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Matthew and I were having a bit of difficulty in deciding exactly what we ought to do for Halloween, the idea of a big bonfire-esque party was thrown around, but ultimately we decided to head to Philly instead.

I don’t recall when we made that choice, but it was within plenty of time to make preparations for the trip… of course as one might expect we weren’t shopping for our costume essentials until Friday night. I had been tossing around the idea of being Alex from A Clockwork Orange, but the proper hat proved to be slightly difficult at best. Matthew hadn’t any sort of clue what he wanted to be, and with the lack of appropriate hat, neither did I.

We saw this cloak at Hot Topic (gag, but, you know, it was a decent place to look for Halloween at least), but with its $80 pricetag and not really being all that nice it was quickly out of the question. I tossed out the fact I’d wanted to sew something like that, but I’d decided not to because of time constraints, lol… ….we were soon off to buy fabric.

After what seems like hours of agonizing we picked up enourmous quantities of black faur fur & red velvet for him and this polyester slick leatherish & grayish acetate satin for me. Thus the process began and would not be finished until 2:30PM Saturday afternoon. I think we were done sewing his sometime in the morning, and mine was done in the afternoon. I didn’t sleep at all, since I actually had sewing skills better than average, lol… and he napped on the couch for a little while. The end result was definitely worth it, I just wish we would have started earlier, as in… at least a week earlier, lol. The entire process of sewing elaborate costumes the morning of the event they were for definitely landed us on the certifiable list.

Around four or five that evening we were off to Philly. Stopped in at the brother’s house for dinner and to get ready and by near eleven we were on our way to Shampoo for the “Go to Hell” event.

Shampoo was a bit of a mistake. Apparently it was the night before that the ‘gay’ Halloween event was happening, and this “Go to Hell” was painfully heterosexual. The music was quite good in pretty much all of the areas, unfortunately the people were a little too motionless for it to be fully entertaining. Hello… You’re paying a small fortune to get into here for the purpose of dancing and drinking… so why aren’t you doing it?! There is something definitely wrong with those straight people. Finally we wound up in the white room where 80’s music was being played… lol, and surprisingly enough that seemed to be the ‘happening place’ by far. Things started looking up quite well at that point.

We met these girls that wanted to go to Pure. Matthew hadn’t been there, but it is, in a sense, ‘thee gay club’ in Philly, particularly if you consider their membership policy. I’ve been there a couple of times, always entered for free (yay me!), and I’ve always really enjoyed it. With a quick taxi ride we were there, it was packed and there were people being much more active than the stationary straight boys at Shampoo, haha.

Five AM closing time came, we ran into a few more people outside who wanted to know if we were going to the ‘after hours, after hours’ …given our complete and total exhaustion a nice bed in the burbs was really in order though.

Matthew passed out on the couch before I’d even finished removing my makeup, but around 9AM Sunday morning I awoke to find him joining me in the guest room; apparently I freaked out as soon as he entered the room, lol, I barely remember, such is the joy of semi-consciousness I suppose.

With a requisite stop at the Ikea we were on our way back, tired, but having enjoyed the weekend enough for it to have been worthwhile. We also know how to get around, where to park for free, and everything else important. ;)

Wednesday my friend Matthew took me down to the College Park IKEA so that I could finally buy my couch. I had been wanting to get the Klippan couch for nearly a year, and oddly enough when I first met Matthew I was thinking about how it might just fit into his Jeep. A year later we’re actually getting it, I found that amusing in that same odd kind of way.

Originally the plan was hovering around the idea of the two of us hopping over to Philly; we could go to that super huge IKEA, hit the town, stay at my brother’s house, and then head back on Wednesday. That didn’t quite happen, I was super unmotivated and slept all day after playing StarWars: Knights of the Old Republic all night. As seems to be typical, when I’m desperately lacking motivation he is overflowing with it and ended up doing all sorts of domestic and garden related tasks.

Tuesday night the plan evolved to us heading down to College Park around 9AM Wednesday. Want to take a guess as to where we were come 4PM that day? Well, don’t worry, I’ll tell you anyway. We were sitting in traffic on I-81 south, south meaning that we’d not even made it down there yet! MST - Matthew Standard Time - was running extra late that day, lol. He had suddenly become obsessed with making this quiche, and I do mean obsessed. I have some waiting for me at this moment, once I actually feel hungry I’ll have to give it a try.

