Resolved:

I think of Scotland on this rainy morning of a day I’ve taken off work.  It’s a fine day for not working, for taking an hour to drink my coffee, for reading and occasionally looking out at everything getting wet and feeling enwombed on the sofa.  I’m working on a tea now as the breeze from the cracked window brushes my knuckles.  This would be my last post here but for knowing how to end this tidily.  But what does it need of my ending it?  It’s over. It’s taken this long to write again because…well, I just don’t know, and I don’t feel inclined to sort it out, anymore than I do to come to neat conclusions. That’s not like me–not like that me, anyway. The transition I sought for Satellite Dance was, in fact, my own, and that transition has, practically and essentially, moved me from this blog. Regrets, hopes, lessons learned–whatever they are, I’ll live with them, not kill them through vivisection. They are a part of me more as vital organs than as tumors.

The rain seems to have let up a little. I hope it doesn’t stop. I don’t want to be tempted outdoors. It would not then, either, be a perfect day for whisky. The traffic is still noisy out. How could there not be a lull at ten in the morning? Is anyone going anwhere? The downspout’s output is down to a trickle, and the puddles are undisturbed. Wipers swish only to dispel the spindrift of the car in front. A tension grows in my shoulder.

I won’t come full-circle. That would put me back where I started. I didn’t book a round trip. I’d like to think–and I have to believe–that I’ve gotten somewhere, and I don’t need to know where I’ve been to know where I am. This satellite dance was not about me going ’round and ’round, but about all us satellites circling one another, hoping for and dreading collision. Satellites don’t get anywhere unless they’re knocked off course. I won’t belabor the metaphor; you already know what I mean.

The site will remain up, but I will do my writing elsewhere. It’s sunny now, and I’m compelled to lay down the pen and get out. That’s just the way it will be.

Spring Me

So many Richmond springs behind me, and I’ve probably yet to appreciate one.  They haven’t been the springs I wanted–a full three months of moderate weather–but a week or two of neither heat nor chill before the heat takes over. My  anticipation of an ideal spring causes me to miss the one we get, and the one we get seems to be in a great hurry to be done with this year. The succession of blooms is so compressed as to  give the impression of all the flowers blooming at once. Nature knows, and what it seems to have figured out is that we’re in for a very dry summer. For other reasons besides anticipation of an ideal, I have missed the last few springs.  The distraction is not wholly removed, but I see with less cloudy eyes now, though enjoyment of what I see is still a challenge.  I am still preoccupied with making a better life for myself, finding a place, building a space that is mine. I woke early this morning (the clock said 3:51) to a bird singing in the echo chamber between the two long apartment buildings.  The song had no rhythm and little repetition.  It seemed more like speech than song.  I then began to think of giving up writing altogether simply to find more time to myself, as I can’t  work shorter days or shorten my commute.  But that would be to surrender to all I’m trying to escape.  The wall is thick, and I have only a spoon.  Five hours later I could still, just, hear that bird over the traffic. 

It’s evaluation time at work again, when we have to put in writing what we accomplished last year and what we hope to accomplish this year.  This year, as last year, my stated goal is to “move to the Tuckahoe library and work in my own community.”  Writing–my spoon–might never dig me out of this prison, but maybe I can spend the rest of my days in a more relaxed facility.  My legs and body are overweary of the commute, and I want back those eight hours lost to it each week.  Well-meaning people who are the second incomes in their households or earn six figures wonder why I don’t get a car, while I only wonder why Richmond and Henrico can’t get together on a fucking bus system.  My employer doesn’t owe me a transfer or any kind of accommodation to my well-being, but neither do I owe them my health and sanity.  Loyalty is not a commodity–no salary can buy it.  It’s to the community that I owe my work, and my employer can’t say that I shirk that responsibility.  Neither can they say I wouldn’t do an even better job in a community of my neighbors.

Another hour later, and the bird is silent, or just can’t be heard.  Another Richmond spring, another day of work.  Rush through an unnoticed landscape to seal yourself off from it.  Appreciate it on your own time.  When you get it.

Forgot the Steps, Can’t Hear the Music

Spring, and I’m still stir crazy, though it’s not the cold weather that cages me. Though I have produced little here recently, I have been writing plenty. Yet I’m not feeling much better for it. Satellite Dance’s transition has been agonizing. I’m no longer sure of its purpose or scope. The harder I try not to mention Julie here, the more channeling I have to do those thoughts to Twickory, and it can’t handle the load. I’m also writing the proverbial letter-never-sent to Julie, apologizing and trying to explain what love did to me and what I did in its name. It should make me feel better to write this, right?–like talking to a friend–but I become focused on all those hopes and regrets, which logic will never erase. What good are words unheard? The desire to explain myself to her is not lessened by the virtual certitude of her having put all this well behind her. I’m still trying to get her attention, still not accepting that she felt none of the fascination for me that I felt for her. That still hurts. I see Twickory as a salvation. I see where the story is going, and I see resolution at the end of the tunnel. The end of Twickory will be the end of this whole goddamned mess. Phoebe will be more real than Julie ever allowed me to know of her, and I will understand why. Those are the hopes. Meanwhile, I’ve sent another postcard, the one with the cat, the books and the glass of wine, to Glen Allen inside Scottish Poems, beside “The Worst of All Loves” by Douglas Dunn. It said, “Crazy me: I miss you.” I have to live with hope as I have to live with writing. Sanctions are artificial and untenable. I had told myself I wouldn’t tag Julie a hundredth time before I’d written my two-hundredth post and that I wouldn’t write about her except as fiction, but how well could I follow either of those mandates and still work out this mess to a resolution? It won’t just go away. That’s why I’m writing. Twickory allows for some detachment, but detachment isn’t always what’s needed. Twickory isn’t always ready for the emotions of the moment, which, if they must be written will have to be written elsewhere. Elsewhere is here, or the unsent letter or the postcard.

I write every chance I get, but the chances are still too few, and I don’t know how to make more. I can’t write in the shower or on my bike. Eating is a begrudged distraction. Reading can’t find a place in my priorities, and as goes my reading, so goes my writing: I can’t seem to engage in a book, and so the writing is choppy and scattered. I’ve become desperate enough for time that I’m willing to pay for it, soliciting someone to transcribe my handwritten Twickory pages. Henrico County employees have an e-mailing list to buy and sell stuff, and I advertised there. A library worker was among the many who answered. He appeared to have the skills, but he works under Julie at Glen Allen, so though I initially felt bitterly mischievous to think of virtually writing under her nose, I didn’t want someone else innocently delivering my acid. I’d also like to keep the library system’s stinking nose out of my business. I won’t say there’s not enough time, only that too much of it is already allocated to something other than writing. Nights get later, but then so do mornings, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed at work. It would seem only fair for writing to compromise my work at the library, considering how badly work has compromised my time to write, but which am I getting paid for?

This dream I’ve deferred I have no intention of denying. The love I seek now is the love I have always sought. It’s the approval I needed to continue confidently in the direction of my passion. And though I can’t make up the love I didn’t receive as a child, I can give myself the approval to do what I need to do to reclaim the passion in my life. The love I seek now is not also the approval to seek it.

And where is the time to do that? The only time left to carve more from is that for which I’ve already carved it–writing. Ah, irony. Am I sealing myself in a vacuum and suffocating the writing I forsake everything else to get done? I have to beat its last breath to the finish line. Spring is not yet the breath of fresh air I need–forty-three degrees for a high today, and work besides–but it needn’t be an airless cage, either. Writing, life–too much, too little.

Despite its artificiality, I keep in mind the formula from Why We Love and have set an arbitrary deadline of the end of the year for finishing Twickory. I don’t know when I’ll finish the letter–maybe never–and then there’s Book Monkey. I’m burning out on the stress of finding the time to get it all done. I’m resenting work more every day, and that’s poisoning my writing. It’s a soul-sucking vortex of diminishing importance and increasing annoyance–a loud brat demanding ever more of what it ever-less needs. Or maybe it just feels that way when I’m sitting on the floor of the storage closet, lunch beside me, writing in my lap, and waving at the automatic light three times a minute to turn it back on as I try to get some peace from the inane nattering in the breakroom. Or maybe it’s when I’ve just pedaled forty-five minutes through the wet dark just to sit down in my rocking chair and scribble till the pen droops. Or when my mind is so clogged with what I don’t have time to write that I can’t say anything–and waste a thousand words saying it. I hate writing about writing. It’s dissipating. The end of the year. God, look at this mess.

To Have Known Then….

My girls will be fifteen in a few months, and I will still be thirty-seven-and-a-half years older.  I fear losing touch, as my parents lost touch with me.  But my parents had never quite been in touch.  I lived with three fifteen-year-old girls once before, but I was too busy being a fourteen-, sixteen-, and eighteen-year-old boy to take notes for the future.  At least my daughters know they are loved.  Love, though, is what pulls kids from their parents, isn’t it? a different kind of love than their parents can provide–the kind I have been pursuing for so long that it seems that all I’m chasing is the chase, a knight after a grail he barely believes exists.

What has this chase cost me?  What future cost will my children bear because of it? because I brought home anger and frustration that I couldn’t put aside to interact with them kindly?  What, ultimately, will it have been worth to have fallen in love?  Probably nothing until I fall in love again.  Or until my kids do, when I might have something to teach them, if I’ve not become too bitter by then to accept the wisdom offered by the experience.  I want them to be prepared for love younger and better than I was.  I guess there’s time.  I want them to know what I’ve been through, what a hard-headed ass I was most of that time, how little control I had over love, and how much I hurt someone in the name of it.  I want them to know what at least one man is like in love.  Maybe I’m not a good role model for that, but by the time I understand it myself they’ll be too old to tell anything to.  What does a daughter need to know? and when?  What does a dad need to know?

In love, I’ve been single-minded, neglectful of nearly everything else.  What did my daughters not get from me?  Being in love again would be tempered by more than a little guilt, as if it were a betrayal.  Emma probably still harbors resentment toward her mother for both the divorce and eventual remarriage, and I know she adores me.  Would I be betraying her?  Would I seem (to her) to be cutting her out?  I need her adoration.  I would probably feel abandoned, too, if she or her sisters fell in love.  I might retreat from them to give their love space, though I would hope that they would still seek my approval and advice.  These two loves–the one I have from my daughters and the one I seek–how do they coexist?  Who is the father and who is the lover?

All of these questions are probably the kind I should not try too hard to answer, as having asked them is awareness enough, a bridge I’ve yet reached:  Knowing there is a bridge is all I need to know, even as I cross it.  How much more prepared can I or need I be?  I hope my daughters fall in love, as I hope I do again; and I hope they recognize it and accept it without the struggle I put up against it.  Perhaps in one kind of love is bound the other, and each makes the other stronger.  It can be like that, can’t it?

They’d Probably Stab the Bag of Sugar, Too

The plant came home with me.  It was a rescue mission. I noticed that the aloe had been watered.  It should have been dry.  I taped a three-by-five notecard to the pot that read, “This plant is being overwatered.  Please leave it be.  If you want to live, leave it to me.”  The next morning, the card was gone and the plant was sopping.  I immediately removed the plant from the silll to my locker.  At the end of the day I carried it home on my back, wrapped in bubble wrap.

So, help me out with this one:  By my reckoning, this is the work of a sociopath.  What, besides killing the plant, was the intent of this action?  Who was this person attacking?  I didn’t sign the card–there was no point–and I don’t know who knows my handwriting.  Actually, I’d rather believe it wasn’t about me at all, because I don’t want paranoia to get too secure a foothold.  This is a person who revels in misery, their own and company’s.  Whose misery they wanted to join theirs, I don’t know.  All I know is that I don’t want to work with that person in the building.  Their presence is disturbing, especially since I can’t imagine who it is.  I haven’t noticed any other such acts.  Have I just missed them?  As scary as that person being here, is their perfect assimillation into the library’s culture.

Now someone does come to mind:  Chris, who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me why he felt he had to expose A Bright, Ironic Hell.  I can see Chris watering the aloe and convincing himself that it was a joke, but I won’t accuse him and will try  not to suspect him further.  It doesn’t matter who it was, does it?  Whoever it is is just one more reason to get the hell out of Twin Hickory.  This place has become so infested with backbiting and petty snitching that it’s becoming a junior high prison.  Morale is long gone, in a tank of formaldehyde in the Mutter Museum.  Everyone is resenting someone else for not pulling their weight in one way or another–using a cell phone in the stacks or making personal calls from a service point, shopping online at their desk or not shelving as scheduled.  Someone even felt they had to tattle on me for being late one day.  That place is toxic, and I’m going to at least get a plant out of the crossfire if I can’t save myself.

When I was hired, I pegged this as my last job.  I quit trying to be a writer and resigned myself to being a father and an employee, and I was able to fool myself for longer than ever before.  I’ve had this job a year longer than any other, but now I’m much more a writer than an employee (though, I hope, not more than I am a father), but what am I getting paid for?  To fit in with a group of malcontents.  The irony is that the more discontented I become the more accepted I feel here:  The waning cynic meets the waxing cynics.  But I don’t want to stop at their level, much as I crave acceptance.  I could easily join in the backbiting and tattletaling, and probably will to an extent, but it won’t make me feel good for long or help heal the damage to morale.  Neither do I want to be fired.  Knowing how high-handed and imperious management can be with none-of-their-business is knowing how much moreso they could be once given a leg to stand on.  No, I’ll leave on my own terms, even if I don’t know yet what they are.  This just might by my last job, not because I[‘m resigned to die at it but because whatever I do next, I plan to do for me and my soul, and that is not a job but a willing duty.  Ultimately, only one’s soul’s rules are worth following.  All other rules try to rule the soul.

The aloe won’t get as much sun in my window as it did at work, but it will get the care it needs and no malice.  I didn’t want to possess it, but the rules it follows were not respected at the library, either by those ignorant of the damage of their well-meaning care or by the malicious intent of a hateful individual.  Some people believe they’re doing the right thing in reporting their coworkers’ missteps; others want to demonstrate their superiority or just plain inflict pain:  Righteousness or sociopathy.  Would that I could be carried away to a caring, meaningful place where I would be allowed to follow the rules I know to be most beneficial to me, where I would be allowed to be me, but I will have to be my own white knight.

