person I thought he was and I said, "very interesting." I smiled. He agreed. He was definitely interesting.

I haven't written while high in ages. I smoked pot regularly in college before I met Ex - nearly every day, in fact. My new family of college friends introduced me to it, though I'd lied and said I'd smoked before. Melinda, my best friend, was a Dance major, a little ballerina (actually, she was a modern dancer) with a roundish nose and the sweetest, soft little face. Rachel, our den mother, reminds me now of Mama Cass must have looked like at age 19. She always had humus in her mini dorm refrigerator. Jayme was the free-spirited dork. She laughed constantly, in a long vibrato bookended with snorts. Of everyone in the group, I courted Jayme's attention and approval the most. (Even though Melinda was my closest friend, she had a boyfriend. Her attentions were divided.) The four of us and a fifth girl, Emily, smoked every night. At first I was the only guy in the group. Before long we were joined by a second guy, also gay, named Rob. Rob became Rachel's best friend, Melinda was mine, and Jayme became a big fan of a third guy, Doug, who would later become my ex-boyfriend's last partner before me.

My beautiful glass bowl and hand-made pouch (the pouch was given to me by Jayme). For most of the last decade, both bowl and pouch have been stored, unused, in three different closets in Ex's and my three different apartments.

Tonight I remembered how I spent my days and nights before Ex. If I could, I woke up late. If I had morning classes, I took a nap afterwards. Then I worked. I read, studied, wrote essays, read some more. Every evening I wrote for myself. (Before Ex, I was writing poems and stories. I now write plays, to a large degree because of him.) I worked no fewer than two hours per night on my writing. Then I joined the girls (and later the guys) to smoke. We stayed in Rachel's room (later in Rachel and Jayme's room when they became roommates). We laughed. We entertained each other. I can't remember most of what we talked about, but I know those nights made me feel appreciated and safe. I wasn't completely comfortable in my own skin, never truly confident about how much I fit in or if these people truly enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed theirs, but to the extent that such a condition is possible for me, I felt mostly unselfconscious. Relaxed.

In warm weather we'd go out, walk around the campus, hang out on the mall, walk from the dormitories to the apartments in search of parties (we did this on cold days, too). Sometimes my friend from high school, Andy, would visit. He hung out with Melinda and me, smoked as much pot as we did (he went to college at Weslyan; he'd been getting plenty of practice), and laughed with us, wandered the campus with us, as we discovered what seemed like an endless number of nooks and crannies hidden throughout the half-forested, half-landscaped grounds. And because Andy and I were so close, and because he'd made me feel special and loved during my senior year of high school, he made me feel even more at ease during those rambling evenings and nights. These were some of the moments when I felt most at home in my self, in my own body.

And then? Come 1:00 or 2:00 AM - later on weekends - I would return to my room. First I would search my pockets; however much money I had I would spend on microwave burritos and soda and Milanos at the late-night food-stop on campus. If the food-stop was closed, I'd settle for vending machine snacks - usually a 75-cent bag of skittles and a can of Mountain Dew. I had a small TV that received 13 channels. Back in my room, I'd eat and watch.

Sometimes I'd tune into significant moments of pop culture. Once it was a news anchor reporting the death of Princess Diana. Another time it was the birth of Madonna's daughter and the death of Mother Theresa.

One marvelous night, I turned on the TV to discover Claudia Shear's Blown Sideways Through Life. The performance was airing on PBS. I was enthralled. I had never seen anything like this before. It seemed like stand-up comedy but more meaningful, and the performance (on stage) was intercut with footage of this woman (Shear) nude in an artist's studio, stranded on the sides of rocks, waiting in line at a coffee stand in Grand Central Station.

At the time I didn't know what "solo performance" was, but I knew Shear's performance was funny, and I felt deeply moved by it. A woman searching for her passion and sense of purpose. A gay teenager whose sole purpose up until this point had been to minimize a barrage of daily humiliation. I related to Shear and felt inspired by the end of the piece: she spun in circles, arms reaching outwards and upwards like a thankful Stevie Nicks. Her arms were open to welcome something. The endless possibilities of life? A release of any desire to control the direction of one's existence when one can't help but be "blown sideways" through it? I don't know. I've seen the video as recently as two years ago, and although I can't remember the purpose, I certainly remember the joy.

