Well, more so than anything else really.  Which is, I realise, hardly a stirring call to words, but whatever.

When Curfew Boy and I decided to go our separate ways, I was convinced that it was the right decision to make, for a variety of reasons. I didn’t really document them at the time because I was so concerned with getting things done that it made very little sense for me to sit there any analyse them to death.  Even now in retrospect, they’re fairly basic: we were at very different points in our lives, it wasn’t really economically feasible to carry out a long-distance relationship (my credit card bills will attest to this), and frankly, I never felt like he was really into it; not to the same extent as I was.  And at that point I thought, Well, why force it?  He’s not great about staying in touch, this isn’t making me feel good about myself, and I don’t want to be the desperate one, so let’s just be adults, call it quits and move on.

But we stayed in touch, and we stayed friends.  He came to visit last year.  I saw him a few times when I was in his city for work; we spoke on the phone with some regularity, and everything very comfortably slid into a space wherein things were OK.  Not spectacular like a supernova but steady, like a palm tree in the desert, all incremental and reasonably smooth with occasional bursts of wind and sand.  Then gradually, we joked about the people we were hooking up with; in my case, on the one or two occasions I travelled outside the country, in his, other people he had started meeting online etc.  And things were still smooth.  I called him from Thailand to whisper about someone just utterly beautiful whom I’d met–he called me while I was in Karachi to tell me about parties he was going to and the guy(s) he’d hooked up with there. We were both so mature and sensible and adult about it that I was both irritatingly smug about my innate superiority in managing affairs of the heart and terrified that it was all going to blow up in my face at any given moment.

I didn’t think this is how it’d blow up though.  Slowly, incrementally, like sandstorms whittling away at the palm tree we had grown.  He told me about someone he knew in the past with whom he’d reconnected; about how the chemistry was great and whose politics he liked.  Things were going well for me at the time, it was easy to take the high ground and sincerely wish him the best with it, especially since he mentioned many times that it wasn’t something serious.  Then the shit hit the fan, I moved jobs, my life twisted in unexpected ways, into a Möbius strip that brought me back to where I’d started three years ago and left me somewhat adrift.  And all of a sudden, that warm glow vanished, and I found myself thinking.  Why him?  Why not me?  How come I’m still alone and single with no one on the horizon?

I buried all those thoughts, recognising the fact that I was desperately looking for some remnants of stability, some constant to which I could return, and kept smiling and nodding.  I tried to get a sense of how serious he was, and sounded him out about it–he was mostly non-committal, somewhat receptive to the idea of our making it work (again), and I breathed a slight sigh of relief.

Then he told me that the other person had said those awful, terrible, magical words to him–and I mean awful and terrible in the genuine sense of the words, inspiring as they do respect and fear and veneration.  I love you, it echoed in my head, a week after we discussed Curfew Boy’s coming to visit me for a weekend away because he wasn’t really happy with this new boy in his life.  And like a bad slasher film, all those inhumed thoughts came bursting out of the crypt, complete with angst and no small amount of ennui.  I withdrew (the bunker is surprisingly comforting in some ways, even now as I peek through slits) and then a mutual friend ran into the two of them at a party and told me off-handedly that he was quite certain I’d been discussed in some capacity as The Ex.

You never really think about other people talking about you, y’know?  You think of other people as The Current, but not really of yourself as The Ex.  It’s awful in some ways, this idea that you’re a tattered dreg of history, a fond memory (perhaps), but a memory nonetheless, something from which to move on, not something to continue considering.  It’s a cold, harsh feeling, and all it makes you want to do is fill in the blanks; to know more about what’s happening there while you’re still stuck here.

What about the blank pages of our past enraptures and horrifies us?  Is it just to know how and why they still love or embrace or someone else? I mean, it doesn’t seem possible that their present can overwrite our commingled past, that our history can just be erased or wiped clean, but at the same time, how do you cope with the idea that they can be denied the experience, the negative spaces left behind as you go your separate ways?  Is it just normal, assumed and emphatically insisted upon that we accept the erasure of that story for the sake of those next acts, for what is presumably growth and the genesis of future story arcs in our lives?  You can’t even attribute that sense of–for lack of a better word, betrayal–to just pure jealousy, or spite.  It’s more than that.

