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whitelennykravitz-blog · 7 years

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I guess Warsaw now has very high contrast memories for me. I’ve been there twice: once on a fickle weekend for sex, and now on a weekend that was dense with my life. This second time was a Friday through Tuesday that included everything: laughter, crying, broken teeth, and mental spaces that both seemed insignificant and insurmountably oppressive.

I’ve been seeing Katarzyna for about a year. Or I guess we met about a year ago, when I walked into the building that housed my new studio, and saw her alit on a balcony wearing a kimono. I say “alit”, because she seemed to be drifting around the concrete railings after having just landed from above, with ivy around her that clung with an air of casualness to walls that showed no signs of hand holds.

She introduced herself a few minutes later and I was smitten. Her face beautiful and turned towards mine, and eyes that held vast confidence that clearly masked severe self-doubt. Eyes like mine. I think that’s why we got along so well. And the sex. Which was amazing. Although, we had the worst first sex I’ve ever had in my life. About halfway through there was a moment where we both looked at each other and the unspoken was almost deafening as it reverberated around awkwardly entangled limbs, “Do we really want to keep doing this?” I would have never thought that sex so clumsy and awful could ever become what it did. Insatiable. Our sex life was the Brussels sprout of my sex life: intolerable at first, and now craved and lusted for.

She was not so keen on me at the start of things. In fact I think she didn’t like me. But something of me found hooks in her, and vice-versa, and a year of fucking in clubs, lead to long distant telephone calls across the world, to us finally landing in the same area of the world once again, where I decided I wanted to break up. It’s hard to tell if it was a flare up of the crushing depression I suffer from that is what caused me to pull the trigger, or the fact that two artists hanging out is basically a pingpong match of people starting sentences with “I”. All those “I”s and distance and it became a practice of spending time with someone while somehow still being completely alone. Either way, distance and the sensation that I was screaming behind my face made me call it quits.

I initially did this over Skype. Never break up with people on Skype, especially if they are prone to large swings of emotion. I now know this after a 4 hour session of being yelled at, being called a coward, and then being told how much I was loved. This all ended with us planning on meeting in Warsaw to talk about things face-to-face. I know that doesn’t logically follow, but suspend disbelief in the details of this story.

We decided to put off Our Talk until Sunday, giving us 2 days of pretending like we were a real couple. We saw friends, went to exhibitions, fucked like we were trying to redecorate rooms through kinetic energy. I don’t think I’ve ever navigated the texture of so many surfaces with my balls before. This was due to a stage of the fucking that meandered through a foyer and kitchen, where different ledges and surfaces (each adorned with it’s own selection of free range objects, knobs, and finishes) meant a new terrain for my balls to high five like a drunk frat boy at homecoming. Oven knobs, keys, and a steak knife, I believe, were all involved at one point.

We spent some time with her friends: artists she knew and an ex-boyfriend. The ex, had always treated me sort of like shit telling me that weekend, in condescending tones, how to pronounce Katarzyna’s name correctly while we bought beer in a convenience store. Or maybe it wasn’t condescension, but just the protection of someone who knew I was a day or two away from really hurting her. It’s hard to tell. The first time I met him he walked into the room briskly and declared “tell me something about you.” Which is a dismissive and affronting command that I tried to laugh off, as I thought about the ways gorillas establish dominance. I also thought about how I really didn’t have anything to say about myself, but the first thing that came to mind was to tell him the last thing I had had to eat. After this first meeting, Katarzyna agreed something strange had happened. Feelings that still dwelled? Anger over their breakup?

Katarzyna loved to talk about how beautiful she was and I could see how certain men looked at her. When I look back at the group of characters that I was flung through, I’m trying to guess which one she’ll fuck now. I guess that’s pretty stupid and shallow, but it’s the truth. My money is on Dawid, a photographer/PhD in art, who clearly likes Katarzyna, and who she clearly likes the attention from. Maybe he’s the one.

We also had a dinner with her brother who I had never met before. His boyfriend and he met us at an Italian restaurant where I watched the dynamics of sibling order take over, as Katarzyna turned into a younger sister, with simplified vocabulary and school girl antics. I think the love between siblings has the potential to bring out their deepest insecurities. Maybe it’s because they can’t let their ego swell up in the face of someone that knows them so well.

The breakup talks started the next morning, Sunday, around 1pm after a night in a shitty club, doing some shitty drugs, and having some rough sex that ended up with Katarzyna chipping two teeth. She was into getting slapped and thrown around during sex, but with the teeth grinding invoked by this particular drug, one slap ended with a chipped bottom and top tooth. This now gives us one more thing in common, besides our narcissism and being lovers, as both of my front teeth are chipped due to a night that involved acid, cocaine, a flaccid penis, and a woman intent on fixing this with an extremely eager blowjob (which I could only look down at both with fright and awe while I bit down so hard, that I broke my teeth. This woman, Cleo, was actually someone that I dated after a particularly long relationship, and on this teeth breaking night I had randomly ran into her at a bar and somehow ended up walking back to her place as I explained, “I’m pretty fucked up and definitely can’t get hard.” And she nodded with a sly smile like she knew something I didn’t. But she didn’t know such things. It was like a mall cop standing outside an English football stadium in the throws of a riot and saying, “Don’t worry, I got this.” before bolting into an entrance with too much enthusiasm.)