To Bridge a Gap or Leap Into an Abyss?

It was to be a four-friend weekend, and I was excited to have had so much on my social calendar.  I felt almost normal, to be in the society of acquaintances instead of strangers, to whom I’d have to reach out and from whom I would have to expect and accept rejection.  The people I would be with would, to varying extents, at least know me.  I aimed for a full weekend of healthy preoccupation without desperation.  It didn’t work out quite the way I’d hoped.  James was sick.  Though that saved my legs twenty-two miles and my wallet at least that many bucks for lunch, it also made me restless.  I stayed home and tried to write, but did everything but–washed clothes and dishes, cleaned the apartment, played the guitar.  The words wouldn’t come, so I let them be.  Dinner with Diane happened–subs and on-demand Netflix on her giant screen.  I couldn’t get Matt out for scooterball the next morning, but I did catch the matinee of  The King’s Speech with Susan (sort of), with cookies and talk in Carytown afterward.  Matt and I got around to scooterball the next evening.

So the weekend was done, and you’d think three-out-of-four was adequate, but quantity far outstripped quality.  Like The King’s Speech, it was good but not engaging.  Missing James was not a good start.  We would have spent most of the day together, walking the canal, talking, listening to music.  James and I connect as well emotionally as we do intellectually.  Idea and feeling are conjoined passions.  James has fallen in love at least twice since I’ve known him (three-plus years) and he’s passionate about many things.  He quit Twin Hickory to pursue writing two years ago.  He’s yet to make a cent, but he’s yet to give up, and I daresay he won’t soon.  James doesn’t drive or pedal, and I don’t own a car.  It’s nearly an hour on the bike east to Tobacco Row.  Even for James, I’m not willing to do that but on a Friday of a long weekend, which comes up every fourth week, so it will be another four weeks, at least, before I see him again.  I haven’t seen him since my birthday more than two months ago.

Diane and I had a little fun, I guess, watching old tv shows, but who really engages that way but loving couples? for whom it’s not about what you’re watching but who’s keeping you warm on the sofa, whose hair you stick your nose in, whose ribs you tickle with the hand around the waist.  Diane and I were never that cozy, even as a couple.  Susan was supposed to meet me at the box office of the Westhampton.  I got there just before showtime aned waited outside, cussing a little more vigorously the longer I waited, for fifteen minutes, finally going in and plopping into the nearest seat.  I didn’t know how much I’d missed until Susan found me during the end credits.  I was ready to pick a fight.

“Where were you?” i said, probably already a little shrill.

“Oh, I got here about five minutes early and just bought my ticket and came inside to wait in the lobby.  I peeked out every once in a while to see if your there.”

“I though we’d agreed to meet at the box office.”

She said, “Oh, silly boy.”

I bristled a bit but shook it off, though I was still disappointed we hadn’t seen the movie together.  She hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but a more respectful acknowledgement of our agreement would have been nice.  I didn’t tell her that.

Every weekend that weather and time permit us, Matt and I take our Xootrs and a soccer ball to Pinchbeck Elementary, my first alma mater, and push ourselves around the blacktop (the venue of most of my dodgeball glory) while trying to keep the ball on the court, sometimes passing the ball, sometimes attacking each other with it.  We’ve been doing it for more than eight years.  Usually apres scooter we have a coffee and sit and chat.  This time he had to get home to Mary and dinner by six-thirty.  By the time we’d done on the blacktop that’s all he had time to do.

Minus James, and without Matt to talk to at length, the weekend was a bit of a disappointment.  I realized, afterwards, that what I’d wanted was someone to really care about me.  Diane asked about the kids, which is what everyone asks who doesn’t really know me; it’s what they know.  Susan and I know very little about each other, but we have a good rapport and can make each other laugh.  We haven’t shared much backstory.  Usually, our conversations take place with the circ desk between us.  She once asked me something to the effect of what did I do with my spare time, and I answered, “Oh, I’m just always looking for love.”  I didn’t mean hers, and she had to have known that, but she blushed and turned slightly away.  There is not that kind of attraction between us, and she got about a fifteen-year headstart on life.

I can’t say Diane and I really connect; there’s just that dense four-year history we share from way back when that counts as a bond, and we don’t talk about that.  I find it difficult to relate otherwise.  She makes so much money that she paid in taxes last year what I grossed in income.  At the same time, she doesn’t seem to relate to my comparatively meager lifestyle, often suggesting I do something that is outrageously implausible for me to even consider, like buy a townhouse.

If I ‘d wanted more from Diane and Susan, I could have given more myself. I didn’t make an effort, not so much as asking “How have you been?”  I’m out of practice with the lesson “Giving Is Receiving.”  (Another victim of the winter layoff?)  But I’ve also expected–taken for granted–to connect better on an emotional level with women than with men.  I’m finally having to notice that it’s not necessarily true.  Women  seem to more readily relate to emotions, but are as wary of a man’s as they are accepting of a woman’s.  I don’t know if that’s true, and I hate to believe in such distinctions.  It could be that I’m simply more demanding of women, regardless of romantic intent, than I am of men.  Hm.

So it wasn’t the weekend I’d hoped for.  How can I complain?  I kept busy with people I know.  I was amused and entertained.  I was hopeful of more engagement, but not desperate for it.  (People give what they can give.)  Spring’s not even here yet, after all.  This weeekend was a pleasant run-up to that, a chance to hone the social skills with people with whom I could relax.  So far so good, lessons learned.  Expectations and hopes are for ideals.  If I can’t stop myself from having them (and it wouldn’t be wise to try), I can learn to accept falling short as just a smaller step forward than I’d wanted to take.  Forward is what matters (sounds like a mantra for the coming warm seasons) and I at least went that way.  Being so philosophical about it might be easy at this stage, but a running start can only help.

Paper Slaps

I’m pleased with the postcards–a couple more Quint Buchholzs with books, one with a cat on a stack, the other with a boy asleep under one.  Who knows when I’ll send them.  I have nothing to send them in but Impossible (Nancy Werlin), but I got that for my girls, and one of my rules for the game state that it has to be a book I’ve read.  I’m waiting on Scottish Poems.  A part of me really wants to believe I’m just doing this for fun–I am, but fun, for me, is in the challenge, and I don’t mind making my own challenges.  I have some theories, and the challenge is in testing them.  I want to see how much trouble I can almost get into for the sake of self-expression.  This paragraph is a test of those theories.

The last time I said I could “play it canny” was just before I crossed a big, fat line.  How sure can I ever be that I won’t do it again?  I don’t know how I can escalate from unaddressed, unsigned postcards, but I’m afraid I’ll figure it out.  Apparently, I’m neither content with the unrequited aspect of this love nor mindful of the pathetic quality of dialogue with her I usually provoke.  Spring can’t come too soon to give me something better, more positive to do.  Eh, but it’s still a few more weeks away, and it will get cold again before it warms for real, and I have time, postcards and love on my hands.  As I can no longer (thanks to Blaise Pascal) trust reason to keep me out of trouble, I can only hope for more rewarding distractions from trouble, because it’s trouble I want, and I can only talk myself into it, not out of it.  The less talking to myself the better.

God, how could I be missing Julie?  I feel almost ashamed of it.  How could I want her back?  How much of that hell could I go through again?  I don’t want her back at Twin Hickory.  I couldn’t go through any of that again, but hope always thinks things could work better the second time around.  It seems unfair that I am not rewarded for falling in love for the first time after fifty years, for not giving up on the possibility.  But nothing’s done right the first time, is it?  I understand what I’ve been going through, but it doesn’t seem to mean much at the end of the day, when I still have to write like this, with my smile cracked and my humor beaten flat, left with this wistful pain.  I write better feeling this way and feel better for having written.  It’s martyresque.

Anonymous postcards sent unaddressed.  What am I doing?  Does it matter?  Just let me do it.  It’s what I have to get me to spring.  Let me believe she reads them, and that when she does she thinks about them, doesn’t dismiss them as an annoying reminder.  If not my words, maybe the pictures on the front will be appreciated.  “Maybe” is all I have, because the postcards are a weak provocation unlikely to elicit a response–in fact, the game was all but designed to render all provocation inferential.  If what I really want is to stir something up, I won’t likely be satisfied–and so I’m back to worrying about escalation.

I would plead for spring’s hasty arrival, but what will that really change?  Julie and spring are just different brands of the same desperation.  Which has the more attractive package?  I don’t need it or want it, but I can’t help buying it.  Spring will probably just find me buying more postcards and having more books sent to Twin Hickory from Glen Allen.  I write, and spring isn’t likely to deter that activity.  Like anything else I write, the postcard game is a project, and though it’s destination is as yet undefined, I’ll see that it gets there.  That, also, is like everything else I write.  Everything I write is a provocation, too, a boot in the ass, a wake-up call, a rent in the drone of life:  Listen to me!  Listen to yourself!  If you think you have nothing to say, nothing better to do, then why would you read this?  You have given up and would as soon do what you do every day without deviation, without challenge.  Take it, keep it, go away.  To proclaim myself a provocateur is to say I’m no mere troublemaker.  I feel, and I want you to feel.  Spring and all its promises provokes a renewal of hope and its potential unrealized from last year.  I plead for a provocative new season to kick my ass, to expand my possibilities, to smother my excuses–not to distract me.

Whatever I’m doing with the blogs and the postcards I have to do, to whatever ends they take me–Oblivion, Nirvana, or Trouble. I don’t see an alternative.  It has been, and will continue to be a hellish sort of fun, a continual challenge, a wired-in, nervy awareness that might never be satisfied or restful.  That’s me, that’s the journey.  Wish you were here.

Reason Enough

February threw a seventy-five-degree day at me and I took the bait.  I’m ready for hibernation to be over.  I got out of the apartment by not letting myself fix my coffee, chasing the caffeine to Carytown.  Still, I didn’t get out before ten-thirty.  There was no stress in my legs, but neither was I taking my time.  Going east is energizing.

I started up Patterson, climbing to Parham.  Sometimes that stretch seems like an electric brae.  Its ease of ascent has surprised me in each of my hundreds of ascents.  The downhill on the other side is no illusion.  I topped out my gears not halfway down.  Cars were only dawdling past me, so I had to have topped thirty.  I nearly topped the next rise on momentum alone.

I finished Why We Love last week, returned it this week.  Before I had it, a staff member at another branch had had it.  Quite a handsome woman, too.  And even more attractive for having read the book.  I wonder what she got out of it and if it was what she was looking for.  I got what I needed.  I hadn’t known what I was looking for.  I got confirmation:  I had been physically, mentally, and emotionally in love.  It’s good to know that.  It’s nice to know that there were good reasons–not excuses–for my behavior over Julie.  The book didn’t tell me if I’m still in love, but I’m not rushing to the stacks to find the book that will.  It wouldn’t be there, anyway.

Besides more postcards, all I wanted out of Carytown was to be among strangers in a place I liked.  Desperation stayed home.  Despite the weather, it’s not spring yet.  The rutting season is a few weeks away, and if I can be so blunt as to call it that, I’ll probably retain an understanding of what I really need and what, if anything, I can do about the signals my body is sending me.  Before I returned the book, I had to remove a half-dozen or so sticky arrows.  One of them pointed to a quote from Blaise Pascal:  “All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.”  I’ve known that all along, but have resisted surrender or decried it when I had to succumb.  But now this is something I can believe:  The fight between the Fool and Wise Man is actually a process.  The effort of reasoning is to arrive at the Fool, not annihilate him, and with luck, to better understand and empathize with him.  Perhaps that’s the key to loving myself, or just to loving. 

I made little contact in Carytown, but didn’t leave there reluctantly (or eagerly).  I enjoyed my time there, though the coffee, despite a larger helping than usual, was drunk too late to head off the headache.  My legs could have used the rest, but the rest of me was restless.  I’ll take a spring day whenever I can get one, and I’ve needed one for quite a long time.  The winter in Richmond has not been bitter, and February has been more like March the past couple of weeks.  I suppose hibernating creatures all over the area are rolling a little in their sleep.  I’m eager to stretch my legs in a fresh, green season in society.  I wonder how last year’s growth will serve me this year.  If this year ends as another without a love to call my own, I hope at least to have been given the understanding as to why.  It’s the only way I could accept it.  I hope the new season finds me more open and patient, less desperate but quietly hopeful.  I don’t want to treat hope as an enemy, cruel pusher of unreality, but I don’t know what will change that attitude but the preclusion of desperation, and how that is effected I don’t know.  Maybe that will be the season’s lesson.

Whenever, I Hope

Lieneke’s Law, Relationship Rule #1:  Getting over the separation lasts half the time the relationship did.  (The Vanishing, 1988, The Netherlands)

From the time I declared (to myself, in writing) my crush  on Julie to the days she left Twin Hickory was twenty-six months.  I’ve gotten more than three of the thirteen months allotted me out of the way, so it seems I can anticipate my Christmas (or birthday) present.  If the formula is true and my calculations correct…well, I’m not sure.  I’m ambivalent.  It seems soon, but isn’t it what I want?  It’ll be the biggest non-event of my life, but it will still be a non-event.  Seeing her set me back a month, maybe, but I did nothing about it but write, so I might very nearly be on track.  If I shut up altogether it might happen sooner.  No–later:  I can’t fool myself into not thinking about her; that’s just an explosion down the road.  I don’t do distraction well; I want to face my problems–resolve them, not ignore them away.  If that prolongs the battle, then it will have been well and truly won in the end.  To resolve it I have to live with it, give it a place in my life where it will do the most good, and that’s right here, and in Twickory, in Book Monkey Says, in “the novel.”  I write, I tell stories.  I have a story to tell, and, somehow–I don’t know how yet–I’ll tell it.  I am afraid of getting over Julie, afraid of losing her.  I want to capture her on paper, at least.  Can I do that when I’m over her?  Will she still mean enough to me to finish the story?  Will she remain an inspiration?  The writing will decide that, will create the Us without Julie (and without me at times), imperfectly recreate the woman I couldn’t get to know otherwise and let me know her surrogate, instead.  Resolution is finishing telling the story as I know it; and though I know barely half of it, I can eventually fill out the rest with my fascination for the other half.  I’m most afraid of losing the fascination.  I expect none of these fears to be realized, though, now that I’m that I’m aware of them.  The aggregate fear is that I might stop feeling love for her, but I’m now almost sure that I can be over Julie and still love her.  And why not?  It’s a good feeling to love without obligating someone else to return it (and I come closer everyday to actually believing that).

