REGARDING ORGASMS IN SAN MATEO

REGARDING ORGASMS IN SAN MATEO



The planes are so white, so clean.

I have been here at San Mateo for a week now sick with pneumonia,
which is actually quite serious and now I´m reading
for the first time in a week, watching the planes go by outside my window.

To where? I remember how in my village I would look up at those same planes,
Silent, fast, clean.
To where? Take me, I would almost whisper.

For a year now I have had, have allowed myself, two comforts:
Q-tips and masturbation.
Masturbation before sleep, to experience pleasure.
Q-tips to calm nerves, to feel clean.
Or is it the other way around?

More than three years without a girlfriend. Two years in high-poverty situations.
One here, in the Peace Corps. One before, in Americorps in Seattle. Why, really?

Just now, after a week, do my feet not slap the tile floor, unaccustomed to the surface.
Just now can I wear my socks inside and around the hotel.
Just now can I navegate the supermarket, buying juice and turkey meat, accepting a credit-card payment as routine, it´s okay, and not atrotious.

Obviously I am being too hard on myself.

Issues I´ve already dealt with in therapy: savior complex, guilt, privelege, general desire to suffer.

Too long since I´ve checked in.
Too long since I´ve talked about books, grad schools, something besides work and pneumonia.

And what would I do if I went back to my village?
What would I do if I went back home to the US of A?

I will move to Austin, Texas specifically, and look for a woman with brown skin, a long face, black hair. I will incorporate myself into the artistic community.

That´s bullshit. I would probably live with my sister and her husband and make sandwiches downtown. Or take another roadtrip to nowhere and work for another year, sad as hell.

How to be happy?
I am obviously frustrated.
Feel like no girl could love me, but should. Am obviously not taking time for me, as I remember her saying. Only five minutes at night.

Today for the first time in eight months I bought Q-tips at the grocery store.
So really, just one comfort in two years: masturbating.
But my poetry is dark, is pain. Not orgasmic. So what´s wrong?

What would I do if I went back to my village?
Teach a computer class? Run a theater group?
Change lives? Get sick again? Look for a girlfriend?

There is a girl, Ludbi. I think she has a boyfriend and her brothers are pricks, but she is smart and pretty and kind. I wonder if I could love her, if she could love me. She is my age. I am just getting desperate. Her mother, her whole living family, is nuts and evangelical.

My host mother from my village will come to visit me tomorrow because I am sick.
What should we do? Go get coffee? See a movie?

I am not ready to go back to her world and I cannot seem to make it mix with this one.

There, I sleep on dirt floors with a bat who sometime swoops above me.
Here, tile and air conditioning, security systems, a pampered dog.
Chinese take-out.

And I know a girl is not the answer but I think it could help
Me to take care of myself. I run ragged. I kill myself. I do not rest.

I get tired. I get so tired. I have been sleeping 12 hours a night for two weeks.
My friend George warned me—Tim you give your all. Take care of yourself.

Self-care? I have been masturbating for three long years. I buy Q-tips, 100 for 50 cents, in a San Salvador corner store. I write my shock poems in cheap notebooks, read novels about Love.

Sunrise, sunset, another day in San Mateo. I feel weak still, and tired. In my village I do not feel alone. Here, I do.

I tell myself the world does not need another suffering person and I know in my village I am not suffering.
I know the world needs thriving, happy people. I know I am not thriving.

I am a pincushion of needles. Shots, IVs, blood tests.
Plastic balls for soccer, kids playing soccer in the lot next door.
A Dominican friend, Nico, whom I met as a volunteer there, calls me asking for $45.
He says, The situation here, you know. I laugh,
But I send him the money anyways, the poor guy. My orgasms are free. He probably needs the money more than I do.

How to be happy?
I used to say, Hang in there.
My sister and I have been saying that to each other for like our whole lives.
Will I ever stop needing to hear that? What comes after? What do people say after Hang in there? Congratulations? Way to go? I´m happy for you?
Why don´t I hear that? Where do I need to go from here?