Years from now, when you talk about this -- and you will -- be kind.

I got up at 4:30 this morning to finish reading a book so C — because I’ve been raving about it and he wanted to read it next and I only had about 40 pages left — could take it with him on his trip to see his family this weekend, and he was leaving for the airport at 6:45. I didn’t set the alarm or anything, I’m not that thoughtful — most mornings at 4:30 I’m lying in bed awake thinking, “I should just get up,” and sometimes I do. (The book was The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide, which you’d probably call postmodernist except it was written in 1915, and it’s a ride.)

All of which is to say that by 11:30 I was already feeling like I’d had a day. I was tired of reading (after my regular morning news fix I started Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir), not ready for a nap, or lunch, or much of anything, so I decided to rent a movie. (As fascinating as the impeachment hearings are, I can only take so much at a stretch.)

I have no idea where a sudden urge to watch Tea & Sympathy came from. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the movie, I read the play in college, which was a long time ago, but I was in the mood for something cinematic and nobody does Cinematic! like Vincente Minnelli. In case you’re unfamiliar: Tea & Sympathy is a gorgeously filmed 1956 melodrama directed by a closeted homosexual about a prep school boy accused of being a homosexual (though it’s the 50s so they’re not allowed to actually say it), but who is not an actual homosexual but just artistic and sad, who loses his virginity to a beautiful older woman who loves him because he reminds her of her dead first husband who was also sensitive but not actually homosexual and, though the older woman and her second husband, whom she leaves after her affair with the boy, live the remainder of their days alone and contemplative (she) and bitter (he), the boy grows up to write a tender, sweet roman à clef about his school days and his affair with the older woman and life is good because he’s not actually homosexual. And there’s a whore who works in a soda shop.

It was great. I wish I’d bought it for $9.99 instead of renting it for $2.99, because I would definitely watch it again a couple times at least. I mean, Deborah Kerr.

You’d think I might enjoy a bachelor weekend now and then, but I just don’t. Absence makes the heart, blah blah, but my whole week every week is a cycle of him leaving in the morning, having my own time all day, and then in the afternoon looking forward to him coming home from work. I get enough absence. I don’t like sleeping here alone; there are unidentifiable noises in the walls. If I sleep with the bedroom door closed, I start to wonder what’s lurking on the other side, and if I leave it open I am exposed to … I don’t know, bad things out there.

I’ve had a miserable cold all week and just today I am emerging from the fog. I’m still coughing a lot, but I’ve turned a corner. I feel light and overstimulated. Maybe I should watch another movie. Where does one go from Vincente Minnelli? Douglas Sirk? A nap? Or Liza Minnelli! Maybe I should watch Liza With A Z. Yeah maybe not. I’m already overstimulated. All that Halston and Fosse might give me a coronary. Better go with something artistic and sad, like me — though to be clear I am an actual homosexual.