The Vanishing is only a movie, and Lienecke’s only a character in it.  There is no rule.  I’d be as well off making my own rules, arbitrary as such rules are.  Why We Love offers no formula, says only “weeks, months, or years.”  Whenever.  Whenever–it’s as good a time as any, considering my fascination with the journey.  Where am I now?  I still think of Julie for a large portion of my day, but every day less of the frustration and bitterness accompanies the thoughts.  Fading, too, but at a slower rate is the regret of missing so many opportunities to step up and get out of my pride.  But how could anything have been different between the two of us, given how we were each equipped to handle any of it?  We both did what we could do, in our own inadequate way.  For my part, hormones were doing the driving.  I dubbed them “The Fool.”  I don’t think they’ve gotten behind the wheel quite as often since Julie left, but they’re still not in the back seat, either.  Minus Julie’s agitation, The Fool can almost relax, detach a little more every day from the past, now that it’s not the present every, single work day.  Sometimes, I can take step back from that bright, ironic hell and see the satellite dance, and that excites me, because that’s what this writing was supposed to have been  all along:  A look back–not over my shoulder, but through time.  When that shoulder no longer knots up at the thought of her or at the sight of her handwriting, maybe that’s when I’ll have reached Whenever.  Or will it be when I no longer look for her wherever I go? or when she finishes becoming Phoebe?

I have honed a certain necessary ability to categorize my feelings for Julie by venue of expression:  The worst bitterness and frustration–e.g., when I saw her at the training center–goes into Twickory; there’s no longer room for that here; I’m trying to heal.  I still often feel the feelings that aren’t good for me, and, still needing to be expressed, they’ve been given a place of their own in Twickory.  It’s an important outlet, a place to answer the nagging questions and understand the Julie that wouldn’t let me know her.  Of course, it’s all still speculation, but in fiction everything is true, nothing can be disputed.  If you understand it, it’s true.  Without Julie’s help I’ll help myself.  That’s an important step away from her, as important as not needing her love to validate mine for her.

But I suppose that it will yet be a long while before I’m over her.  I still write this for her, to her, still hope to hear from her, to see her, to sit down and talk with her–not to air grievances, not to talk at her, begging for answers, but…to get to know her.  Having those hopes makes my recovery seem a lot farther away.  Perhaps Twickory is the place for hoping, too.  Hope–at least this hope–might as well be fiction, and Julie might as well be Phoebe, because the reality just isn’t good enough.  Whatever the reality is at Whenever, it may still pale to my hopes, and Twickory may in the end be little more than a story.  What will I be?  A little more complete, a little closer to loving myself, a little closer to falling in love again–a lot less Julie and a lot more me.

Bag of Sugar to Plant to Human

There is another plant at work that I take care of–protect with my life, really.  Had I not known it had been Julie’s I’d let someone else have their way with it.  As she was preparing to move, Julie donated to us a sun-starved aloe, maybe actually her mother’s.  I took it under wing, trimming the dead and dying and placing it on the sunny breakroom sill.  It’s green again, and I do what I can to keep it that way:  Every day, first thing, I make sure with a finger that someone hasn’t watered it.  I saw Nikki peer into the pot, and I was quick to say, “It’s good.  I watered it last week.  It’s probably good for a couple more weeks.  I’ve been tempted many times to send out a staff email alerting them to leave that plant to me, but I don’t want to get possessive.  I wouldn’t so much as pretend to deny that that little aloe is a surrogate Julie.  I care for and protect it as I’ve wanted to Julie, to demonstrate, if only to myself, that I’m capable, and in so doing ameliorate my guilt and shame.  It helps me, too, to subdue the frustration of that old hopeless hope, which continues to burn and sometimes flairs.  Love, in-love–I don’t know the difference, but the feeling remains.  I have love, and that Julie doesn’t want it is irrelevant to that fact.  It is, again, love regardless.  Is this love she will not take only hers? or does it now await someone else?  Is love love?  For all the unique reasons it exists for Julie, how could it be regifted intact to someone else?  To believe it could be that easy would altogether marginalize Julie, and I don’t want that, though I don’t know why.

I’ve been told how Julie seethed and stomped about when the flowers were delivered to her.  Had I been there, I think she would have confronted me again, and I would have, again, refused to defend myself and apologized for a blameless act.  Trying to spark a dialogue, I had, yet again, provoked a territorial defense.  Those flowers, of course, are long dead, but the peace lily is thriving and blooming.  I repotted it, giving most of the plant to others and returning the remainder to the same pot and cachepot.  This plant, a reminder of emotional support, gets no less precious treatment than the aloe.  Though Julie is gone from Twin Hickory, not all of my paranoia went with her.  I am not comfortable there feeling as I do that I yet must be on my best behavior, that even a slip five years down the road will validate management’s label of me as an emotional loose cannon with an “ongoing” attitude problem.  That plant must outlive my stay at Twin Hickory, which will be much longer yet, unless I can find my way out of the Henrico library system altogether.

I took the day off to write, because I need more time to do it than work and the commute allow me, and it’s more rewarding.  Don’t tell me a job is it’s own reward–that’s bullshit.  If a job is your life, it’s not a job.  My life is much larger than my job, for which Henrico County has not rewarded me or my coworkers with raises for going-on four years while they chase the technological Jones’ with “upgrades” that don’t make our work lives any easier.  No plant gives me solace from that frustration.

Writing is not my life, either, though.  Just as my job is a means to feeding myself, writing is the means to discovering my self.  Were I paid to make this quest I would feel much more rewarded, much more complete, much nearer my goals.  Love is one of my goals, and I’m still desperate for it; but it’s still winter, too, so I am little up to the pursuit.  Instead, I think and write about love, little though I know about it.  I’m still reading Why We Love.  There is no chapter on unrequited love.  Breakup is as close to the subject as the author gets.  Julie and I did break up, in a sense.  The emotional attachment might have been all mine, but it was nonetheless painful for both of us.  In my goofy, awkward, painful way, I try to make it up to both of us by taking care of an aloe in a chipped pot.  It’s the way I’ve done anything involving Julie.  How could I possibly change now? and in what possible way could this offend her?

Give or Take a Second Opinion

(To the tune of “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan)

Anyway, I’m not crazy.  I started reading Why We Love (Helen Fisher)*.  I am not a weirdo or a psycho.  I was in love with Julie.  I don’t know yet if I still am.  I saw her.  The book has told me, so far, that what I have felt toward her is normal.  I hadn’t seen her since she left Twin Hickory three months ago.  I suppose it was normal, too, for all the blood to rush to my face.  The book will probably tell me that in the chapter on unrequited love.  It was more than simply the sight of her that pulled my blood against gravity; I was trapped in a classroom at the county’s training center.  For fifteen minutes I didn’t learn a thing (the class was “Emotional Intelligence”) as I stared, through a window, down a floor, and fifty feet beyond the building, at that black-pea-coat-draped back.  Though her hair was mostly hidden under the coat and her back was to me, I knew it was her, even before I recognized Jennifer beside her, probably because I expected her to be there.  She and Jennifer work out together at the gym there, and I saw Jennifer going in when I got there.  I didn’t hear a word the instructor said, either while the two of them chatted on the sidewalk before parting for their cars, or a few minutes after seeing Julie’s car cruise past that spot a couple minutes later.  I was enraged by my impotence, the missed opportunity, though what I’d have done with it I don’t know.  I prayed for a break in class, and when it finally came scorched off a couple pages of Twickory.  At that point, I hadn’t begun reading the book.  The writing helped–I returned some of my attention back to the class–but I was antsy to get out of there and write some more.  I didn’t know I’d feel that way when I saw her again, and I didn’t even see her face.  But that’s okay, right?  “When one’s love is spurned…the brain links this motivation with negative feelings, such as despair or rage.” (page 76).  The inability to express myself to her, the frustration of trying to engage her, drove my rage.  When it came to a head (how many times was that? four?) it exploded in an impulsive act that would finally get her attention.  It was not (once she clued in to my affection toward her) good attention.  I finished My Brilliant Career and sent it back to Glen Allen with a postcard on which I’d written “I hope love finds you unafraid.”  I should be so arrogant.  Could I handle what I’ve asked for?

I am also not wrong to consider this love an addiction, according to the book.  At this stage, it might be the most accurate designation of how I feel about her.  I’ve been just hanging in there without her, pretending and distracting myself away from the idea of her; but the sight of her was a mainline into my heart.  I’ve relapsed only slightly, though, I think.  It helps to know that this is normal.  Is it normal to have lasted this long?  Is it normal to feel the need to buy more postcards and check out more Glen Allen books?  (Maybe there’s a chapter on “Delusional Self-Permission.”)  I’m not crazy, anyway.

* Thanks, LL, for the book suggestion from your site (Unrequited Love).

Isn’t That Why I Grew the Beard?

Winter is the longest season.  This the longest winter.  I wish I could do what my body would like and hibernate.  The summer was too long, too active to be satisfied with staying home Friday nights and days off, but I have yet to transition fully to the weather.  It’s too easy to stay home, even before the sun goes down, because it’s  just a bit chill outside for my liking.  There’s no element of desperation, but social inactivity always teeters me closer to She Who Must Not Be Named.  A bad movie (The Girl Who Played With Fire) slowed down my moviegoing (as did living slightly beyond my means).  I have not been inclined to actively seek my mate, but I still crave society.  Society is the healthy diversion I’ve needed.  Reading, writing, puzzles, music–none of it holds me from considering my addiction for long.  The only thing that stops me altogether is better sense, but connectiong with someone else is all that sufficiently pulls me away from myself to meet someone halfway and beyond and leave Julie (sorry–couldn’t be helped) behind.  It’s not often enough, though, that I can do that, and I begin to squirm thinking about her.  That’s why I wish I could hibernate:  to stop the effort and the awareness and just shut down until spring and shorts weather.  The best I can do toward that end is stay away from Thomas, his teasing and his “news.”  I do not need to know what he felt in his latest squeeze, how soft and pliable she was.  I do not need to know that she exists, and Thomas is the only reminderer of that.  Reminders undo my progress away from her–and, yes I am aware that my writing about it is itself a reminder.

There are still two months of winter to go, still more snow to come and layers to put on before getting on the bike.  Usually, my winter reading is about baseball, a verbal substitute for the real thing, to get me to the next season.  Last week I checked out Why We Love–not Why We Love Baseball.  I’m afraid to read it.  I don’t want to go down that reading path again.  Marriage was at the end of the path last time I took it, and it wasn’t a good one.  I can’t trust that I’m any better fortified against it than I was then.  Love is easy to believe in, and these love  preachers can really sell it, sending millions out after it armed only with hope and good intentions.  Perhaps all I’ve gained(?) is cynicism.  Sure, we all deserve love, but if getting it were as easy as reading a book, 152.41 Fisher would be the love bible instead the tip of an ever-expanding section, racing the diet books to the last space in the stacks.

Social idleness has been the breeding ground of my worst “transgressions” toward Julie.  It’s why I thought it was okay to give her the magnets and why I wrote that angry email to her when she didn’t accept them.  It’s why I went to Carytown a month ago just to buy two Quint Buchholz postcards and why I sent one of them to Glen Allen in The Crow Road inscribed “You still fascinate me.”  I had sense enough, anyway, not to sign it or address it–anyone there could have come across it and simply been puzzled by it–and though it’s easy enough to track the borrower of the book, what had I done? and to whom?  Ah, but that logic has more than a touch of arrogance in it, and arrogance is an emotion that can grow to engulf even the best sense.  “What was I thinking?” is usually what I hear myself say when that happens.  I have another postcard and another Glen Allen book.  Save me spring! distant, distant spring!

My Plastic One Can Do the Same Job, Just More Slowly and Painfully

(To the tune of “Foot Shooter” by Frightened Rabbit.)

Thomas said he had news.  I said, “Oh, yeah?”  My mind was already out the starting gate, chasing the possibilities; my gut already girding for the blow.

“But I can’t tell you.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“Yeah, but see, I didn’t know you were gonna take it so hard.”

I was surprised that he found that more important than the amusement it afforded him,  but maybe I’ve been selling him short in the compassion department.  Of course, I wanted to hear this “news,” and, of course, I didn’t, but my imagination had probably already topped the reality:  The immediate thought was that she had a boyfriend.  Not that I could believe it, but my imagination took off after the worst news I could have heard.  I didn’t push Thomas.  I knew that despite my own worse-case scenarios, ignorance was the path to bliss in this matter:  Don’t give me the knife, and I can’t fall on it.  Naturally, I’d be jealous of any man whose romantic attentions she accepted, but after that. . . ?  Well, I’d feel plenty of pity for my lonely ol’ self, sure, but I don’t think the dreaded inpiration-loss would happen.  See, I’ve been learning to channel the bitterness of the irresoluble reality that was Julie and me into a resolute fiction–Twickory. I am creating the resolution, putting two characters in motion against each other and trying to interpret the consequences and steer the course to an actual destination.  Thomas can go ahead and tell me Julie has hooked up with the man of her dreams, and I’ll feel all the things I usually feel towards her and myself, but if it comes down to asking the same unanswerable questions with which I’ve burdened myself in Satellite Dance and A Bright, Ironic Hell, then I will put them to Twickory and see how those people deal with it.