It’s an interesting connection to notice, because Cleo was the first person to get me into rough sex. Ropes, gags, and pushing the limits of physicality. We met when I didn’t have a room of my own — I was floating around Seattle — and I asked to use my friend Jon’s room for a date night with her. After being tied spread eagle onto his bed, fucked, and hit with a belt, we took a break for drinks, only to have Jon and his girlfriend return to his room. I guess a pro tip here is: don’t leave a bunch of ropes tied to the bed of your friend, with a random belt and a heap of condoms presented almost like gifts at the foot of his bed, when this friend has a very jealous girlfriend. This girlfriend will never talk to you again.

But Katarzyna and I took all that to a whole new level. It’s not a place to unpack here, but she made me reframe what a physical relationship is: the celebration of the independence of two bodies that choose to spend a moment of time together.

Anyway.

The thing about breakups is that both people want to be understood. To be heard, and acknowledged. The problem always is that if you both understood each other perfectly there probably wouldn’t be an issue in the first place; the issue would have been fixed. So the Long Tail of relationships can happen where you mix arguments with breakup sex over and over in the hope of baking the perfect We Both Understand cookie. This cookie doesn’t exist.

An extra piece to the whole thing was that on Sunday around 2 or 3 hours into talking/yelling, Katarzyna’s mom called to say her grandpa had died. This wasn’t out of left-field, he had stopped eating and drinking fluids a week before, but the timing was somewhat absurd. Over drinks the following day Katarzyna jokingly retold the story of our breakup, as if talking to friends, saying “and then my mom called to say my grandpa had died, and he thought, ‘nah, I’ll still break up with her.’” There’s a lot I want to say about her grandfather. But there are only a few snippets that popped into my head when I heard he had passed: he was in the war, his wife was mean to him, he had seen too much. My sister remembered that he had an apartment that looked exactly the same since he moved into it after the war. It was like going back in time. I didn’t remember this, which made me feel very bad.

There was a lot of crying that weekend. From both of us. At a certain point I broke down and wailed like an animal. Katarzyna drew me a bath and lead me to it as I seemed to be overplaying the part of a lobotomized patient. There was a point right before where I thought, “this looks good if I seem to feel this bad.”, but then I realized I actually felt that bad; playing crazy and then realizing no game is actually happening.

She soaked a scarf in the hot water and draped it on my head. Splashed water on my shoulders and back. She couldn’t help but flick my cock once. That’s one thing: she creeped on my body hard, all the time, and it was the sweetest thing. The next day I was able to return the ritual to her, making her a bath and caressing her as she wept and took deep breaths.

I think she performed the ritual better: my approach felt a bit like applying sunscreen to someones face using only the backs of my hands.

Such strong emotional engagements in bed made for some interesting conflicts between body and mind. Katarzyna would scream or cry, but this look would creep in her eye, and she would excuse herself in an emotional explosion, getting out of bed by pushing off of me, her hand placed fully on my chest, or resting precariously close to my cock. It was like subway creepers “accidently” brushing against strangers. Similarly, I would be talking and holding her, and suddenly be completely hard. We were in middle school, slow dancing; a lot going on with maybe only a 30% conscious understanding of what was happening.

I think as I get older and look at what I have failed to accomplish, it can be hard to hang out with younger people making something of their lives. The whole breakup conversation was made worse by it being lead by a young woman driven and dedicated to a certain path. If I had been coming to awareness of my poor basketball skills while talking to Lebron James, the sensation would be similar.

I cried, and laughed, and fucked, while thinking, “that could be me!” Which is actually a funny sentiment to have with her as the previous year she had thrown me a surprise party where everyone was wearing masks of my face, which I then asked if she could wear during sex. We cut a hole in the mouth and I watched my unblinking face as I blew myself. It felt a little like getting a blowjob from a character in Goldeneye. After I gave myself a facial, she put on one of my sweaters and jumped eagerly onto all fours on my bed, looking over her shoulder. My face peeking over the shoulder of a beautiful young woman’s body, which made me see my normal face as one begging for sex as I tried to put everything together in my head. I couldn’t finish fucking doggy style. It felt like a bit much.

Anyway, I had technically been her at one point in my life. And fucked myself. Which seems very similar to the current situation.

On Monday we woke up late and I think I ate the best pussy of my life. Katarzyna’s entire body became paralyzed and she retreated to a ball and started crying. She was terrified at not being able to move and described something that, to me, sounded like her pussy throwing up all over her body. I’m sure the intense emotional context had a lot to do with it, but I’m going to go ahead and give myself a gold star anyways.

We went out for one last date together. We drank Prossecco and got a seafood platter that reminded me of how I hated seafood platters. It’s a lot of work spread across suspicious flavors; all Mike and Ikes mixed with black licorice that is too salty. But the point is they’re fancy and it seemed like a thing people get on a first date, which maybe are also the perfect things to get on the last date.

I left early the next morning. We lay in bed those final moments and I told her I loved her. It felt a little like saying hello to say goodbye; Hawaiian customs adapted to a failed relationship. She stood in the apartment’s entry in a kumano. Her body a stripe down the open front. Light switches and door bells seemed to hover around the walls. But the door wasn't a good place to say goodbye, because half of my mind was on the elevator arriving. It did. I entered, and it closed around her body, the building swallowing her up.

I’m still trying really hard to remember exactly the look in her eye. Probably over the years it will be many things.

I turned to look at the mirror in the elevator and my hair looked like shit — I looked like shit — and I thought about how this is exactly as she would remember me.

I thought about two nights before as we both entered the elevator and immediately did the preening checks that most are wont to do in elevator mirrors: the subtle turns of the face and drawing of facial muscles, as we quickly scan the imperfections that we are trying to hide.

I can see her pretty clearly in the mirror at that moment, as stacked layers of a woman seen on a balcony, in a doorway, and through some things in-between that seem hard to put my finger on.

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