We finally reached IKEA, not really sure when though. The College Park location is rather nice, not as large as Philly, but much bigger than Baltimore (plus it wasn’t a ‘dump’ like the Bmore one tends to be, egh). I remember checking the time when we were in the marketplace section and it was around 7:30, the waiting on I-81 for 1.5 hours really killed our travel time, lol.

I spent an absolutely absurd amount of money… of course two-thirds of that would be the couch, so it isn’t so bad I suppose. I also decided to upgrade the lighting in the lounge area and bought a Thermosfar wire system. Let me tell you, the transformer to reduce the voltage from 120 to 12 is insanely heavy. I bought a few other miscellaneous things totalling about $100, heh… I’m never sure how it gets to be so much money, but I know that’s IKEA’s sneaky little way: Make everything so inexpensive to influence the customer to buy lots of stuff.

The couch… I was mostly confident that it would fit into the Jeep, Matthew on the other hand was more on the “errmmm… ” side of things; that made me a little more worried about it. One thing we’ve noticed is that things seem really small at IKEA because it is such a spacious place, though once something is at home it seems huge. The couch is a perfect example of this, I think it’s their smallest one not counting futons and the like. It did fit into the Jeep, thankfully, but it was a bit hairy there for a little while. We put it in, and realized we had about eight inches still sticking out. We moved the seats forward and it still wasn’t quite fitting in there… we moved the seats even more, to the point our knees would be resting on the dash, lol. It still didn’t fit. Well, that’s when I just decided to forcibly close the back of the Jeep… it closed, but not fully. I hurled myself into the door and ‘click’ it shut completely. Yay for the foam padding stuff being able to compress! :) Upon entering the vehicle I was extremely glad we didn’t go to Philly, but chose the relatively closest store. This became even more apparent as the travel home was less than completely pleasant - the couch limited visibility quite a bit, as in… no way to see out the back, lol.

We’re such momma’s boys. Once we were underway I gave my mom a call to let her know the progress of things, especially since I’d probably not see her until the next afternoon. After talking with her Matthew asked if he could call his mom, hehe.

We stopped in Frederick for dinner, by then it was about 10:30 or so… Houlihans closed at 10, ergh, bastards. Pargo’s was open though, thankfully, and might I say their special margarita hit the spot quite nicely. I bought dinner as a sort of thank you for the trip down there, heh, though oddly it was probably the least expensive meal we’ve ever had together.

So, yes! I have my couch! The black slipcover I bought in the as-is for $10 (instead of the normal $50) seems perfect, fits nicely, and went on easily. I am extremely happy with how it looks. Of course, it’s not in the final position yet, but more of just being smack dab in the middle of the room at the moment, heh. It’s a lot bigger than I remember it being too, as alluded to earlier. I’m able to lay down on it without my feet touching the other side… lay down as in, fully propped up on the side in TV watching/book reading (haha) position.

I changed out the light fixture early Thursday morning. If I ever put up another one of those, or for any reason need to take this one down, well, I’m not doing it alone! That thing is so incredibly heavy, much more so than a ceiling fan. At least the wiring is less complicated than my ceiling fan, which has all sorts of extra wires for the remote control, lighthing, and such. I got one of the screws holding it put in, but then kept dropping all the others, repeatedly. I had no choice but to risk it hanging there by one screw while I got the fallen ones. I thus feared that it would fall and conk me on the head, something that would most assuredly result in severe injury. Thankfully that didn’t happen and I finally got the transformer sphere attached. This is one area where my dad was a genious… Since my lounge/bedroom was formerly a garage it didn’t have the proper outlets around the walls — when he put them in he put them all on separate breakers. This means I have about five breakers for that room alone, not counting the main one for the two ceiling fixtures. This also means I had plenty of light to change out the light fixture in question. Anyone having done that sort of thing knows how much of a pain in the ass it is to use an extension corded lamp from another room to do the work.