Very recently I discovered the answer to one very old question, and have found in that answer yet more motivation to fictionalize my account of the affair.  It might have been one of the first questions I asked after Julie was told about BIH:  How was my writing about how I felt about her an “invasion of [her] privacy”?  The simple answer is, it wasn’t, and in my defensive, naive idealism that was the end of the matter.  What I’ve finally come to realize is that though it was not an invasion of privacy, it was lack of discretion:  Had I had more respect for how my writing might affect Julie, perhaps I wouldn’t have written what I wrote in the way I wrote it.  Not that I regret doing so, because at the time and in that forum it was the only way to express myself; but I do regret the pain that it caused, though I will yet not take the blame for the readers’ inference and its effect upon them.  That said, however, there is an entire page of this entry slashed with a red X that, though a true account, would serve only to hurt Julie.  There was a time when that would have been a weak argument for exclusion–on the contrary, might have been the best reason for inclusion–but the argument has strengthened mightily under a regimen of maturity and humility.  At the time, especially since The Tribunal, the motivation for discretion has been mostly self-preservation.  I’m not concerned with Julie taking further action against me–she won’t and can’t–but I am concerned with bruising the ego of a more “important” person than Julie.  I cannot trust someone who says, “I remember every word I say,” so I can’t feel safe in telling you what he said to me when I reopened Satellite Dance and after Julie had left his library, what he gave me explicit (though unsolicited) permission to do at Glen Allen; only that I would never do it and that I took silent umbrage to his use of  the word “harass.”

I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (though that hasn’t always been the case) but I do want to tell the truth as I know it as candidly as needs be, and sometimes discretion gets in the way of candor and is shunted by emotion.  Thomas is the more valorous of us two, but he didn’t have pride to contend with.  He had better keep his news.  I’d be a fool to solicit it (the same fool that’s dying to hear it), and who knows how valorous I could be with the information.  I would be a fool to want to find out.

“What a waste….”

It snows, and I wonder how Julie is getting along at the house she just bought three months ago.  Is she digging herself out okay?  Has a neighbor offered help?  Would she take it?  She’s been gone from Twin Hickory for two months now.  It feels like much longer.  How long does it have to feel like before I’m actually over her?  Forever? or as if she’d never been there?  And how long will it take to get there?  I don’t ever want to see her at the library, but I miss her.  When I no longer think of her relative to myself, I am over her.  Saying that makes me think that the blogs have been about neither her nor me, but about us.  When it truly is just about me, I’ll be over her.  I have to reclaim the blog from her as I do some of the music I love.  When the thought of doing something I know–or even suspect–we both like doesn’t conjure daydreams of us doing or partaking of them together, then that thing is mine again and I’m over her.  Or is all it takes is to want to be over her? because I’m not even there yet.

I played all my XTC one week on the pretense of introduction to my kids.  The pretense helped shift my usual perspective of, and self-investment in the music, so I can’t confidently attribute my relative emotional semi-detachment wholly to personal growth.  The association of the songs to Us or her was delayed from instant to eventual to not at all, depending on the song.  No small feat, given the difficulty in finding a song in their canon that isn’t about love.  Still, I haven’t been fooled into trying Prefab Sprout.  I was reluctant to give up james (Hey Ma), because after a particular listening I became enraged, entirely stripped of the fool’s new clothes–the belief that I could get over Julie.  That was several months ago, and now I want another listen.  I loved that album, but I had convinced myself that Julie did, too, and couldn’t sever the association.  Now Belle and Sebastian is taking up that mantle.  It doesn’t make me angry, though, to believe that Julie likes them.  It taps hope’s knee, but the reaction no longer kicks my ass.  Though in nearly every song I can apply a lyric to Us, the gut-wrench is no longer the requisite reaction to the association.  Belle and Sebastian are mine, but I’m willing to share.

Of course, work is a reclamation project, as well.  Two months, and the thought of her when I’m at the library still knots my shoulder and stifles my expression.  I quickly got use to the absence of her car, but in the library two or three times I thought I heard her voice and was attended by equal parts hope and dread.  And paranoia can still make me believe that the next time Ahmed or Greta speak to me it’s going to be, “May I see you in my office?” though I know I’ve done nothing to be reprimanded for.  My sister calls it a post-traumatic stress disorder, and I won’t argue; I just about exhausted the war analogies in describing the ordeal.  But the war’s over.  I’ve long since forgiven Chris for telling Julie about A Bright, Ironic Hell (“The Fool, Winner by Knockout”); and though it still hurts a bit, I’ve forgiven Stacey for siding with him when it happened.  We don’t really talk, anymore, but we were never really friends; we just kept each other’s misery company before the procession of her boyfriends began.  It hasn’t been a conscious effort, but it would be nice if management noticed what my peers have noticed: “You’re so much more yourself” and “You laugh a lot more”; and I’m much less intent on lying low and doing my job than on doing what it takes to help us all out.  Mary Lou and I work very well together; my blowups with her were always about Julie and blew over without hard feeling.  Everyone knows what I did to force the last office meeting, and if there is anyone left who hasn’t forgiven me they are hiding it pretty well.  Thomas the courier, endlessly amused with this particular tribulation of mine, never fails to bring news from Julie’s new library home, Glen Allen.  When he finds me alone, he betrays confidences the likes of which I was soundly condemned for exposing.  (I wonder if he’d be punished for his indiscretions if she found out.)  He knows he shouldn’t, but can’t help himself, knowing the laughs he’ll get out of it at the expense of my agitation.  No one at Twin Hickory has been so indiscreet, though I daresay there’s a lot of material to work from; but I’ve heard enough to not just temper my insecurities about this whole mess, but to make me feel good about how people feel about me:  It was definitely not just me.

Two months gone, and I’m still tangled up in Julie.  I will be for a long time yet.  What is she to me? and what must she become?  She is a fascination and an inspiration still, but she may also be a woman I’m still in love with.  How many more months before the love and the woman fade and leave the fascination and inspiration with which to write?  When will the fascination allow me to plumb the depths of her character without falling in love again with the woman?  When does the woman become the complex character that allows me to know her?  I don’t want to be over Julie, because I’m afraid of the inspiration drying up; that I’ll no longer feel the need to write it out–not even fiction–if  I no longer feel for her.  True?

Time will tell, right? A time dependent upon Julie’s continued absence to do any good.  It may be a long winter, though.  It will snow again, and I will worry again.  Maybe I would show up at her door with a shovel and a smile.  (Don’t worry; I don’t know where she lives.*)  I wish I wanted to see her again.

* I fell asleep, pen in hand, book on lap, and dreamt, after writing that last word:  It seemed a nice day.  I was pedalling along enjoying it, but found myself nearing Julie’s house.  As I drew opposite her front door it opened, and I dreaded/hoped she would see me, but she closed the door and stepped down three concrete steps with her head down.  At the bottom she turned right and dwalked to the shrubs under the picture window.  She wore a dress of burnished yellow whose few movement-made folds shimmered in the sunlight.  The back was cut in a deep V, and when Julie reached with her left arm toward the top of a shrub, I watched myriad muscles tense in a powerfully attractive pattern.  Then I was struck with sadness that she was going out, had a life of her own, without me.

Echo in a Packed House

I’m close to not writing, or farther from writing.  Satellite Dance has been a much lonelier endeavor than A Bright, Ironic Hell.  I thought I was writing a forum, but I’ve just been shouting down a manhole. I thought I’d connect with people who felt what I was feeling, but those people won’t come out, even incognito–I know they’re out there.  I get calls from well-meaning family worried about my emotional health and called into Ahmed’s office to be told I misrepresented him, but I am not after advice or trouble.  Spare me the pity, too; I’m not after that, either.  I express how I feel and hope to be understood, but, like Kerouac, all I’ve had to express is my own confusion; so if I’ve done a good job of that who can possibly understand?  Goddamned irony.

I talked to my dad last week.  He asked, as he always does, “Are you writing.” but added, “Not journal writing–real writing.”  I bristled but only said yes and changed the subject to my guitar-playing, which he could better relate to.  He is embarrassed for me and my writing.  This, coming from a former professional actor who once said, “You have to bare your ass for your art.”  Well, my ass has been hanging out there for a long time, but it’s winter and it’s damned cold.  Anyway, the people who’ve seen it are either embarrassed or offended by it.  Maybe it’s their own ass I’ve been showing them.  I haven’t connected.  I’ve exposed my self–my flaws, my fears, my hopes, my joys–but I have no clue that anyone actually knows me any better.

I’m sure many people don’t want to know me quite that well.  I began announcing new blog posts on Facebook (and Twitter), and, at first, readership rose; but now a new post is met mostly with indifference.  I’ve equated readership with friendship, because writing has been the easiest way to reach out, so if no one is reading . . . well, you do the math.  Writing has become a lonely job with little return on my efforts.  Lately, I have felt better not doing it, but that doesn’t end the need to be understood and to understand and connect with others or make it easier to do so in some other way than writing.  That bared ass has taken many a bite because of the blogs, and I suppose if I’d considered those possible consequences I’d never have started them.  But then I’d never have written, never have asked Julie out, and all those other bite-precluding nevers that would have followed.  I’d have been miserable.  Instead, I was confused and frustrated, but I was alive.  I moved forward, took action, suffered the consequences, and grew.  There may yet be more:  Jackie has friended me on Facebook, so she might find out about the blog(s) and maybe read enough to find herself mentioned.  This writing just keeps on giving.

But it doesn’t give enough.  I don’t want to write so much as the writing yearns to be written, and I try to oblige it with a few hours a week.  It demands more, but some things are more necessary to do, and some things more rewarding.  The reward of having written a post often is having gotten it out of the way, marked it off the list:  It’s a burden lifted, if not exactly a chore.  I’m never satisfied that I’ve said what I intended, and all of it, only that I’ve made some sense, and that doesn’t seem enough relative to the effort.  Neither does the audience seem worthy of the effort.

I am not leading up to saying this is my last post, though at the start I thought I was.  I’m trying to navigate a transition, yet I’m not sure where I’ve come from, and I certainly don’t know where I’m going.  Julie’s gone, and the cold and snow and the refusal of deference to desperation keep me from the social rounds I’d established over the summer; so, busy as my head is, I wonder if any of the chatter is worth relaying or if it is within the scope of the blog.  I’ve said I don’t like to write about writing, but writing is lonely and writing about it is as much about loneliness as writing about Julie is/was about me.  I still believe that I write simply to get a word in where my meager confidence in conversation won’t let me.  In writing is a place where I can’t be interrupted, where I can be confident, even in my confusion, that I’ll finish saying something.  In that way it’s a friend, but it’s a crutch when I ask too much of it, and that’s when I consider abandoning it as a weakness.  Then I consider other lonely, socially awkward people who may not even have a compensatory creative outlet, and I feel grateful that I can at least write.  Until I wonder if anyone’s reading.

Climbing the Pitch

Even at the risk of taking all the fun out of it, I can’t help wondering what flirting is all about.  I likened it to sex, but is it in reality a sort of pre-foreplay?  It’s a toe in someone else’s water, isn’t it?  Or is it an invitation to a club into which only a coded rapport gains one entry?  And what is membership?  See, I wonder just how serious flirting can be.  Certainly, it can be more serious for one person than the other; that is, it can mean two entirely different things to each of the participants; and if there is a disparity wide enough, someone’s feelings could get hurt.  But, no, a flirt is a flirt, right?  You can’t get a flirt on alone.  (In that way, it’s definitely not like sex.)  Even the unacknowledged flirt is valuable insomuch as it eliminates a relationship candidate.  I suppose that’s what I’m doing when I flirt:  gauging compatibility.  Is that what it was for that flirter I told you about?  No, that was pure tease, a test of the ol’ feminine wiles.  If I’d been a serious candidate for romance to her, she would not have mentioned a husband.  So I got notched; at least she must have considered me attractive–unless she’d set her sights low when she picked on me.  (That can’t be true!)  I don’t flirt with every woman who approaches me at the circ desk, though I try with most of them; but that’s only because most women are attractive to me in some way.  I allowed the flirter her fun despite the tease because I had fun, too.  I had not invested much, and isn’t that the beauty of flirting?  There is never much invested, but the payoff is always in the black, ranging from flattery to romance.  And no one gets hurt.  Flirting is a kind of speed-dating:  No rapport?  Next!  A flirt can’t go too far but always far enough–far enough to know the sparks just aren’t there; far enough to have a good time; far enough to hit it off.

What happens after hitting it off?  This is where expectations can diverge.  Who’s seeing romance and who’s seeing a little diversion?  If it seems as if I’m looking at this a bit too deeply, to the extent, indeed, of sucking the fun from flirting, well, part of that is me trying to find a reason to not enjoy myself at it and part just plain curiosity.  I can’t much control either entity.  Serious or fun, flirting is still a game, but a fascinating one.  I want to know how and why people play at it.  After all, if I want to play this game I had better be able to hold my own.  This is a league I do not want to be booted out of.  Maybe I want more than my partner in repartee, but flirting is not the stage at which such things are revealed.  So, then, flirting is less pre-foreplay than pre-first-date, right?  That wasn’t how my flirter saw it, but maybe that’s how Ms. C saw it a few days later.  She had a different style altogether–subtler, with the body language all in her eyes and head, and no pointed innuendo.  In fact, there was nothing so much in what she said that defined her attitude as flirtatious as there was in the quality of the rapport between us.  I’m not even sure where the flirtation began.  Maybe it was in my own raised eyebrows when she approached, for she was gorgeous–see-green eyes set in caramel skin and dark hair piled hurriedly on her head–carelessly beautiful.  I was in her power, struggling to hold my composure and her interest.  Certainly, she knew that.  Though she didn’t mention a husband (and my eyes were unable to stray from hers in search of a ring), perhaps she was, still, playing the same game as Ms. H, the previous flirter, insomuch as she was enjoying her power over me.  Ah, so be it.  My flirtation skills are not yet such that I can hold and wield much power in these exchanges.  I wonder:  Is it the balance of this power that seals a mutual attraction?  If I were to hold my own better, not yield control so easily, would I be more desirable?  Huh.  I guess I’ll just have to improve my game to find out.  Ms. H. has a book on hold.  I can only hope that she holds off getting it till Wednesday or Thursday evening, and that I’m on the desk when she does.