It’s a need.  That’s what it is.  A surge of desire  to know those players in our history, to see where time and space have taken them.  To know them intimately, even if intimacy is a thing of the past.  Those burdens to which we yoke ourselves, of history and future, how do we move beyond them alone?  Because really, that’s where they leave us.

But I remember that I started writing under similar circumstances.  I was frustrated, my future had been derailed (for the first time, at that point), and I didn’t know any other way to express myself.  Hell, drawing a straight line without a ruler and a level is well beyond my artistic capabilities, so I thought to myself, Huh.  Well, I know I can kind of write, so maybe that’s what I should do. And so I did.  That somehow turned into three years of pouring out bits and pieces of myself onto the internet, bits and pieces that somehow, like messages in bottles on countless oceans, drifted into other people’s lives and brought them into mine.  It was really quite lovely, meeting people who–based on nothing more than my words–flew across continents to meet me.  Who became friends with whom to lunch every time I made it to their city.  People who, for some reason, found something in what I put out there.

And now I guess I’m back, for both the best and the worst reason of all: I don’t know what else to do with myself.  But this is–in some way at least–a start.  Another one.  Not as fresh as I’d have liked it to be, but a start nonetheless.

Based on (“inspired by”) the book of the same name by Simon Doonan, the Creative Director of Barneys New York, the show follows Simon as he explains how he wasn’t always “a slightly fey window-dresser”, and takes you through his life as a slightly fey teenager in Reading, where he spends most of his time being ridiculously camp and over the top with his best friend, Kyle (a.k.a. Kylie).  There’s a lot more I could tell you about it, but the show is absolutely hilarious, and just goes to reinforce my firm belief that the Brits know how to do a damn’ good series.

It’s fun.  It’s camp, but in a clever way, has a great soundtrack, and Simon’s mother steals the entire show.  The clip below is from the end of the second season and is a bit of a spoiler, but worth watching anyway.  It’s what I stare at these days, whenever I’m feeling blue (i.e. it’s getting a lot of air-time on my screen).

If anyone knows where I can get a copy of this song, “I’m Not The Only One”, please drop me an e-mail.  I’d love to listen to it on infinite repeat.

That’s partially all right, I guess.  It’s all right in the sense that life never works out according to your specifications, no matter how precise and focused you may be, and frankly my dissolute, nebulous visions of being fabulous at 30 never really got more beyond: “I’ll be in a healthy romantic relationship with imminent commitment on the horizon, oh, and financially secure.  And thin.  Yes, I’ll be thin.”

Then, at 23, I moved back to Pakistan, and basically scuppered myself.  I became fat.  I sacrificed myself to the notion of the Pakistani economy, in which age matters more than competence.  I moved into my family home, wherein now, at the age of (almost) 30, I live with two old women–dearly beloved, but two old women nonetheless–out of one bedroom that is by turns incredibly claustrophobic as well as the only place I can legitimately feel like I have some control over things.

And I am lonely.  I am so, so, so lonely that I’ve been hiding from saying it for the last few years, and I don’t want to hide from it any more.  I’m so lonely that I hold out hopes when I meet people while travelling, that I can forge relationships of some sort with them.  I’m lonely enough that I sometimes find myself crying or raging for no good reason whatsoever, other than the fact that I’m sitting here and I can’t think of a single person with whom I’d rather be.  And I’m actually not ashamed of that loneliness–I just wish I had a choice, some way to get around it.  I wish I could be like all my friends who somehow manage to find lovers and friends and create their own families, but I’m not; and I find it awful that in some weird warped way, I consider it perfectly normal that because I’m completely capable of existing in my own company and solitude, I should live in that fashion.