The supplied wall anchors weren’t quite up to the task though. I finally got around to the task of hanging the wire and discovered as I was tightening it that the hooks were popping out of the anchors… ergh! I had just one of those fantastic ‘hollow door’ anchors. They’re similar to the toggle bolt style made of metal, yet they’re plastic. Anyway, I thought that would work, and it did, except once I got started again the other side gave way, oops. I decided that since I couldn’t run out and buy more anchors that I’d take a nap.

My phone rings, waking me up, though I wasn’t so much sleeping anyway. It’s Matthew calling to ask me how my ‘remodel’ work was going. I was about to ask him why he was home so early from work, but then I realized it was 9PM… D’oh! Guess I wouldn’t be going to Lowe’s!

Walmart, it’s an evil place like IKEA… I got for wall anchors, total cost being less than two dollars, but walk out having spent $40. Marketing for Downy’s new essential oil fabric softener got the best of me… who can resist lavender & vanilla?! In my defense I’m almost out of my ‘cuddle up fresh’ Snuggle, so it’s okay, lol.

I redid the wiring for the lamp, setup all the light fixtures (five of them) and cautiously flipped the switch. OMG! The lighting is so perfect! I’d been worried about it being too bright, especially since I had a 4 x20watt halogen fixture up there originally. With an extra 20 watts, errm…. but this is great, nice and subdued, a beautiful warm pinkish glow (and, if you don’t know/recall, I have these blueish gray walls… pink & blue/gray is perfect in terms of lighting. I use 3 Way ‘pink’ coated bulbs in two of my floor lamps for that same reason.).

I’d been doing some research into dimming this fixture in the event it would be too bright. Lutron makes this amazing new eletronic dimmer that will remember your preset, has two tap to full brightness and the coolest part is that it was ‘fade to off’ features. One of my problems has been that the lightswitch by the door only controls the fixture in the lounge, not the one in the bedroom. Granted, I have the fixture in the bedroom on remote control, but I keep that on the night table so I can turn it off once I’m actually in bed. I could get another remote and have one fixed by the door, but, ehh… for some reason that never appealed to me. After seeing the lovely glow of the new Thermosfar system I had to question the need for a dimmer at all… but then that ‘fade to off’ feature really does make it worth $30 on its own. The dimmer is just an added feature, lol.

I also realized that I’ll be able to use my paper lanterns more often now, as the overhead fixture doesn’t overwhelm the room anymore. I do think I need to swap out the CFL bulbs and put in regular ones so I can add a lamp dimmer. They’re ever so slightly too bright and compete slightly with the warmth of the overheads. I also think I want to get another paper lantern… Jon did an awesome job of arranging them, but there seems to be a gap that perhaps should be filled, bringing the total to five, a nice odd number. Design-wise odd numbers are usually better, unless one is going for symetry.

Anyway, I’m so very close to being finished with the lounge, it just took me a year, which isn’t too bad considering I started with a horridly decorated and totally empty room… having to upgrade or install everything. I do want to perhaps get a different rug, more likely two small round ones. I also want to get two of the pallbo cube cushion/stools to place on those round rugs. I’d been considering getting two Tullsta armchairs, but I think that would make the room look a little crowded now that I actually see the couch in there. Other than that and the supplemental lighting items, I think that is it. Not counting a fabulous new surround system, but, hah, that’s a costly upgrade that will be put off for rather a while. I don’t want some piece of shit in a box thing.

So, yay, I think once I’m officially done I’m going to invite some people over, a mini sort of party-esque deal. It’ll be fun. :)

That’s just a tongue-in-cheek sort of inside joke, okay?

I’ve been working pretty steadily all of last week with the server move, so I’ve been needing a bit of a fun sort of break in that monotany. When Matthew called me Thursday night I immediately started in on persuading him that he just had to come over and watch a movie with me, hehe. It wasn’t too difficult to convince him to come over though, he had a bit of wine left from the previous weekend and decided to bring that. The woman was also fired up about having some pina coladas, so I made those for the three of us after a quick trip up to the smoke shoppe. I wasn’t sure if I’d be going up for a weekend in Harrisburg on Friday or Saturday, so that’s the main reason I was a bit insistent that he come over that night. We ended up drinking that Yellow Tail Shiraz he brought over while watching Mission Impossible 2. He left and then I promptly fell asleep trying to watch the first Mission Impossible — yeah, watching them out of order, whoops!