I have allayed my initial fear.  Not only have I not analyzed the fun clean out of flirting, I have actually found new levels of appreciation for it.  Desperation has become eagerness:  Put me in coach!  I’m ready to play!  It’s a game worth playing, and worth studying to get better at.  I don’t know what “winning” at it means, and I don’t want to know just yet, but maybe by the time I’ve learned to swing the balance of power closer to center I’ll understand what prizes are awaiting me.  Do I then try to pull that balance toward me?  Ah, so much to learn.

To Take Desperation Down There and Drop It In a Bum’s Cup

It was more than two weeks before I finally played the CD I’d bought at Plan-9 when I was last in Carytown.  I didn’t want to be reminded of the failure and disappointment and the limbo of transition I was lost in.  It’s called Write About Love, by Belle and Sebastian.  It only took me a day, though, to respond to the sticker on the wrapper:  “Write 300 words about love in any form.”  It was a contest solicitation, but the thought of a “song and a visit from Stuart Murdoch” was not my inspiration.  Being asked to write about love was enough. It was the kind of inspiration that got me started on A Bright, Ironic Hell after at least two years of not writing about anything.  This what I wrote:

Love is all I write about, because I don’t know what it is, and I want it so badly.  I think I have been in love.  I’m not sure.  It was a new feeling, and it was a good feeling, and it was torture.  It might as well have been love.  She didn’t love me, though she liked me once–just not enough.  Now, she doesn’t like me and won’t even let me talk to her.  So I write about her.  She doesn’t like that, either.  It doesn’t matter what I write–whether I’m angry that she rejected me or worshipping her qualities–she doesn’t like it, and has asked me to stop–a few times–and I have stopped, because I would do anything for her.  But I have always started again, because, I guess, there was always that one thing I couldn’t do for her as long as she inspired me.  And, though, if she told the truth and said she hated me, I would find inspiration still in the fascination for her that won’t die.

Was I in love with her?  Am I still?  Is it even love if it is rejected?  Is it just a seed without soil?  Her name is Julie, and she’s beautiful except when she looks at me, when her eyes darken and her face hardens, and I could cry because she feels that way about me.  I only wanted to love her.  That was my crime, and that face is my punishment, though hell is not being able to stop seeing it before me–and having to write about it.

Still, it was two weeks later, just after I’d published the previous post that I listened to the album, and now it cozily inhabits my head.  Friday had arrived and all the chatter I’d felt so excluded from had left with the half of the crew that didn’t work that weekend.  I am always more comfortable with the smaller crew, and the size of the group has much to do with that–the smaller the better for me–but the people in that group are individuals I’m comfortable with, people I can talk to and listen to.  That they’re all women plays no small part, either.  I feel the rooster in the hen house in some ways, but the brother among sisters, mostly.  Mike and Maddox have in turn shared this weekend with me, and I felt them to be interlopers.  Jennifer traded a weeekend with Bethany recently, and it simply seemed there was a hole in Bethany’s place.

This crew–Megan, Becky, Bethany, Angie, Sujatha, and Judy–gets a much more relaxed Dion than they’ve probably ever known.  Though I harbor bitterness still over the not-so-distant past, I feel no reason to air it at work; without its source and target, it has no (or little) context there:  She’s gone, I’m out of the box.  I can breathe deeply and not dread an emotional menace around every corner.  On my best days–and they are coming more consecutively all the time–I feel like a dancer–loose-limbed, swivelling from the hips and shoulders; turning on a toe; reaching from the waist standing on one leg, back and other leg parallel to the floor, eyes straight ahead–nearly every move a “step.”  I feel closer to real.  Amongst this group, I feel much more accepted; and individual but still connected to the group.  I’d like to think that I ask for less and give a little more now that the person I used to ask so much from with such futility is gone.  Before she left what I wanted out of this crew (and everyone else) was some acknowledgement that they understood me, that I wasn’t alone.  My paranoia needed to know that not everyone was on her side.  Then the peace lily came, and she left.

The desperation stayed, of course; it’s mine, a part of me for the time being.  I can diminish its role as motivator, but it has to tag along to work with me.  It wants me out on the circ desk, to see and talk to people (by which I mean women).  I’m anxious to get out there, too, but when I do, I leave desperation in the workroom.  On most days, with a full crew in force, any of us is lucky to get more than an hour out there in a day.  Monday and Tuesday, day shifts for me, are busts:  Any women I see on those days are most likely to be either young mothers or retirees.  Give me my hours in the evening on Wednesday and Thursday, when the working women come in.  Fridays and Saturdays, with the half-crew, I might get on the desk three times, and as busy as those days are, my opportunities for contact can reach tantalizing proportions.  I have no “line,” just a smile, a greeting, and lots of eye contact.  If her eyebrows go up, the pitch of my voice goes down and its edges melt away.  That’s my invitation to a flirt, but sometimes the invite comes from the other side of the counter.  I never turn those down, though not leading the dance can momentarily tangle my feet before the flattery rights me.  With Megan as witness at the terminal next to me, one woman virtually turned a fine payment into a come-on, leaning across the counter to within inches of my face to joke huskily about being “bad” just before casually dropping the husband bomb.  I felt teased but didn’t let on, didn’t even pull awayto regain my personal space from what could’ve been a kiss if we’d both puckered up, we were so close.  If this had been a game, I’d have conceded her the victory but not without letting her know with a one-sided smile of a wink that I was merely extending her a gentlemanly courtesy and that next time I’d be a bit more competitive now that I had her measured.  I asked Megan what she though of this woman dropping the husband bomb in the middle of a flirt.  What was the point?  Megan theorized that the woman wanted to prove to herself that she still “had it.”  If that were true, then she went away satisfied.  I felt the same way:  It had been nearly as good as good sex–a mutual challenge willingly met to pleasure in each other’s pleasure.

I’m not sure what I’ve been getting at here, except, maybe, that I don’t have to just write about love, that I can talk about it, too, at work, where there is no longer someone with whom I’m in love and who resented and feared it.  What I have now (for the most part, and the rest doesn’t matter) is a peace lily and people who understand that I am a passionate man and am not ashamed of it; can confide with it and joke about; and is who he is not because of one person, but despite her.  Every day is less of her and more of me, and much more fun–and I’m getting paid for it.  What’s the rush to Carytown?

There Are Worse Ways to Get Attention

Among the books I shelved yesterday was Kate Gosselin’s (yeah, right) I Just Want You to Know.  I looked at that title and wondered,  Who does she want to know what? and who cares to know?  Is the person who just returned this book important to Kate Gosselin?  What did that reader want to know about Kate Gosselin?  Surely they aren’t friends.  Couldn’t they talk  about it over the phone, coffee, or drinks?  Maybe Kate Gosselin has no friends.  Maybe she thinks readers are her friends, and that each book sold or checked out makes her a new friend and garners her more sympathy.  Replace her name with mine and ask the questions again.

This You I want to know me is no one I know yet.  It’s the person who doesn’t recoil from my emotions, maybe the woman I dreamt of last night:  a woman my age I’d apparently just met.  We were walking side-by-side across a park lawn, not speaking or speaking low, murmurring innocuous pleasantries.  I glanced back and noted aloud a small stage upon which I think I might have recently performed.  She turned to it to look.  I turned, too, but stared at her pale-orange hair.  I was behind her but only by a few inches.  She mumurred something I didn’t hear and leaned back against me, trusting I was there.  It was then that I noticed we  were the same height and that she was beautiful.  I slid a tentative arm across her waist and rested my hand on her belly, and she relaxed into me.  Could it be her that would not be afraid of what I say here?  Could it be any of the other women I’ve dreamt about recently?  How could I think they are reading? and how could we ever meet?  Is it you?

I have only a few friends and they have not judged me for my expression here.  They do not take it personally or pity me or consider me a threat to anyone.  They are also not enough.  Though I can bare my soul to them and receive understanding and compassion from them, I can’t come home to them and get that understanding and compassion from them with a touch, a hug, a kiss.  I’m feeling sorry for myself right now.  Who of you is recoiling from it?  I feel this emptiness almost constantly, especially at work, or in public.  Alone, at home, the emptiness is one person not there to greet me at the door; at work, I sometimes feel acutely alone amongst a chattering group that seems to know everything about one another, or cares to find out about it.  I envy that and try, in my clumsy, obvious way, to show that I care, too; and I do care, but I’m also trying to elicit genuine interest in me.  Bethany asks about my weekend in order to tell me about hers–I know that by now and don’t delay her telling her story with details of my own–and Judy seems to ask simply to fill time, and is as likely as not to cut me off mid-first-sentence to tell her own tale.  I don’t connect well, maybe because I want my coworkers to actually care beyond the social niceties.  Maybe they do, and I just can’t tell.  Maybe I’m asking for too much from the wrong people, but it’s what I need.  Does that make me needy?  Carytown is the same as work but with strangers.  I have forgotten how to look them in the eye and smile or have something to say to them.  I don’t feel motivated to go back down there, but am afraid that if I don’t I will contract back into myself and stop trying altogether.  But desperation is not the motivator I want pushing me down there.

Are you my friend?  Would you want to know me beyond these words?  I wonder what I could mean to you, why you care what I have to say , and of course, what you think of me.  What part of me is a part of you?  I’m writing to you, after all.  It’s your approval I’m after, isn’t it?  Your approval is love.  I’m betting that’s all Kate Gosselin wants, though she’s asking it of a lot more people than I am.  Four readers or four million, they aren’t friends.  Is that all I’ve been doing? soliciting friends? recruiting an army of the sympathetic?  I’m finding it increasingly difficult to be motivated by that to write.  I’m in a limbo, an indefinable transition, a blank space between meanings, reaching but not grasping, groping for the other side.  I’m not sure writing can bridge the gap, or what else might in its stead.

Ghost of Julie-Not-Quite-Past

No, I didn’t get to Carytown.  I didn’t even leave the apartment Friday until three, and that to do laundry.  I slept in, then read (Watership Down) and wrote (Twickory).  Carytown could not call me out to play.  The air was brisk and the sky cloudy, and I didn’t feel like preparing for a seven-mile ride in anything but optimum conditions.  The motivation was missing.  I couldn’t find meaning in going down there, but I could feel the desperation, the hope without confidence.  And I was feeling poor a week after paying rent and a week before payday.  I guess that all adds up to “I wasn’t feeling it.”  But it’s only going to get colder.  How much more motivated am I going to be three weeks down the road when I get another Friday off?  What else can I do in the meantime that can help me feel more a man worth having, and closer to having a warm, soft body to share a winter’s bed with?

Is this really desperation?  It’s what I want; it’s what I need.  Am I anything but impatient to have it?  I’ve done nothing desperate to reach my goal, don’t even know what I could possibly do to reach it besides what I do now.  It’s my introversion that defines desperation as any difficult necessary action.  Besides the aching desire, what else makes this mission seem so urgent?  Do I need to know?  I don’t think I really want to know, in any case.

Julie is only gone from the library, not from my mind.  Its’s hard to relegate her to the past when there’s still a chance of seeing her at library functions.  I don’t want to see her at those, because (among many other reasons) I still can’t say anything to her; but I still fantasize seeing her in public and telling her frankly how I feel about her.  Not that I’ve come to terms with those feelings; but as I will not likely get a chance to voice them to her, I have plenty of time to formulate them.  My pride holds onto an anger when all I really want to do is talk to her with compassion, not a personal agenda.  The truth is, she still fascinates me, and my curiosity won’t  be sated.  She deemed me unworthy of her trust.  That is her call to make.  I don’t care so much that she doesn’t love me, but I still want to love her. Why am I talking like this?  In my fiction I portray Julie in a much more compassionate light than my pride will let me in reality, perhaps because it’s the only place I can know her, where I can detach from my pride to see through her eyes.  But she has not gone far enough away to leave me alone with my imagination.  She would laugh in my face to hear me declare my compassion towards her, and I couldn’t blame her, but it nevertheless exists.  When I think of her now, I see a lonely woman likely to remain lonely, unable to expose smallest part of her soul to anyone.  Perhaps that sounds arrogant and condescending (and sour-grapes), but I know loneliness, and I feel sad thinking that I can’t help her, that I can’t be allowed to just listen to her pain.  Again, I know how I must sound, and you have every right to not believe me.  Why am I talking about Julie, anyway?  Because I can’t pretend I don’t think about her.  That’s me:  Closure comes only from resolution, and there’s no faking that–or getting it.

The urgency to find someone for myself is to get rid of Julie, and knowing that is what makes the mission desperate and me reluctant to indulge it, though I know also that otherwise I cannot move on:  I have to accept this tack as the best course toward the best resolution I can get and take it.  yes, I’m desperate, but I know what I want, and whether or not I know how to get it I have to make the effort, however clumsy or blind, to find it.  Trust and patience can preclude urgency and desperation, given the chance.  Carytown will wait for me.