I love it when people give me solid advice like “Move out”, or “You need to get out of Pakistan”, because while I appreciate the intention behind it, I also want to throw something at people who toss these words of wisdom out as though it’s just a matter of willpower.  Try having a green passport, or working in a country where your annual take-home income for the typical 30-year-old is under $15,000 per year.  It’s absurd. I can’t just get up and trundle off to graduate school, because I can’t afford it, and even though I’m Pakistani, I don’t have a vagina, which means I don’t really qualify for a lot of the financial aid that’s out there.  I can’t just apply for a job in another country because no one wants to–especially in this economy–go through the hassle of hiring or even interviewing an international applicant.

I used to be able to take vacations, but since the rupee started going the way of the Deutsche Mark circa 1948, I can barely escape from this benighted country, other than once in a while when a work trip happens to take me away for a bit.

And all I find coming ahead of me, here in the start of my third decade, is an overwhelming sense of rage and futility.  I mean, honestly, FUCK THIS.  What the FUCKING HELL was the point of doing all the “right” things, being the “good” son, listening to people and all that other drivel, when clearly it has done absolutely nothing for me?  I see people all around me getting the things that I desperately want, without even trying or having to make an effort…and yes, life is unfair, etc. etc., in which case, why am I even bothering with any of this rubbish?

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, not this bad.  Not this much anger and this much pain and frustration, not all the time, not that sense of defeat and failure from the time you wake up until the time you finally fall asleep after looking for a hundred distractions so that you can somehow keep yourself preoccupied until you’re so tired that you finally just close your eyes and instantly fall into a dreamless sleep.

I just didn’t think that at 30, I’d be so incredibly unhappy.

Well, that’s not completely true; the latter portion, I mean.  Things are far from good, but that’s actually not the worst thing in the world, because I find that it’s when things start spiralling downwards that you find yourself gaining some sense of perspective.  For example, when I woke up this morning, I found myself on the receiving end of an e-mail that sent me into a very weird headspace…it was almost like getting dumped (well, in an odd sort of way, it was involved being broken-up with), and pretty much blew the one thing I was really looking forward to this year out of the water.  I’m still not sure how exactly I feel about it (Vaguely? Upset.  Specifically?  Kind of upset…), but I was certainly not happy when I got to work, even less so when I had a non-committal “career discussion” with people from the global HR team about what I’d be doing some time in the next six months.

And then I got a telephone call telling me that an acquaintance of mine had died.

Death always helps contextualise life, and all the strange little things that happen in it.  At least, it did in this case.  As I was telling Beanz earlier today, I feel conflicted about this death.  Asim Butt, my…acquaintance I guess, I can’t legitimately say we were friends, died last night, and I can’t find it in myself to generate the levels of grief and trauma that many other people I’ve run into today have been demonstrating.  I can’t qualify the depths of their sorrow, but I know that for me, I simply wasn’t close enough to Asim to grieve for him the way I feel that I should.

Mourning is a separate story though.  I mourn the loss of someone who had more passion and perseverance that you’d have thought from a brief interaction with him.  I mourn the fact that someone who had got his act together after some very difficult times, suddenly found himself going off the rails and didn’t know how to put the brakes back on.  I mourn my lack of interaction with him, the realisation that he could be so frustrating and awkward and difficult that it was easier to avoid him rather than put up with the sturm und drang of his day-to-day existence.  I mourn for his parents and his family who lost someone so young and who had such potential, and who was–unlike so many of us–on his way to realising it.

Like I said, we weren’t friends.  But remembrance and regret doesn’t have to be just for friends.

Asim was viciously intelligent, incredibly down-to-earth and a prima donna like you’ve never seen.  To realise that he is no longer part of my life, even tangentially, is–of course–devastating, but more than that, it feels wrong, twisted and unheimlich and clashes with my firm belief that everything happens for a reason, even if you can’t see the reason for it at the time; it taxes the limits of my ability to believe in some sort of greater plan or design because there’s something too raw about someone who was chatting away with people on Facebook until five in the morning, who was excited about the new mural he was going to paint at T2F and was found dead three hours later by a gardener.

You may have loved him, or hated him, or like me, not really have known him.  But it would be difficult to, if you had in any way ever encountered him, dismiss the spark that animated his every conversation, even the darkest ones when you found yourself telling him to go home and take his meds.  I don’t find tears or horror or trauma in me, but I can’t avoid (nor do I want to) the inalienable sense of loss that I feel on so many levels at his passing.  Because it is, in all senses of the phrase, a loss.