Patrick suggests that I just come up Saturday because of various things we both needed to do, so I gave Matthew a call Friday night to let him know that I was still going to be in town. We were ever so slightly torn between the idea of going down to the “worst gaybar ever” aka Deerpark, or just doing another movie night here. I figured he should just come over and by then we’ll figure out what we wanted to do, and movie night it was. He came over with a sixpack of cider which was added in with roughly the same number of bottles I had already. We watched Luster and then started watching Confusion of Genders. I say started, instead of actually watching, because sometime midway through he passed out, lol.

You see, I was watching the movie, then I noticed after a while that he’d been rather quiet, then I also started to notice that he’d not really moved much for a while. I figured he was either dead or that he fell asleep… given that I’ve never had anyone just abruptly die while laying on my bed the conclusion he was sleeping was chosen.

I was sort of ….errm…. because by then I wanted to sleep, heh, but if I actually got into my bed, meaning under the coverings, I’d probably end up pushing them on top of him. You see, my duvet is extremely warm, thus I tend to push it over to the side or at least somewhere, so it isn’t on me, and I figured smothering him wasn’t a very friendly thing to do, lol. I just decided to ‘can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ and slept on top of the bed too. Of course sometime during the night he woke up and actually got into bed, and then feigned being offended because I still slept on top, lol.

Before all of this bedtime drama and passing out occured Matthew had called my boyfriend up and we decided that he would go out with us Saturday night. He being Matthew going out along with Patrick and me, since my grammar was a bit odd there. Matthew also put in a request for a new boyfriend with a 10″ uncut… ahem. Needless to say, but that was pretty unlikely.

I had set my little phone alarm for 9:30, that would give me enough time to get to Harrisburg by 11AM, considering that’s when I told Patrick I’d be there. The alarm did its thing, I immediately stopped it. I figured I’d just sleep another half hour and be a tad bit late, hah! I woke up at 11:50, exlaimed to Matthew that I was supposed to be in Harrisburg fifty minutes ago, and immediately called Patrick. He said that he added the two ones in eleven to get two, and that he didn’t expect me until two that afternoon anyway, lol. It worked out fine because I indeed did get there at 2:10.

Strangely though, when I got there Patrick was nowhere to be found, nor was his car. His cigarettes and lighter were sitting on the potting table on the porch and the door was open. It was almost as if aliens had abducted him and his car! He’d just run over to the Home Depot to get more mulch though, hehe.

I called Matthew to coordinate our plans for that evening in regards to what time he should arrive at Patrick’s and more importantly exactly how to get there. He said he’d call whenever he was ready to leave, thus leaving Patrick and me with a good chunk of time to do whatever we wanted to do. Ahem, it had been a week since we saw each other, so I’ll just leave that up to your imagination. Wouldn’t you figure though while we were engaged in our ‘activities’ my phone started to ring. I so conveniently knew it was Matthew thanks to the previously assigned ringtones, so I figured I ought to actually answer it. I go running out to the living room, totally naked, rushing to answer the phone. He knew something was going on, lol. The reason I even mention it is because of what happened next… I’m standing by the door, because Patrick’s place is a bit like a wireless blackhole when it comes to signal, and I see his neighbor coming up! I pull this sort of “ahhh!!!!” and immediately hide myself, lol. Matthew’s all interested in knowing what on earth is going on, heh, I just tell him I’d let him know later.

We’d told him to ‘pretend’ that he needed to be in Harrisburg at six so that he’d at least be there by seven…. because we wanted to get to dinner around eight. He showed up at 7:58, lol. Of course practically the first thing discussed is what was happening during that phone call…. and of course Patrick tells him!

After a cocktail and some photos we were off in the Mini to Fisaga. Fabulous dinner there, the two of us ‘youngin’s’ getting carded before we were even allowed inside the resturant, lol. We were then off to Noma for the bulk of our ‘going out’ experience in a sense… the reason we were a bit more ‘dressy’ than usual. Noma is very nice and precisely the sort of place I had in mind when I was going a bit bezerk shopping the weekend previous… thankfully. As I was buying clothing that deserves to be worn to classy places I was thinking of how Patrick and I really need to go out to somewhere just like that.