Progress Stumbles On

For each of us, there must be someone we can’t–and shouldn’t–live without.  Who of us has met this most significant other?  Who of us has settled for less? Who’s kept what they settled for?  I settled once.  I was tired of being alone.  I met a woman who was tired of being alone.  But we were still alone, alone together, for thirteen years.  I never felt more alone as when I was married.  Failure engenders a desperation for success.  After my divorce and before my pursuit of Julie, I was desperate enough for an end to my loneliness to pursue it through personals and a few online dating services.  And, so, here I am, having finished another failure, desperate still for a success.  But I didn’t get down to Carytown on my first Friday off since Julie’s departure.  I spent most of the day and much of the night with James.  By then, the eighth day of Julie’s absence, I still had not celebrated.  Watching Julie paraded to her car by well-wishers that last night as I climbed onto my bike, I was sad, hoping right to the end that she would have something to say to me.  The next day I was angry.  It wasn’t until I’d spent a week without Julie that I began to appreciate the new environment at work.  That’s when I celebrated.  I could have wandered Carytown and thereabouts.  I was feeling loose enough to engage strangers in talk and confident that something wonderful could happen, but I was feeling hopeful, too, and hope is the first ingredient of desperation stew, which was not on the menu for any meal that day.  I would like to have made a fourth attempt at finding the Carytown Psychic’s door unlocked (do you think they know I’m coming?) or hung out in a coffee shop for a while, but I hadn’t seen James in a month or so, and who better to celebrate Julie’s departure with than the guy who kicked me out of my shell, slapped the doubt out of me, and convinced me to ask Julie out?  If you think I should be whacking him upside the head with the bottle of Jura I brought with me instead of sharing it with him, consider the months I spent agonizingly not-asking Julie out before confiding in James about my feelings for her.  It was the right thing to ask her out.  How could it not have been?  There is no more room in my life for what-ifs and if-onlys.  That’s why bypassing Carytown was an easy decision:  Maybe I missed meeting the woman of my dreams and idle fantasies, maybe not.  I didn’t meet her at the diner at lunch or at James’ over beer and scotch.  I may have met her on the way home.  She may have even gotten me there, for all I know, because all I remember of that trip is pulling over about halfway home to throw up.  I don’t know how I’d pedalled that far or how I covered the rest of the eleven miles.

Who is this woman that I can’t live without?  She’s a comfort, a smile, a warmth.  Someone to touch, to hold, to kiss, to breathe deeply of, to wake up to.  But you know that.  If I can trust my fantasies and dreams, she has long, dark brown hair, thick and with a slight wave.  Her little pooch of a belly is nearly as satisfying to cup as her small, round breasts, with a downy treasure trail into a curly jungle–Oh, but I don’t really know her that well, do I?

But I will, won’t I?  Do I have to be desperate to hope?  I am hopeful, and that means I haven’t given up, that I care and am confident.  The confidence totters between desperate to inevitable on the fulcrum of hope.  Desperation carries the weight of failure, a burden that will be difficult to shed, though less so now that its focus has left Twin Hickory.  My pursuit of Julie was a failure only because I didn’t catch her, but I can more accurately say that I succeeded in not-catching her.  In fact, I succeeded in many areas during that time, most importantly in finding voice in my emotions, in opening to myself.  My journey has been a continual stumble, but always a stumble forward, trying to keep pace with my emotions.  Eventually, I will find my feet and the woman I know so well but haven’t met.  Maybe in Carytown this Friday.

“We Understand”

Did I tell you about the plant?  It landed on my desk the day after the tribunal, the first of two consecutive days I took off in order to get away from Julie for the week and write what I thought then was the last post of Satellite Dance.  Of course, I didn’t know the plant was there until I made it back to work, but Angie informed me it created quite a stir, and that only through serious conscience-searching did the curious leave the little card envelope sealed for me to open myself.  The plant was a peace lily in a bright orange pot.  The card said, “We understand.  Hang in there.”  It wasn’t signed.  A florist had delivered it.  Only Angie and Bethany ventured a query about it.  I told them only that the card wasn’t signed.  The message was mine.  I smiled impishly to think of the overheating the rumor mill must have suffered in speculation of the sender and message.  I don’t speculate much myself.  No, I don’t know who it was, and, yes, I’d like to know, but they don’t want me to know.  It’s a horse with perfectly good teeth, is all I know–well, that and that it lives at the library and is a hell of an ally.  Just when I was feeling my most isolated and friendless, someone dares to step up and step in and say, “We understand.”  It could be the most timely and necessary gift ever given me.  On my desk, where I could see it and touch it, it got me through that last month of Julie, offering support and peace of mind that came to me from nowhere else in that building.

In this first week without her, it continues to offer support and solace.  It is a friend, as others, I hope, will become.  No longer tiptoeing through a minefield of paranoia–hers as well as mine–I am free to do my job.  The person I was before–that acerbic, angry man–left with Julie; in fact, existed only relative to her.  How long it will take anyone to realize that and adjust their judgement of me is not my concern, though a certain vanity cares a little how I am perceived; but they are not even potential friends.  I know who those people are–I’ve seen the judgement in their eyes, as I could see it in Julie’s, though theirs is much subtler, perhaps becasue of the relative absence of malice.  All the judgements are irrelevant.  I like my work, and I like the people with whom I work most closely.  I talk to them, I ask after their families.  I show interest in them with the hope they’ll show interest in me.  I want to get along, not be alone.

To say the whole Julie thing is behind me would be a lie, though one I try almost incessantly to believe.  “Out-of-sight, out-of-mind” is hardly accurate.  Her nameplate on the whiteboard was removed the first day she was gone and the gap filled by lowering those above; Tupperware cups she’d brought in to hold the transit-hold flags have been replaced with something more useful; and the last of the holds with her handwriting on the slip has either been picked up or deleted.  I had no hand in any of it.  I’m not the only one eager to move on from this mess, which might serve as Julie’s legacy at Twin Hickory.  I can think of nothing else she’s left behind but in a few select hearts.  No, I’m not over it, but I refrain from initiating reference to it, preferring, instead, to looking forward.  I did tell Megan what I thought of Julie in a few terse words, just to get it off my chest, but only Becky has spoken to me directly about it, intimating my relief.  I was grateful that she cared, though I was more expressive of my lingering bitterness over the handling of the affair than of my gratitude to her.  The bitterness will linger for some time, because my questions are not satisfied with silence for an answer.  Things swept under the rug make a lump that’s always there to be tripped over.  It will likely remain difficult for some time to accept Julie’s departure as resolution, but it’s all the resolution I will get.  It’s a pretty damned good one as they go, though, and, without doubt, the best one I could have hoped for:  The one person I couldn’t get along with is gone, and with her the hostility that poisoned the workplace.  My peace lily is thriving, and with good reason.

Week One, P.J.

My life is slowly seeping back into my veins–I’m a junky fresh from detox.  Reintegration into society, however, might take a while.  The relative orbit of my thoughts has been around Julie for so long that now it will be as if they’ve been cut loose, hurtling through space without the gravity of meaning or importance.  It seems that everything I’d done for so long was for Julie’s benefit–and my torture.  I lost myself in hopes of her approval.  For what?  Of what?  I don’t know.  Did I ever?  But now that she’s gone,  I can wipe her from the mirror that was always before me.  I do it consciously, smiling, as if it was, and had been, patently absurd to have cared to have her care about me.  I haven’t a care at work but for work.  I am not the malcontent I might have been judged to be, and if Julie’s absence proves nothing else, then it will have served that purpose with distinction.  I can’t say I don’t care what people there think of me, but it was only ever Julie’s opinion that mattered; everyone else can just go on heaving their rocks from their transparent homes.  Though I might always wonder how I “harassed” Julie, I don’t have to care about it.  Every day without her will render her less meaningful.

Not that I feel any more kindly toward her.  I am glad I wasn’t the one to leave.  That would have made me the pariah, and I would have had to start from scratch getting to know a whole new crew.  It’s taken me seven years to feel even tenuously a part of a unit at Twin Hickory, so I’d be damned if anyone were to take that from me, though when I got hauled up that last time I was hoping I’d be summarily transferred to Tuckahoe.  Glad I didn’t wish too hard.  I’m not big enough yet to wish her well at Glen Allen or to feel very bad about her leaving friends behind at Twin Hickory–or at least I’m not ready to admit it.  Call me petty if you like (you’ve called me worse), but I can’t admit wanting her transition to be without anxiety.  When I found out what position she’d gotten–essentially a liaison betwen the people who do the work and the people who delegate it–I was meanly gleeful, knowing that it is an all but thankless job with a responsibility load for which compensation is relatively meager.  I know it’s a mean little revenge, but the smaller the better, the sooner it will fade to indifference.

Outside of work, I’ve just about forgotten what I was up to.  I probably haven’t been out to a movie in two months, and have hardly done anything outside the routine.  Now that I’ve been freed of an emotional tyranny at work, I can work a bit harder there at my personal development and take it on the road for my free time.  I feel less desperate to find a mate, probably because I don’t need it as a psychological wedge between me and my feelings for Julie.  Now, it can happen for the right reasons and in good time, though I can’t guarantee that my patience will support that philosophy.  Still, it would be nice.  I dreamt the other night of a casual acquaintance (so my dream told me; I didn’t recognize her) kissing me, playfully wrapping her arms around me from my right side and planting peck after peck on my cheek, giggling and murmuring silliness in my ear.  I loved it, of course, but we were in public, and I voiced mild concern, as it seemed we worked together.  If it’s only in dreams that I can get that for now, at least I will sleep well.  A Friday off looms only a day away, and Carytown is already in my sights.  I’ll flirt a bit here with the moms and housewives and the rare single and try to get a running start away from my shyness and toward something happening.

Don’t Forget to Pack Your Paranoia!

With the entire workroom as audience, I accused Julie of being vindictive in crying harassment.  She said she didn’t accept my apology because I put her note on the blog.  That, she said, “made a lie of” my apology.  It wasn’t long after that that I was pulled into Ahmed’s office for a haranguing, during which I was somehow allowed to tell my side.  Then Julie got to tell hers, and I was hauled back in and told, “Julie told me a completely different story.”  Surprise.  Unlike in a court of law, I was not privvy to what she said, and, therefore, was not allowed a defense.  Please don’t expect me to believe that my story was treated with the same “respect.”  I was convicted before I sat down, so I offered no defense but to two accusations–that I continued to write about Julie after she’d asked me not to (she never asked), and that I told coworkers about Satellite Dance (I told no one at work).  The rest of the accusations were bizarre, to say the least, and I was too puzzled by them to know where to start defending myself against them.  Ahmed told me to delete all references to Julie in my blog and was flabbergasted when I refused, offering instead to make them “private.”  Julie said, “Believe me, that’s the best you’re going to get out of him.”  I hated conceding even that much, but the axe blade was caressing my neck.  When Ahmed asked Julie if she would like to proceed “to HR with this”–quickly adding, “I’m not saying you have to”–she answered, “No, not at this time.”  With Ahmed alone in his office afterward I found out how much of an advantage I’d actually had:  He expressed mortification of harassment proceedings sullying “his library” and, by extension, damaging his reputation.  Besides, it would have been the last thing Julie would have wanted, too, to bring more attention to her this way.  After all, it seems my offense in the first place was embarrassing her. 

Now, a month and a week later, I am rid of her, she and her promotion moving to the Glen Allen branch; and I will continue the writing and my personal social mission of making meaningful contact with my world.  To anyone who would take offense to my alleged reneging on a coerced “agreement”, I would suggest first, “Stop reading it.”  I can write as I please.  Every conversation of which I am a part is mine to report, as are my emotions to express.  Feel free to express your own, but if you have any intention of shutting me down, you’d best lawyer-up.  Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.

Strike Three, Out Two

This is the last public post, maybe the last altogether on this blog–I don’t know. It might have been a while since the last one, but that’s how long it has taken me to distill the emotions into meaning. As per an agreement that I’m not allowed to discuss here, I will restrict this blog to private consumption. I don’t know how that works or what that exactly means, so I will remain public until the start of the week to give proper notice to those who wish to continue following the blog. I have taken two days off work to write this; I hope it will have been enough time to do it right and not so much as to provoke the powers-that-be to judge me derelict. I have sworn myself to even-handedness and rational lack of emotion. I promise neither, but I will not be ungrateful to those powers for their patience by attacking them with indignation. There is no cause for indignation. There will be no cry for justice.

This blog may now finally become what I had intended it to be, a personal, positive exploration of real life. Readership will likely plummet to nothing. If this had been a reality show, the past two weeks would have scored record ratings. Now it’s, effectively, cancelled. Most of the readers I lose will not be a loss, though. Most of that new audience probably works in the library. It didn’t tune in for good writing or exploration of character. It wasn’t reading anything but a juicy story, made the juicier for being able to put faces to the names. I didn’t need a chart to see the statistical spike: The shunning was as obvious as the numbers. The day before the flowers were sent I was invisible but to the clusters of whispering fishwives that would disperse like cockroaches when I appeared. The day the flowers came I was smothered under a steaming blanket of ignore-ance. And when I came in Monday after the week off, it was no better: No one asked me what I did while I was out–they already knew, and knowing was enough. I am not complaining. I can’t choose my readership. I can’t fault a voyeur for enjoying an exhibitionist. I put myself out there, so I have to accept what I attract. Fortunately, I’ve also attracted readers who found themselves in the writing. If readership does, indeed, plummet after this post (as I write this on Wednesday I see the clamor for it spiking the stats again), and it will, given that not only does it not offer hope of more gossip fodder, but it makes continued reading a commitment by subscription. I know who my real readers are, and it will be them I will miss if they choose not to follow me into hiding. Regardless, I will not relate on the blog what happened in that office on Tuesday. I consider the entire matter beyond the scope of Satellite Dance, though not conversation or correspondence–all conversation off-work-site and correspondence through my personal account or Facebook. If I don’t continue this blog, I’ll start another. It will be public and lawyer-proof.

Leaving Twin Hickory is still the top priority. There’s no pretending to be happy there.

And Good Fucking Luck

Fuck it. I’ve lain in bed long enough to know I’m not getting to sleep until I pull off the goddamn gloves and say what I feel. I just can’t understand it. I can’t sympathize with whatever made her accuse me of harassment. What the hell did she expect that to do to our work environment? Did she think it would make everything better, that I’d stay on this fucking leash and like it? I’m not losing my job over this, believe me, but I’m not taking this vindictive shit lying down. Yeah, I fucked up. This is what I get for apologizing? What did I do that can be called harassment? I gave her a couple fucking magnets, for godsake! Let it go! Christ, it’s been a year since you killed A Bright, Ironic Hell–and nearly two since I’d given you anything–a box of altoids! What the hell am I paying for? I don’t need to tell you how to spell grudge!

