Searching for love in all the wrong places

 

January 10, 1984

 

Love is a deception.

It is need, hope, faith, caring, and a lie.

It is the ultimate self indulgence as opposed to the popular belief that it is all giving.

The unconscious has much to do with this, motivating a soul towards what it needs.

We give in order to obtain those things that sustain us.

We protect ourselves against the unbearable thought of doing without.

“I need you,” you say, and I think, everybody says that at some point, and it either creates the relationship or buries it.

It depends on timing.

Often when spoke too late, it comes across as too dependent, a desperate move to save a failing love.

Sometimes, the need is just too overwhelming, dominated by subconscious and unconscious urges.

For me, the need for love is great.
I walked around New York City on Sunday, seeking attention.

I wasn’t being lustful so much as lost.

I feel abandoned.

Fran had called me earlier in the day to say she could not pick me up.

She was drunk; this made me wonder why.

For every act, there is a reason. She was at Bill’s apartment again – which lured me down the path of jealousy for a time.

When I got over that, I felt empty.

I maintained a cheerful surface. Emotions are sometimes easy to handle. We lie to ourselves all the time in the name of love.

Wandering around inside the cavern-like Port Authority, I found myself aching for love, love in anybody’s arms.

Only later did it occur to me that I always end up in this place each time I felt like this.

The conditions of my life being such that I had no one to hold, no one to be cared by or care for.

When Fran went away last, I indulged – not because I lacked patience to wait for her sexually, but because I lacked love.

But you don’t find love searching the streets and allies of this world, and on this Sunday, I searched mostly for myself.

I had thirty bucks in my pocket along with my bus ticket home and so when the woman asked me if I wanted a date, I let her lead me into one of the abandoned buildings off Times Square.

I recalled those days when I went AWOL from the army to wander these same streets and heard the same invitation.

She didn’t do anything, except ask for more money, telling me that she could make me very happy if I could come up with more than twenty dollars.

In the shadows, two very large black men waited, and watched, staring at me through the cracks in the walls as if they were ghosts or I was.

I handed the woman a ten dollar bill, as she faded away into the darkness, the interaction unrealized, and unwanted, and certainly, not love.

I hurried back down stairs I could not remember climbing, through the bones of a building with rooms on either side as empty as I felt inside, and then rushed into the day light, feeling more than a little dirty, and more than a little lost.

Somewhere on the stairs I had lost my ticket and the rest of my cash, and had only enough coins to make a phone call back to New Jersey, to a now-sober Fran, telling her I needed her to come pick me up.