We were going to meet Tim at Stallions later that night, so we ended up killing some time at the Strawberry before heading over there. By the time we did get to Stallions though I found myself feeling considerably drunk, lol. I knew Matthew had reached the ‘considerably intoxicated’ point at Noma, but of course we just kept drinking anyway. I even grabbed Patrick, several times, and pulled him up onto the podium there to dance, lol. It was one of those cute little “I think he’s going to kill me” moments each time. Matthew homed in on this boy throughout the night, but didn’t quite pull it off the way he may have wanted, hehe.

I forget when we left, but it was pretty obvious that Matthew wasn’t going to be driving home that night, particularly as I was helping him walk to the car. It was quite reminiscent of when just the two of us had gone out a few weeks ago, but back then we were helping each other walk. Patrick hadn’t been drinking nearly as much as the two of us though, thankfully, lol.

When we got back to Patrick’s place I immediately took my pants off, lol, which illicited a sort of ‘what are you doing?’ reaction from Matthew, but of course he was soon stripping off his clothing too. I just didn’t remember to bring my pajama pants like he did. Patrick baked a pizza for him and me and an eggroll for Matthew as we started drinking copious quantities of water. We were up for quite a while sitting outside and in, rambling on to each other about the most random of things… at least it seems like that at this point.

Matthew went to sleep on the couch… one of those lovely pieces of design, lol. Apparently it wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as it would seem to be. Of course Patrick and I went into his bedroom for the night, lol. We ‘took a break’ to find that thankfully he really was sleeping, haha, but it was very strange because we felt like we were sneaking around in his own apartment.

“I always find us a Bed & Breakfast” I say to Matthew as Patrick starts to prepare Belgian Waffles for the three of us, hehe. As always they were delightfully yummy. :) Matthew made his way back to Chambersburg after breakfast, which of course wasn’t really breakfast because it was sometime around 2pm or so.

I suppose Patrick and I just sort of hung out for a while, I know we stopped at Target and did a little shopping. I finally bought the cable that we needed to bridge his Mini and my iPod together, so whee, we can listen to my iPod in his car now! We also stopped at this little pizzaria for a quick dinner before heading back.

I helped him rip a bunch more of his cds into mp3 format, he worked on his ever leaning cd shelf (in vain because it start leaning almost immediately after putting all the cds back on it, bugger), watched Six Feet Under where we learned we were correct about Arthur not being the one to send the poo, lol. Basically just the usual Sunday night, lol.

This goes down as one of those glorious weekends. It was so nice to be able to have a friend of mine go out along with Patrick and me, and for the reality of our friendships and relationships to be very apparent to everyone involved. ;)

I’ve somehow, which isn’t too surprising, failed to write about the past week as I usually do. The… whatever it was… prompted me to spend Monday through Wednesday with Patrick instead of doing what has become rather the norm for the beginning of the week. I went up there Monday night… kept the two of us awake until daylight as I tend to sometimes do, heh. He decided to take Tuesday off so we spent most of the day in bed… sleeping mostly, lol. Later on then I took him out to dinner at Lonestar and he took me to see “The Chronicles of Riddick” afterward. I spent Tuesday night up there with him too before venturing back home Wednesday afternoon. Really, it was all rather ordinary things that we were doing, but for some reason it was just so much fun… to put it simply I was just very happy I’d spent those days with him.

Wednesday evening was much the same as that previous Thursday… some sort of ridiculous fell upon friends again; to which I basically have called it quits, at least temporarily, because I just can’t take it anymore. It really does bother me, and I want to see and talk with him, but I just can’t right now, either he’ll see where I’m coming from or he won’t, but it hasn’t been long enough for either yet.

Much to my shock though, while I was staring blankly at this computer screen, Matthew showed up rather randomly. He said that, basically, he was halfway to my house because of errands and figured he’d just stop by… it was a very pleasant sort of random surprise, so we went off to Walmart together…. since that was his next little bit of errands for the evening. I was so relieved to see it was him at my door, I was almost scared to answer it given the conversations earlier in the day.