I went through absolute HELL today trying not to ask you what–if anything–you were thinking to make your accusation–or call you a vindictive bitch. I’ve had enough of trying to understand you–sic your goddamned demons on yourself! Whatever caused you to be this way, I no longer give a flying fuck–and is irrelevant, anyway. I’ve exhausted all attempts at sympathy. Yeah, that’s rich–I’ve been an asshole. But I know what I’ve done, I’m ashamed of it (though not as much now as before you did this), and have apologized for it, but I AM NOT A THREAT. Call this a rant–call this whatever, I don’t care. I’m angry beyond measure, but I’m not a threat of any kind to anyone.

Goddammit! This is better? This is less stressful? What the fucking hell were you thinking? You weren’t! Any more than I was when I sent you that email. At least I realized the damage I’d done. Do you really believe your damage is proportional? Do you have any idea what it’s like now at work since you laid the minefield? Justice would have you sharing my hell, but justice is for the one who runs to the boss and tells her story (and I do mean story) first.

I don’t care how irrational this seems. I don’t care how much of this could be shouted right back at me, but–Fucking magnets? Jesus Christ!–What the hell did you think I meant by them? And are you gonna tell me you’d have accepted them if I’d handed them to you? BULL. SHIT.

I love my job, but you’ve been marking time since you got here–and here you are threatening to take it from me. That’s so fucking rich–you, who abandoned circ at our busiest times for your Adult Services vacations because you’re bored–and now sloughing off workload onto Slackles, as if he needs an excuse to sit on his fat ass and pretend to work. (You know, there are simple appliances to do what you do at your desk without your attendance. If you’re bored, do something we need done.)

This was not a work issue and never was. I can confide in who I like about anything I like. If I recall–and I do, correctly–it was you who let everyone know about the blog, so don’t play that hand. Was it any of your goddamned business who I told I had a crush on you? How did that hurt you? Your embarrassment is your own–you created it, you carry it. How the hell did I “[keep] reminding” you with my “words and actions how” I was in love with you? Huh? HUH? What the hell has that paranoid brain of yours concocted to justify that statement?

Get over my writing “about” you. How many times did I tell you I was writing about me and how I felt. Let your vanity believe what it wants but these were my feelings to express as I needed to. I haven’t told anyone about this blog, but I know coworkers are reading it. Is it an invasion of your privacy? Run tell Greta. She’ll make sure everybody in the system finds out, as you did before.

So, did you tell Greta about the card that came with the flowers and what the flowers were for? (Didn’t think so.) What did you tell Bethany and Becky and anyone else who would listen to your sob story of relentless victimization at the hands of a–but I won’t say it–you would be to ready to ignore the irony. I’ll say this, though: You’re sick. Yeah, yeah, so am I–whatever–but at least I have some self-awareness. I try to break down my walls, not build them up. Accuse me of whatever the hell you like. Did I speak your name? If it’s not true, it’s not you, right? (Whatever you need to tell yourself.) Good-fucking-night.

Shoot Me–the Poison’s Not Working Fast Enough

Returning to work is a challenge I’m still not up to. I’m scared, and I’m hurt and angry, and I can’t spin my way out of any of those emotions. My heart is silent, and whatever my head says I’ve heard a million times. I know what happened last week, and I know my part in it, and I accept the blame for that. It’s Julie’s reaction I have trouble accepting, essentially for the inimical place it has made the library and the innecessity of doing so. I will not ask why she threatened me with harrassment charges or pretend to understand it, but if I can find some empathy for her fear of me I might find myself able to not take it personally. None of this will happen by Monday. It’s best I make no predictions on what will happen, for the spoken prophecy is too easily fulfilled. The best I can do–or try to do–is to find the lesson to be learned, the opportunity for growth. In the meantime, I must put my pride in my pocket and stay the hell away from Julie. (Now I’ve reached the end of my emotional restraint, so I will stop.)

To, From, or Nowhere at All?

The week has been passing slowly, but I’ve made little headway back into the outside world, and the purging of the workplace poison seems in no better hurry. The dreams have returned indoors, though I have been able to send them outside with stern lucid commands. Wednesday I finally talked myself outside, down to James’, where across a table over a bottle of merlot before a perfect soundtrack of handpicked music we talked until the wine was exhausted and the daylight nearly so. Despite his diminishing funds, James does not in the least regret his decision to quit the library to pursue a writing career. He feels called to it and wouldn’t trade the lifestyle for any other, except, maybe, that of a “successful” writer. He asked me how I might get out of the library now that it has become toxic, and I confessed to being trapped in a shrinking box, resentful of the attempts by displaced retailers (Greta and Julie) counting out their days to force me from a a job I love. “I’m just…I’m just…I’m just so…”–my voice disappeared in a whisper and a tear trickled over my cheek before I was able to finish–”disappointed. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt of not being that way.” My rubbery legs somehow got me–very slowly home, uphill all the way, but I was sober, if exhausted, when I got there and fell asleep around nine.

Early to bed became early to rise: I was up by seven and took a now-rare morning shower, though I put off shaving for about the eighth straight day. As I towelled off I drifted into revery: A woman was in the shower with me and I was towelling her off when I dropped the towel to the floor and snatched her around the waist and brushed my bristly chin briskly between her shoulder blades. She squealed and laughed as she struggled reflexively to escape the tickling…. I came back to myself, and I was smiling and clutching the towel to my chest. “Ah,” I thought, “such a simple thing to want.” The woman was not Julie, but taller, slimmer, and dark-haired. I never saw her face. Maybe she was the woman I dreamt of so long ago, the woman I was convinced (in the dream) was the one I looking for. If only I had retained that conviction against the pursuit of Julie.

My legs felt okay, and the temperature was the kind I couldn’t break a sweat in and didn’t need to warm up to. Megan had recommended another cafe, Urban Farmhouse. She said she thought it was on Cary around 1st. She was right about Cary, but eleven blocks short, in Shockoe Bottom. I was nearly at James’, but I wouldn’t be dropping in, because today was to be my day. Besides, he wouldn’t be up; his usual day barely begins before noon, and he still had his mother and sister to entertain after I left him. Urban Farmhouse was better than Megan’s previous recommendation, Cafe Caturra–more casual, less snooty, and comfortable enough to keep me an hour with just a coffee (good) and a slice of banana-nut bread (average)–but lunch would have been expensive, so I moved on before I got too hungry to pedal myself to more affordable food.

I barely made it. I detoured to get a card at the Library of Virginia (they told me I had registered in ’92) then stopped at the Harlem Cafe on my way back uptown, but they’d changed their hours and weren’t open yet. I trolled a couple blocks of Broad, passing trendy places with specials like leg-of-lamb and blackened something-or-other, disappointing myself a little along the way by not asking one of several passersby to recommend a cheap place to me, before finding Nick’s deli/market at Henry St. It was just the place–honest and unpretentious. Ahead of me was a line of customers the jolly counter guy knew by name and served swiftly without taking down an order. I stepped up and said, “I have no idea,” and he laughed and yelled to the kitchen, “No idea! That’s lettuce and tomato on nothing!” I settled on corned beef on rye and got the best I’d ever had, though I didn’t find it out till I’d pedalled a half-dozen blocks and plopped down under a tree in VCU-ville, in the triangle park at Grove and Harrison, where a few months before I’d eaten alone. This time I watched a sidewalk parade of young men and women whose attempts to distinguish themselves stylistically came from the same imagination. I did see a tattoo I liked, on a calf–a fully armored knight slumped on his armored horse, three arrows in his back. I told the guy, “Nice art,” and without looking at me, he said quietly, “Thanks, dude.” The women (there seemed to be ten to a guy) were pretty, I suppose, but at that age that’s about all there is for me to see in them.

Of course, I ended up in Carytown, but I didn’t wander or linger, just bought a couple CD’s (Puffy AmiYumi, Proclaimers) in Plan-9 and rolled around the corner to the Belmont library to refill my water bottle and check my email. In a sunny window facing the street I found a small table with two chairs designated for jigsaw puzzle construction. On it was a small puzzle with large pieces, about two-thirds finished, of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Though the sun warmed me uncomfortably, I finished the puzzle, despite, too, being reminded of the lunchtimes Julie and I sat close at the breakroom coffee table working on puzzles. That stopped after The Trainwreck, and the puzzles sit stacked on the refrigerator. I want to throw them away.

It’s easy to tell when it’s time to go home: I begin half-heartedly searching my meager imagination for someplace else I might find stimulation, all the while reviewing my day for positive reinforcement of my efforts. I’ve learned to lower my standards in order to lower the resistance to returning home. At least I got out, I tell myself. I talked to a few people, though I could have talked to more. As much as trying to find the positive, I’m trying to subdue the regret. Precluding it altogether is a bit much to ask of myself yet. It’s the desperation I must keep at bay right now, but even a week away from work I can still taste its acrid atmosphere and see the other shoe dangling over the landmine. I can preach patience to myself from this distance and pretend that I believe my heart will speak clearly to me in its guidance, but I fear that when I step into work Monday morning the pretense will be stripped to raw bitterness and my heart’s voice choked in bile. Whatever personal progress I will have made over this week off is difficult enough now to discern. How can it defend me against a force that has surely not been enlightened in my absence when it could barely dilute the poison injected into me last week?

Tiny, Yellow Frog

The landscape of my dreams has changed. It seems sudden, but I can trace a subtler transformation back a couple years, when it was a maze of artificially and dimly lit corridors, flat and anglular, to a rugged, pathless wilderness wending through woods, across meadows, down steep, jagged slopes to cool, sighing streams, and back up another craggy climb to the next meadow and distant wood. Along the way corridors turned to paths and the paths disappeared; and getting somewhere became just going. There’s no anxiety to get somewhere or get something done, because no one is there to ask it of me. Instead, animals feature prominently–most lately, frogs, and in great numbers at once. Wednesday night, following the giving of the flowers, the frogs appeared to me as I slept, and, as many as there were, I yet became fixated on a frog that could not have been more than an eighth-inch long, but was colored a yellow so bright as to be nearly luminous. I tried to catch it, but I could not close my fist over it before it sprang from my palm, though I caught it again several times before it could finally touch the ground and get away for good. I don’t know what they mean, the landscape and the frogs, but after the anxiety of that workday the dream was an oasis from my troubles instead of a reminder.

I am off work this week, and I intend to put last week far behind as I get back to more positive work over which I have some control. In Greta’s basket, for her to read Tuesday afternoon when she arrives, is a copy of “The Price” (minus the title), submitted, as I wrote in the enclosed note, “in the interest of truth and fairness.” I also made it clear that I would not discuss it any further with her or anyone else not of my choosing. I have slept much better since, but I have not been able to recall my dreams in the morning.

The farther I move forward the smaller last week becomes–not that I’ll be looking at it in the rearview. Not getting out the two weeks leading up to the Magnet Mangle precipitated it: As I was unable to turn my attention from Julie with my outside endeavors, I allowed myself to apply my efforts to that problem. It was a vacuum I couldn’t leave to fill itself, and now it’s a black hole. My dream settings are always dark, a murky gray. I’m hoping this week to bring some light to them by doing all I can to sweep out the basement corners, throw open the curtains on the vampires of my soul and send them scurrying with impotent hisses into the black hole. The landscape of my life henceforth is as undulant and varied as the roads and neighborhoods I pedal through to experience it. In my recent dreams, upon scaling the craggy bank, I have looked back across the stream and the meadow to the woods from which I’d emerged, and I see no path, no line of flattened grass, no tumbled rocks, no footprint in the stream bed. I turn back to the way ahead and find I am between mirror images. But I know where I’ve been, and I know that the stream, meadow and woods behind me are not the same ones I will face when I turn forward again. I notice, too, that I’m walking eastward, the same direction I pedal toward the city. Perhaps I’m walking out of the night toward dawn, where the vampires can’t follow me.

I’m Sorry, Did I Apologize? I Meant to Rake You Through the Coals. Please Forgive Me

All day today I’ve been trying to calm down enough to write rationally instead of emotionally.  It’s not working any more than it was yesterday, when I was merely trying to keep from twisting someone’s head off.

The flowers came Wednesday morning.  I don’t know when.  Julie was on the circ desk, the flowers weren’t on hers.  I saw them two hours later when I came out there.  They were on display on the upper counter, the card with her name on it protruding prominently from the center of the yellow bouquet.  Julie didn’t say anything to me before she left, but she said plenty to others.  Mike broke into a hushed huddle to ask her who sent her flowers, and she answered, “Oh, a coworker.”  He didn’t press her.  Of course, I didn’t either, but her silence irked me, though I tried to tell myself I had done all I could.

Apparently, by Thursday afternoon, when we both came into work, Julie had decided I’d done more than enough–in the wrong direction.  Greta was waiting for me at the head of the workroom and invited me into her office.  I glared down the row of desks at Julie not-looking at me.  “Incredible,” I said.  “Un-be-lieve-able!”

In her office, Greta said, “I know this has been going on for some time, but it has to end.  No more giving her things, no more personal emails…. If this continues it will be considered harrassment, and then it will be out of my hands.”

Someone slid a sheet of paper under the door.  I looked at it when I said, “I considered it at an end yesterday.”

“Okay.”

I stepped over the paper when I left the office.

I shook with rage for most of the next eight hours, and remembering that thirty hours later threatens to start it again.  My jaw bulged under the pressure of my clenched teeth.  My breathing shallowed as I stared at nothing for many minutes at a time.  In my head, I asked a million times, “Did you even read the card, Julie?”  Only by slamming doors could I vent my rage and prevent saying it aloud and to her face (if I hadn’t refused to look at it).  At the first opportunity, I threw the flowers in the trash.  I screamed the question to the stars all the way home.  I don’t know if I slept even a couple of hours.  My body rolled as my mind reeled:  I said some mean things to her, and though an apology couldn’t take those words back, it was an act meant to facilitate healing.  I didn’t ask for forgiveness.  I didn’t ask for anything.  But I didn’t deserve this, did I?  The questions pile up from there, but I have to restrain myself from speculation or drive myself crazy, for no speculation will answer any of my questions.  I won’t scream for justice.  Only the status quo is served justice, and only by the status quo.  No one asked for my side of the story–not that that could prevent the gossipmongers from believing that that bouquet was anything but a play for Julie’s love; it would be asking their little brains to work too hard to reassess the judgment they laid on me nearly two years ago.