And we–all of us–are the poorer for it.

Charming.  In an odd sort of way, mildly encouraging, even.

So I’m going to stick with what I do best, which is just…write, I suppose, and hope that despite the utterly miserable year I’ve had, I can end 2009 with at least some high notes.  And much to my chagrin, dedicated as I’ve been to declaring 2009 an utterly atrocious annus (no jokes), it hasn’t been all bad.  I’ve lived, I’ve loved, I’ve lost (my mind, my temper and several pairs of headphones), and I’m fairly sure that to some extent I’ve grown, both in the metaphorical and literal sense (stupid weight gain).

I mean, there’s been the buggery of work, in which bosses have lied, lied some more, yanked me about with promises of promotions and international transfers, and finally wound up leaving me in limbo.  And really, that’s been the single greatest factor involved in making my year a shit one.

Enough on that though.  It doesn’t merit more attention, and at the end of the day, if not for work, I’d never have met some of those people who’ve managed to make my life a slightly more cheerful place.  MetalPete for one, who turned out to be the (hottest) gentle Adonis in Bangkok, to some extent a victim of his own looks and gym routine; Eternity84, who showed me Viet Nam in a whole new light and made me think that sometimes you do meet people for a reason; Curfew Boy, whose first-ever trip to Karachi not only reacquainted me with my own city, but also made it abundantly clear that a break-up can be handled with grace, dignity and an honest acknowledgement of the fact that things may not work out despite your best efforts…and that’s okay.

Most of all so far though, 2009 introduced me to Kawadjan, through whose presence I found myself realising that sometimes the most random occurrences (and the Internet) can bring an entirely new dimension to your life, that it’s entirely possible to meet a stranger and feel it completely natural to walk hand-in-hand down the street with him three hours later; that you can make the effort to alter your travel plans for the sake of one person, and at the end of the trip realise that it was completely worth it; that it’s not impossible to find someone who makes you feel good about yourself, no matter what you look or feel like.

Falling over drunk on a road in the middle of the night, diving off the roof of a liner into a bay, dancing through the night and into the dawn, smiling until your cheeks ache, cooking the perfect steak, savouring the smell of lemongrass and ginger baking in the oven, mixing the perfect pomegranate martini, Eddie Izzard and pizza, death-threats during manicures, lying in the sun in Soho Square with a bottle of wine and friends, laughing at students in the UCL quad, smoke breaks on the office rooftop, trading eggplant casseroles for a waxing session by a friend, lying in the sun on the beach, being tumbled about by waves, sipping Starbucks coffee while overlooking Piccadilly, a six-course tasting menu at Frangipani, kissing in a nook at G.O.D., high-fiving random toasted teenagers stumbling along Lumphini Road, watching the cook at Raan Jay Fai create–and then eating–the best Pad Khee Mao in the known universe, eye-candy at the gym, the Thanksgiving Day episode of Gossip Girl, Terry Pratchett’s latest release and oh-so-much more.

To the new decade then.  May it be a good one.

Then something fairly awful happened to him, and he told me about it, and vanished.  I never heard from him again, no e-mails, no IMs, no phone calls or text messages.  I grew up a little bit, left the country, studied, lived, loved a little bit, cried a lot, and forgot about him.

Then tonight, I discovered that he had been back for a few years.  And is in a relationship with a very close friend of mine.  And he doesn’t know that I know this, but that’s OK, because even though I’m tempted to re-establish contact (and we did, as virtual strangers over the internet, no idea of who the other was until some digging and logical leaps on my part pre-empted the actual discovery), I won’t.

I can’t really explain why though.  Maybe it’s because he dropped out of my life so suddenly, or because he’s now in a relationship with someone very close to me, but I think it’s more to do with the fact that I know, no matter what he says about it, I’ll always be a little angry that he didn’t treat the link we made with the same level of regard that I did.  Which, in its own way I suppose, says more about me than it does about him.  Even though I messaged him online, this most recent time, as a complete stranger who seemed to be personable, even though he wrote back to me the same way now, four years after the fact, knowing who I am, but not drawing the link (although, as he noted “I’m very close to someone very dear to [him]“, so obviously he knows who I am).  But apparently he chooses to avoid picking up where we left off, and that’s fine too, in its own odd sort of way.