We sort of made plans for Thursday, but his schedule wasn’t really all that good for it, so we ended up rescheduling for Friday. I also realized that Patrick wasn’t working late Thursday so I decided to join him in Harrisburg for Karaoke. I’ve always kind of hated it, but this time it was a lot more fun than normal too. It’s like this trend… I’ve been doing stuff that could possibly be fun, but they hadn’t been as of yet, thankfully they are now. Anyway, I spent Thursday night up there, not too surprisingly.

Thursday before I went up to Harrisburg I had acquired SimCity4, thus I started playing it Friday. Matthew called and we ‘put our plans on layoway’ for Saturday. He wasn’t feeling particularly good, and since I was starting in on my SimCity4 addiction that was fine with me.

Saturday I started the process of trimming all of my herbs and making little bundles of them. I still don’t have the paper bags to put them into so I can hang them up to dry though, d’oh. While I was out there doing that he called and I made my way over to his place. We started watching a movie, but within about twenty minutes or so we decided a trip to the state store was in order. We each bought a bottle of wine, I suggested we get something to eat, and figured chinese food would work well, even if a little odd with wine, heh.

We finished watching “The Myth of Fingerprints” …it didn’t really seem to have any noticible plot, it was interesting though. I’d just finished watching “Shakespeare in Love” but he wanted to see it, so I figured why not see it again? When alone I tend to watch movies in bed and thus tend to fall asleep during them on regular occasion, which I did for that one twice, lol.

His wine choice was substantially better than mine, oops, but it didn’t particularly matter much to me by the point we got to my bottle, hehe.

I confirmed that my cellphone didn’t work at all while at his house, which is a little unsettling, because as soon as I neared the city limits it started beeping again, thankfully it wasn’t anything work related.

I got home and I just felt… I’m not sure how to describe it, but let’s just say reminiscent. I went downstairs and grabbed a cider, drank that, and found myself talking to Davey. Yeah, actually talking to him. I didn’t really have much to say to him, nor did he likewise, but we were able to just kinda see how each other was doing. He appologized to me pretty much immediately, which I didn’t expect, but I guess it was a nice thought anyway. The more I talked to him though the more I drank, heh, which was kind of a bad sign, but it seemed to work.

I was talking to Patrick and Adam at the same time, and in a sense it was kind of weird to be talking to all three of them at once, because they each somewhat represent a particular type of relationship… someone I’d been involved with, someone… and someone I’m currently involved with.

Patrick wasn’t thrilled with the idea of my talking with my exboyfriend, but… it was just something I did, it was random, I’m glad I talked to him, but it doesn’t change anything in regards to how I feel overall.

Talking with Adam… we discussed some things that perhaps should have been discussed rather a long time ago, and given what has been happening in his life lately, I was able to just be a friend to him. I gave him a call then, he asked me why I was still up at five in the morning and my response was basically because he was awake too and I knew he needed someone to talk with. We’re just connected to each other in this really deep and unconventional, spiritual, sort of way… He’s usually the one to say it, but I agree with him. I tend to pop back up whenever something is happening and it turns out those periods of time usually match up with when something is happening in mine. There’s just a sort of comfort that we can give each other that most can’t, I understand him and he, actually, understands me.

After that though, I slept, then spent most of Sunday and Monday playing SimCity4 again, heh. It’s very addicting.

Unfortunately when I woke up Monday I wasn’t feeling very good, I have this coughing and stuffy nosed sneezing thing happening, blech. So, until next time…

There’s another interesting thing about Friday, in terms of unusual for me. I found myself sort of frozen when presented with multiple choice situations… kind of like “Oh my god… What is he doing? What am I supposed to do?!” lol. I didn’t really think about it after that moment, but it’s very interesting to sort of sit here and replay various bits of the evening, especially after now having a better idea why certain things were said and done. I guess that’s kind of a nice part, in a sense, of having ‘debrief’ time with people after events. That of course would lead me to a rather long tangent about how when we’re subtle the wrong impression is received sometimes… It was particularly interesting when Matthew took me into the bathroom, lol… and no, he didn’t slam me into the wall and start molesting me or anything, it just had the weird effect of starting a conversation that we’d continue while upstairs overlooking everybody. Especially because I was like… “uhmmm…” when he grabbed me and said “let’s go to the bathroom” …I’d generally expect someone, hmmm, like Patrick for example to do that, hehe.

