It's hard being back.

I told myself I wouldn't come back to California until I was ready. Ready for what?

I have this enormous anxiety being here and I can't really define it's origin. I've been looking through my Facebook page, amazed to have it back and browsing all the people who have come in and out of my life throughout the years. I really have been gone for almost four years now.

Things have changed. Nothing major. My closest friends are still close. Old lovers who truly cared still truly care. But some people have woven me out of their lives. For some, I am a vague memory of this kid who used to live here. And I wonder what my life would be like if I hadn't left.

Would I have fixed the issues I had? Would I still walk into a bar and feel like the ugliest person there?

In Shanghai, I've learned to get past all my drama... but I'm starting to feel more like I haven't gotten over my self-esteem problems as much as I have distanced myself from the source.

I've never been able to fit in with the gay crowds here. Theatre Rice was the first place that I really felt comfortable with myself, until more gay guys started joining.

So what's the deal here? I look at some of these people and I feel like a monster around them. Awkward, limping with boils and slime oozing out of my pores. Did heartbreak and rejection leave me to feel like less of a man?

I lost myself in California, and coming back makes me feel just as lost. For as much life as I have restored, recreated and reinvented in China, there is the part of me that exists here in LA, barely existing at all.

Ready as I'll ever be.

I am in a recovery state.

At a bar here in Shanghai, I see Stevie. I have such vague memories of our short but rocky history. He was the first guy I ever had feelings for. My first roommate in college. The first person I ever slept naked with. And he was just standing there 10 feet away from me, with a little messenger bag.

I'm not that shocked anymore when I run into people here. At first, it was a somewhat amazed look, which quickly transitioned into something more subtle. All of my past has been coming back to me lately...

Artsy as always, and with his awkward general presence we catch up. Stevie and I haven't talked to each other since he had his infamous revenge orgy in our room. That was about seven years ago. We were such children.

And I only have small fragments of memories of my time with him. I was anxious. I was counting down the days until he would sleep with someone else. I remember a giant hanging lamp we bought from Urban Outfitters. And our yellow room. And our first kiss we had while we painted our room yellow.

We lived in Wilde House, one of the co-ops at Berkeley. And he was sitting on a chair taking a rest. I looked at him and it had occurred to me that we had seen each other naked but hadn't had anything resembling romance. So I dared to infuse it into our relationship. I walked up to him, moved one leg over his and then the other and sat on his lap, and without too much thinking I kissed him.

That was my first real kiss. I remember how thin his lips felt compared to mine. I can think of it and still pan back and see the rest of the room... fresh wet paint on the walls, furniture piled into the middle with tarps loosely draped over, a 3 p.m. sunlight trickling in, and me, a incoming freshman thinking the next four years would be so amazing.

The story of my time at Berkeley, was amazing actually, but not the way I would have imagined.

I've been trying to piece my narrative together. I see loops and I think conclusions. I just turned 26 this month and I feel so lost. My sentences are said and written in fragments, and my thoughts don't seem very cohesive tonight. I don't get it. I feel like I've been given the pieces to three different puzzles. And I can't work.

So maybe I'm thinking... maybe this doesn't have to make sense. Maybe this time the pieces don't fit. Maybe I don't have to become a better person out of this. I asked Arthur to tell me he would never love me, and he did. So I believe him and I'm free, and messy and dysfunctional.

I am in a recovery state and I'm never leaving it... so no more waiting.

Firework revelations.

I feel like I'm in one of those indie movies. I'm the protagonist and he's lying there, his face lit up by city lights looking at me with big doe eyes. Except, I can't tell if he's looking at me or looking right through. I only know that it's in my general direction. He's that weird kind of character. The kind that you know the filmmakers intended to be attractive, only he didn't get the job for his looks but for his acting skills. Somehow not, yet somehow hot.

And he's young. Too young. I love you, he says. But I don't hear it. In fact, I remember now that since the last time I've said those words to someone else, when I hear them now I bat them away with my hands like little annoyances buzzing towards my ears.

Sitting with Stephany in a sushi bar, I almost cried thinking about Arthur. Only this time it wasn't about our relationship or anything that had actually happened in the past. We spoke briefly when I was in LA and he in SF... our relative cities only two letters off. I get the feeling that he's still afraid to talk to me, as if I'd lash out in anger. He asks me if it would be ok to write me sometimes and see how I'm doing, and it makes me happy to hear that he still cares in some manner.

I was really happy and it's maybe the closest I'll get to tears of joy because I don't actually believe in them. I had a feeling of accomplishment and more than ever before I believed that I actually did love him. It gives you a renewed faith in the world to know there's someone out there you care about that much, that you can let go of and let them be with someone else. 

Three years and two and a half months ago, we sat together on my bed in Rochdale Apartments. In my underwear (because why should I know better than to pair emotional with physical vulnerability) I told him that everything that I had been doing wrong I did because I loved him.  I knew he wouldn't say it back. I did not expect it. I did not even hope for it.

Three years and one month ago, I wished him to come back to me. Now, I wish him happiness.