I do wonder though, about the way things work themselves out.  About why I, despite everything, find myself sitting on the edge of my bed at three in the morning, typing these words onto a blank screen, hoping that in some way, processing my thoughts by putting them down will help me disentangle this Gordian knot of emotion that I seem to have nurtured over the years, letting it get ever more complicated and not being able to find the right metaphorical blade with which to sever it.  Wondering why analogies are so simple in theory and so cumbersome in actual practice.  Why it takes unhappiness or discontent of an Eliot-esque sort to make me come back to words and paragraphs, turns of phrase and prose that verge on the banal or the absurd, to sort myself out.

And it’s frustrating to not find an answer to that.  Ten years ago, I woke up in my bed at college, excited by the idea of taking a class on iconoclasm and certain that when push came to shove, I’d leave university with some sense of who I was, where I was going–and most certainly–with whom.  And year after year since then has slipped past, while I’ve floundered, ricocheting off the walls of my life, trying to find direction or happiness, convinced that one or the other would automatically engender something more, be the catalyst that would make everything just that tiny bit better.

I’m still waiting.

Less so, in every conceivable way, was the flood of emotions I went through today when I logged on to Facebook and found that a gay guy I know in Bangkok (gorgeous and funny, naturally) is “now listed as being in a relationship” with another (almost) as attractive young man.  If not for the fact that it’s Eid and I was expecting guests at the house, I think I’d have thrown a full-on tantrum, complete with wailing and gnashing of teeth, ripping of clothes, some serious self-flagellation, and most likely the consumption of about six pints of ice-cream.

As part of my New Year’s resolutions this year, I swore to myself that I would stop letting the happiness of other gay men make me miserable.  And for the most part, I’ve managed to adhere to that idea, even as I see people around me pairing up, moving in together, having the kind of life that a decade ago, when I graduated high-school, I had envisioned for myself.  I certainly didn’t expect to be living at home, taking care of elderly relatives at the age of 28, based out of one bed-room filled to overflowing with books and badly laid-out storage space.  I just…well, I assumed I’d be happily settled down with someone who didn’t care whether or not I had a six-pack, for whom I’d be making brunch in the mornings on Sundays and cuddling next to on a lazy holiday afternoon.

I’ve not done everything right, not by any stretch of the imagination.  I’ve been fired from work, I’ve lied, cheated, stolen, done any number of unpleasant things.  But I’ve always tried to do the right thing, even if sometimes in retrospect.  I’ve given up chunks of my life to move back home to Pakistan, to live and work in a country where I can’t be a real person, to earn a pittance because that’s just the way the economy here works; I’ve paid my own way, tried to be a good person and tried to put other people ahead/above of myself.

But when I sit here, agonising about whether I should leverage an opportunity into moving abroad, tearing myself up about how I’d be abandoning my family at the time I’m most needed, hating myself and the society in which I live for not being able to live freely with another man or even try to, and then I come across that fucking news feed on Facebook, I lose the plot.  Verging on 30, it’s not just that I’m single, it’s that I’m not even in a place or position to do anything about it.  I’m trapped, of my own semi-autonomy, in a situation that perpetuates very little besides misery.

Why am I not allowed this?  Why can I not live the kind of life that would make me, if not actually happy, at least content?  How did I let myself get here?  And why won’t something happen to give me the chance to fix things, to get my life back to where I hoped it would be going?

I try to forget it, but sometimes, the flood-gates give way.  And I wonder what the point of it all actually is.