(I was so moved by Shear's work that I spent years afterwards trying to locate a copy of the recording. My third year of graduate school I did an internship at a prestigious Broadway organization. My first day I noticed they had a copy. I stole it, took it home, dubbed it, and replaced the tape the next day. It was the one worthwhile thing to come out of that internship.)

So I would finish my burrito or my skittles - satisfy my munchies - and shut off the TV. Sometimes I'd read, although I'd forget everything I read the next morning. Then I would shut off the light and sleep. I've had trouble falling sleeping from the time I was a child, but at the end of a night like this, my head would hit the pillow, I would hallucinate for a few minutes, and then I was out. The next day? Class, reading, maybe some writing for school, definitely two hours of writing for me, then the whole beautiful experience again.

Sometimes my friends and I would drive off campus to see a movie. Sometimes we'd venture out to special events on campus. A screening of The Abyss in the swimming pool. A concert or performance at the college's Performing Arts Center. The annual fall Drag Ball. A party in the football field or a drum circle in the atrium of the ATM/bookstore building (only in cold weather; when it was warm out, the drum circles took place outside under the stars). But mostly we smoked pot and laughed and celebrated our own foolishness.

Tonight I remembered those adventures, re-lived them to an extent. (For Real may have been creepy, but tonight I also remembered that I am a paranoid smoker. No matter how often I got high, I nearly always managed to find something creepy.) It felt good not to be focused on Ex, to remember myself at a time before I knew him. I realize I've been focusing on the past and that living in the past will get me nowhere (at least this is what For Real and several sympathetic listeners have told me). But there may be a genuine utility in revisiting the past. The past is who I was before him, and though I've certainly changed over the last 12 years, the person I was is, in many ways, the person I still am. If I find myself forgetting that I ever relied on myself, identified as only myself, and enjoyed myself in company that didn't include him, I can think back to these moments, this former version of myself.

I wasn't always happy. Sometimes after I returned to my room, I played sad songs on my CD player (my favorite was Kate Bush's "Never Be Mine") and wallowed in my desire for the very thing I enjoyed for the last 12 years and now find myself, once again, without. I had fallen in love with straight friends from home and carried these feelings with me to school, calling my crushes late at night, asking them "deep" questions, feeling myself growing closer to them as they answered, and hoping enough of these conversations might eventually tip the Kinsey scale in my favor. But I lived by myself. I slept by myself. I had friends who cared about me - both at school and from home. And every so often, my self-conscious interior narrator would shut down and I'd know what I wanted.

I wanted to write. To be D.H. Lawrence. To read as many books as I could. To find someone who would love me. To have small but wonderful adventures - the kind of adventures children have when they pull the cushions off the sofa - a familiar object - and turn them into a fort - a space for secrets and unknown possibilities. Ex sees adventure in climbing mountains, backpacking across Europe, touring the continents, spending the summer at a cabin by the lake without an indoor bathroom or hot water. I've had these kinds of adventures, even enjoyed some of them, but the adventures I prefer are quiet, interior, thoughtful. I like building forts, with sofa cushions and with words. And I rediscovered some of that spirit tonight. It's a spirit that existed before him, and while it isn't necessarily the spirit of the person I want to be today, it's a spirit I enjoyed revisiting, and one I want to build on.

It's 12:13 AM and Ex will be back soon. He is taking tango lessons (For Real's reaction to this: "The boy broke your heart and now he's out dancing?") For Real is the first person I've spoken to since Saturday who blamed Ex. He asked several times if Ex had cheated; I said "no." He said I must have been Ex's doormat to allow him "suck the life out of me," to give him everything, for the last 12 years. Truthfully, I felt validated by the last part of this statement. I had loved Ex and given him everything, and of that nebulous "everything" there will be pieces of what I gave him that will never be fully mine again. But I wasn't a doormat anymore than my ex-boyfriend is completely to blame. We shared 12 years - 12 beautiful, terrible, intimate, distant, loving, restless, and wholly human years. I can't delete those years. At the same time, I can't account for them any longer as part of an ongoing chapter in which my ex and I are the two protagonists. Ex says he knows in his gut that a better match is out there for each of us. I don't believe that - I'm not sure I ever will - but I do believe in Claudia Shear opening her arms and spinning with abandon.

I believe I can have that. And I believe I can have it without another person. Just me. Spinning. And smiling.