I don’t remember for certain if he said the next words to me while still at the Velvet Rope or later at his friends’ house, but regardless it was a very interesting realization for me. He said something to the effect of “I think you missunderstood me when we were at Luke’s.” I don’t think I wrote in any detail about that night two weeks ago, or how I really felt about it in relationship to what we were about to talk about, but the point here is that there was a moment where things could have gone either way between us that night. I also think that he perhaps learned that saying “I want a friend” yet still expecting the boy on top of him to kiss him isn’t the best of ideas, lol. Pretty much instantly when he said that I stopped and backed way off… sort of like ‘alright, if you’re not interested, that’s fine.’ Yeah, it was a little disappointing though, and confusing.

Keep in mind, this was during that period where Patrick and I were NOT together, and he was out that weekend with someone whom I’d describe to be somewhat an equal with Matthew in regards to how we feel about them. Also, as the night and next day progressed, which is equally important, I found myself coming to the decision that I’d much rather attempt to fix the situation between Patrick and me anyway.

At Kate & Jill’s we were sitting outside on their balcony area when I saw him start going down the stairs. I asked him where he was going, to which he said he was going for a walk. I told him I would join him and I did. I didn’t really know what was going to happen, but I had this overwhelming urge to be with him, I just got that impression that he needed someone to talk with, otherwise I figure he would have asked to be alone.

Kate & Jill have this sort of carriage house behind their home, it has stairs that lead up to the roof, we went up those stairs and stopped on the landing. I found myself, for no apparent reason, gripping the railing quite strongly, but then we started talking.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want a relationship, that he wasn’t interested in me, but when he said that he wanted a friend, he meant that he wanted a friend more than a romantic relationship. Considering at this point Patrick and I had ‘reunited’ for lack of the ability to put it better, the issue really was rather moot. Regardless though, it was something that had weighed on my mind and obviously on his as well. I suppose it is especially important because when we had met, I did meet him with the intentions of having something more, but then I’d moved on to wanting just a friend… which is when I met Patrick, my “I don’t want a relationship” turned blissfully into me wanting one, it just took the right person.

Matthew and I had one of the worst starts to a friendship that I can ever remember having… We’d go months without talking, then we’d talk a lot, make plans, then we’d break them, repeat. We weren’t communicating with each other what we wanted, so he’s thinking I’m still interested in one thing, I’m thinking he’s interested in the other, it just wasn’t meshing up. In the middle of March I emailed him and invited him to the party Patrick was having, made it clear that Patrick was my boyfriend and that I just thought he’d have a good time if he came. He didn’t, but he did call and tell me he was interested in going… then something, as usual, came up, sadly it was his boyfriend basically flaking out on him. We sort of went through the same song and dance a little more, still not seeing each other, but calling randomly and talking occasionally.

Through all of this though, I still liked him. That one evening we’d spent together talking over martinis made an impression, and a good one. I saw something within him that I knew would be worthwhile, I can say that I didn’t give up on him, I wanted to be his friend. We live in the same town, have similar interests, and generally I’d say we get along tremendously well. Why wouldn’t I want someone like that in my life? …even if it was on such sporadic occasions? Friends are difficult to find, especially ones that live so nearby. Most of the people I consider my friends live a day’s driving away, or require airfare to see! It seems almost pointless to mention that both of us have had our share of awful people in our lives, we’ve been disrespected, hurt, and have had our efforts wasted. These experiences wear away at us.

So when he asked me, and at this point I believe we both had tears in our eyes, if I would be his friend, I put my arms around him, held him tightly, and told him most emphatically that I would.

I really appreciated the fact we were able to actually talk about that sort of… I’m not even sure how to describe it, it wasn’t so much a tension, but just something within us that had gone unfinished or otherwise unanswered. We were able to make things right between us, to agree in regards to what exactly our relationship was, and it felt good to discuss it.

Patrick was, at first, a little upset that I didn’t leave from York to spend the night up there with him, but I’m glad that he understood why I felt I needed to stay down there once I explained this to him. Two friends just needed to spend time with each other and truly talk with one another.