I still don’t have it back–not completely, at any rate–but there’s been enough going on recently that made me wind up turning here at long last.  The larget imperative comes from, I suppose, Curfew Boy, who managed to in the last two or three months, dig himself into a ditch so deep that it may be easier for him to burrow through, emerge at the other end of the world and hop on a flight back before I wind up giving him the time of day.  This is, I realise, something of a far cry from the last few months of constantly wondering how else I could manage to make a long-distance relationship work, and I think (sadly enough) that I’m kind of over the idea of pushing for something that’s just so much effort.  As a wise friend of mine said a few days ago, when I was complaining to him about how miserable Karachi is after returning from abroad (naturally, this segued into Boy talk), he said, very simply:

We go into relationships to feel good generally and to feel good about ourselves. This is not to undermine the giving part of it. If, in the long term, something does not feel good-or more simply-is not fun any longer, then there doesn’t seem much point in persisting with it for the sake of it. I am sure you’ve given it the time and attention it deserves. If it doesn’t come about then maybe it is time to put it to rest and move on.

So, it looks like I’m moving on.  But for once, I’m closing a chapter, or at least book-marking it, with a distinct lack of regret.  I honestly don’t feel that I could have done anything more to make this work: flying to a different city and staying in a hotel at the expense of about half my monthly salary, each month; calling and SMSing at least four or five times per week; going out of my way to make plans for us to spend time together outside of Lahore and/or Karachi…I really did try to make a go of it.

And when you’re away for three weeks, and the person you’re trying to work something out with doesn’t call, text, e-mail or Facebook you even once (except for the single occasion at DJ Station in Bangkok when you texted him), despite the fact that you have a local Pakistani mobile number, so it’s not like you’re inaccessible or anything, and does so after the two or three conversations you’ve already had with him about how he needs to also make an effort to stay in touch with you–to initiate contact, not just respond to it–then really, you’re just bordering on desperation if you suck it all up and say “Ah well, fine, that’s just the way he is, I’ll make do.”

Fuck that.  I will not settle.  I don’t care if I’m fast-approaching the big 3-0 without having been in a “meaningful relationship” of some sort, I deserve better than this.  And that’s not just a random moment of self-empowerment; I neither need, nor warrant blatant disregard for my feelings and my needs, especially after having given way more ground than any reasonable person should.  There is absolutely no reason for me to stay in a relationship for which I have to make excuses to my friends, when they ask me how come I’m not feeling positive about it, or when people ask how Curfew Boy is, and I don’t have an answer because I just don’t know.

Everyone has their own drama, no matter the number of therapists involved.  But you can only help carry someone else’s baggage for so long before you become just another porter.

Which means, I suppose, that I’m back.  For a while at least.

Hey everyone.

Or it could just be the large amounts of cough syrup I’ve been downing since I got into Lahore and was promptly struck down by the flu.  I don’t fucking know.

That’s the problem though.  I don’t know.  And I hate feeling like I don’t know something that I “should”.  Do I like him?  Yeah.  Do I find him attractive?  Certainly.  Do I lay awake at night dreaming about him?  No.  Do I enjoy talking to him or being around him?  Yes, to both.  Can I see myself never looking at another man again?  Hell no.

So I don’t really know what to do with myself.  Or with him, for that matter.  I don’t know if he’s feeling any of this, and I’m terrified of being the over-analytical, insecure queen who starts raising issues when everything’s ostensibly hunky-dory.  My friends who know about the two of us (but haven’t met him) are of the opinion that I’m putting too much into this whole dynamic, and that he’s not as into it as I am, and they also wonder if I’m so into it because I’m terrified of spending another decade waiting for someone who wants to be with me, or because I’m genuinely interested in a relationship with him.

And again, I don’t know.  I can’t untangle the skein of thoughts and feelings in my head, and I certainly don’t want to end something that I haven’t even given the time to grow.  But I wonder if I’m being more flexible than I would in other circumstances because we’re in different cities and different places in our lives, and being unable to answer that question leaves me with another slew of queries, all of which seem to have no real answer. And I haven’t the foggiest as to how I’d ask him to think about any or all of this either.

Because right now, it feels like we’re friends with benefits. Not boyfriends. And I always figured it would take time to get to know someone well enough to move beyond that “friends with benefits” phase, but I’m kind of clueless. Does it take time? Does it all feel different, ever? Is it just generally fucked up for everyone and a “take it as it comes” situation? What?

Someone please tell me.