Now, was that calm enough?  Did I call anyone names or make any accusations?  Oh, I’m still plenty angry, but I can step pretty canny through the verbal minefield.  But having done little venting, I’m doubtful my gods of slumber have been appeased.  A sizeable whisky didn’t help that effort last night, but the sun has just gone down and the cicadas and I are all yawning.

The Price

I gave Julie both magnets, placed them on the door of her overhead storage compartment in plain sight on a day she didn’t work.  She saw them the next day, when I didn’t work.  She said nothing to me the next day but approached me the day after as I sat alone at lunch.  I was spooning yogurt when she asked, standing across the table from me in the breakroom, “What do you know about the magnets on my over head?”

“I put them there.”

“Why did you put them there?”

“I don’t know.  I just did.  I didn’t expect anything from it, if that’s what you’re worrried about.”

“Well, you know I can’t accept them.”

“I don’t know why not.”

“I just can’t.  It doesn’t feel right.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want you to give me things.”

“I saw them and thought of you, thought you’d like them.”

“Well, I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t accept them.”

“Okay.”

She walked away.

I seethed the rest of the day and emailed her the next morning.

I’m angry and disappointed. I’d had those magnets for some time before I gave them to you. When I bought them I thought of you, but thought you would misunderstand my giving them to you. Then I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt, that you might accept them in the simple spirit in which they were given. I expected no reaction, wanted nothing from it. You thought otherwise, and that was disappointing. You didn’t, as you said, “appreciate the gesture,” or you would have accepted it without confrontation, as you would have from any other coworker. It was not a diamond ring.

I’m angry because there now seems nothing at all I can do that you won’t construe as a come-on. Which one of us is not over this? I’ve had to get over making the biggest mistake of my life–falling in love with you. What have you had to get over? If you can’t accept a peace offering, a housewarming gift, can you accept anything at all? Do you like things this way? Do you like being afraid of me? Do you like thinking I’m still carrying a torch for you? Do you like worrying about encountering me at work? Do you like that stress? It’s time to read another magnet of yours: What attitude does our conversation follow? The workplace is toxic with our attitudes toward each other. And please don’t pretend to believe that you’re only doing it because you thought I wanted it this way. Who would want it this way? I’m not dying to get away from Twin Hickory, but from you, because things won’t change as long as you believe I still hold affection for you, and whatever proof you need to believe otherwise is beyond my reckoning. I’m tired of being the one who cares that we get along. I’ve stepped up, I’ve tried, however awkwardly, to mend things, but it is not, as you once said, “all up to” me. How often is that your answer to conflict? How often do you just wait for bad things to just go away? Or, how often do you walk up to them with that facade of smug bravado you’ve been perfecting all weekend and accuse them of having feelings for you? Don’t you want things to be better than this? Is there nothing within you power to change it? Your power over me is not sufficient–and waning. If you want to get along, try. If I don’t at first seem to appreciate the effort, it will only be because I don’t recognize it for what it is, having lost hope of ever seeing it. Believe it or not, I want things to get better between us. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve just gotten weary of trying. If you care, please come halfway.

Immediately, I regretted sending it.  Not a word seemed true, only mean and accusatory.

I found the reply in my basket.  I put off reading it for several hours, afraid for my heart.  I made sure I was ready to get on my bike to leave work before I removed the staple and unfolded the single sheet of copier paper.

First let me say how upsetting I found you email.  I can’t understand why you would send me what I felt to be a bitter, mean-spirited email at work.  It seems I upset you by refusing your magnets.  You accuse me, among other things, of not being able to accept them in the “simple spirit in which they were given.”  How was I to know what you intentions were as you did not approach me personally.  Maybe, if you had handed them to me and explained youself, I might have accepted them.  Instead you chose to leave them anonymously on my overhead bin with no note, no anything.  And I was supposed to know your intentions, how?  You equate your gesture to that of any other co-worker but it wasn’t.  Would you have done the same thing for any other of our co-workers?

For the past two years I have had to live with a work situation that I have found uncomfortable at best.  After I initially told you I did not return your feelings, you proceeded to make your feelings a work issue: Telling people about your blog, informing others that you had a crush on me, taping my photo to your bicycle.  You wrote about me in your blog with no regard for me or my feelings.  You kept reminding me by your words and actions how you were ”in love with me.”  I did try to not let it interfere with our work environment and to maintain a cordial relationship with you but you didn’t seem to accept that, you seemed to only want what I couldn’t give you.  If I remember correctly I made it clear I didn’t want it to affect our working situation.  And the most distressing part was that you continued to write about me in your blog when you knew I did not appreciate it.  Now, all of a sudden, it’s my fault we don’t get along, that I’m the one who isn’t trying and I’m afraid of you or like thinking you still carry a torch for me.  If that’s what you think of me, then you know nothing about me at all and I wonder how you can even imagine you were ever in love with me if you believe that’s the way I think and act.  I have no desire to have power over you or anyone else.  Your past actions have made me uncomfortable with you and I do not and have not for many months felt comfortable conversing casually with you.  Now you expect me all at once to forget that and be friends.  Yes, maybe it’s a failing on my part that I can’t do that on demand, but how would you react if you were in my situation?  I certainly don’t claim to be perfect.  You betrayed my trust and that is something that has to be earned, not given for the asking.  And the tone of your email to me certainly hasn’t improved the situation.  Quite frankly, I don’t know now if things will ever, as you say, be better between us if this is the approach you continue to take.  And to answer your question about what did I have to get over?  Well, that would be the death of my mother.

It has been a very long night since then.  I have forced myself to read the letter a few times, forced myself to not react in angry denial of this perception of me.  I try not to react at all, but the weight of shame is crushing.  I sent Julie flowers last night.  She should get them at work before I come in in the afternoon.  The note with them will read, “Everything you said is right.  I’m sorry.  Please accept these flowers and my apology in the spirit of peace and goodwill.”  I realize, now, that she will be embarrassed and have some uncomfortable explaining to do to coworkers.  That was not my intention.  It’s simply what I thought to do.  I didn’t consider how it would make me feel, either, but that doesn’t seem important.

The magnets, which Julie tossed in my basket after reading my email, are on my overhead now.  I should probably remove them, remove them from any chance of seeing them again, which could make me bitter again, but that seems inevitable, anyway. I only hope that whatever I was meant to learn from this takes hold first. I only hope that Julie can forgive me and that I can forgive myself.

The Fifty-One-Year Locust

Sunset is before eight o’clock now.  The  cicadas are thrumming themselves to death.  If it really were possible to gauge the temperature by the cicada’s mating call, tires would be melting to the street and trees desiccating to dust.  But it’s getting cooler, too, and wetter.  I didn’t get into town over the weekend.  I feel like latching onto a tree and thrumming to beat the band.  I see darkness coming; cold wet excuses keeping me off my bike on weekends; and a long, dark winter without a warm companion. 

I’m missing  valuable practice time.  I’m nowhere near the point where socializing comes naturally.  A couple months of painstaking diligence is no match for a lifetime of easy ignorance.  If I don’t get out on the weekend not only do I risk losing what little touch I have, but I am not diverted enough from the negativity of my work environment to make positive progress.  Backsliding is vey easy when going uphill.  Even baby steps make progress, but as steep as the way is, even stopping is dangerous.  And by this Monday, I won’t have gotten out again.  When I work both Friday and Saturday, as I did last week, my only opportunity to get the weekend’s groceries is Friday night, because Saturday night I have the kids. I am losing touch with my progress.  Habits are hard to recognize–old ones because they’ve been taken for granted; new ones because they haven’t fully established their identies and embedded themselves in the unconscious through diligent application.  A week of opportunities at the library can’t replace–in quality or quantity–what I can rack up in a day in the city.  I need to be practically inundated with opportunitiy to practice the new habits if I’m to get them to take hold, to push the old ones out.  But the conscious wearies, slacks in its diligence, and the unconscious flows into the gap.  I forget my strategy, lose my confidence.  When I don’t get out on the weekend, I want to spend every working hour on the desk and hoping that the flow of patrons to it doesn’t stop.  I’ve given myself a second chance, made myself a new life, but will I soon need a third chance and newer life?  (See what I said about the confidence?)

It’s fair enough that I should feel desperate, but it doesn’t make anything easier.  Yeah, the days are getting shorter, and cicadas are dropping from the trees, but I’m not dying, not even going into hibernation.  I’ll find my way to human contact despite the less than optimum conditions, find my way back into my new life, regain patience and confidence, maybe even remember what the hell I’m trying to do.   Maybe the winter won’t be that cold, either.

Victories Everywhere

This is very hard.  I have to take my victories very small, or I could not remain motivated.  Friday an abundance of confidence allowed me to believe that my search for love could end that day.  Yet at the end of the day, the light retreating, I sat outside The Eatery in Carytown wondering what I had accomplished.  “Nothing” was my initial assessment, but as I wouldn’t go home feeling that way, and I could think of no other reason to hang around other than the hope of the love of my life falling into my lap within the next few minutes, I decided to make a closer inspection of my interactions during the day:  There was Stuffy”s (pass), Richmond Book Shop (fail), main branch of the Richmond library (pass), Library of Virginia (mmm…pass), Carytown shops (fail).  I guess I did alright on the pass/fail scale, but that still wasn’t good enough to get me on my bike headed west.  I tried a third assessment that started with throwing out the fails and moving to a deeper measure of the passes.  How good was the eye contact?  How often did I stop myself from speaking? and how many times did I not? With how many strangers did I initiate conversation?  This is where I began to feel better.  At Stuffy’s the eye contact was good and the banter loose and easy, but at the book shop I began to turn inward as I assessed the likelihood of meeting anyone there as unlikely the moment I walked in and the woman behind the counter didn’t look up; and I felt a pang of failure for not speaking to her.  The disappointment of not finding myself in the treasure cave I’d anticipated depressed me a bit further.  I was relieved to be out of there, to escape my darkening mood and the leaden stuffiness nowhere near relieved by the meager phalanx of fans.  Before I unlocked the bike I nearly called James but felt I might miss out on meeting someone if I spent the rest of the day with him–taking friends for granted for the sake of friends I haven’t yet made.  Hm.

It wasn’t the last time that day that I stood on a busy street pondering my next move–in fact, it could have been the theme of the day.  I spent a lot of time looking in all directions for the right direction.  The last time, frozen in place on Cary Street, I looked down between my feet.  From a crack in the sidewalk protruded a silver cut-out heart.  I stared at it for several moments before stooping to pick it up.  I had a heart already, a pocket charm I’d bought a few weeks before, just before I’d found a heart-shaped rubber band in a book on a shelf at work that I now wear there around my name tag every day.  Then there’s the one on the claddagh, too.  Direction was home, with my new heart.

At the library I take my victories even smaller because they are harder won.  The nag of hypocrisy sours much of my action and digs me into a cynical hole from which I have to climb back into my game by the time I have to face the public, because the positive opportunities there can help me heal the negative ones in the back room.  However, the gains I make out front, in public and on the floor seem yet to have made an impact on the back room, but I try to ignore that situation altogether anymore, as there seems nothing else to do about it without a cooperation that will not be forthcoming.  No victory there, but an unsatisfactory truce.  No ground to be gained, I’ll go where I’m not trespassing.  There is no enticement or motivation to cross a minefield–what reward could overcome the setback?  I won’t get hope started in that direction.  The ultimate little victory I can go home with at the end of a day is, sometimes, simply not to have gone that way.  That can be quite an accomplishment, really.

A Meeting of Ones

Suddenly, I know what I’m doing.  I doubt I can explain it, but that seems right, too, as if I’ve come to some organic understanding, or it has come to me.  Metaphor, analogy don’t form.  I do things, they work, so I keep doing them.  A machine I’ve finally put together right?  I’ve always had all the parts but never the instructions for assembly?  This ineffableness is frustrating, but only as it comes bang up against the compulsion to write.  Whatever anxiety I feel about this is detached; I look at it with an almost ironic curiosity, as if I simply find it cute as an earnest but naïve child.  I explained it to Matt after scooterball Sunday at such length and in such detail that I might have been a motivation guru marching stridently back and forth across a stage in front of a corporate audience.  Before then I’d had little idea how well I knew what I was saying, and I’m not now even sure what I said, but I was talking about that guy that bought the merlot two weks ago.  I called that experience “out-of-body.”  It is the detachment with which I look at that naïve child and the emergence of a Dion I’ve never known, rarely even glimpsed.  It’s the guy whose negative voice gets fainter with every encounter, the guy who understands more every day why that voice should just fade away. 

What ever was the reason not to speak to someone but fear of their impression of me?  Funny how that has become so insignificant and so much easier to dismiss.  Sometimes that negative voice shouts and I can’t help but hear it, but it used to be noticed in a whisper.  But even if I fail to ignore it and stop myself from saying something for fear of it sounding stupid or being misinterpreted, I am able to dismiss it as merely an intrusion and not embrace it as an abject setback.  Confidence has played a key role in this development, and doggedly striking out against my shyness has built this confidence.  What else was there to do?  For how much longer were those weak excuses for inaction going to hold up against the desperate need for a life beyond loneliness?  I don’t even remember what those excuses were, but I expect to recognize them in whatever clever disguise they may return.

The merlot buyer was a CD buyer last Friday.  He was standing beside a young (that is, about half my age) woman over the bins  in Plan-9 when the music above grabbed my attention.  I turned to the woman and said, “Do you know who this is?”  She did not have the same apprehension as the woman in front of the wine wall, but looked up, looked to me, said, “No, I don’t,” and smiled.  I said, to her, “I have to know,” and strode to the counter, excused myself to the customer there, and asked the clerk.  I came back and told her.  “I don’t even know how to spell that,” she said.  “G-o-g-o-l,” I said, “Bordello.”  I quickly found the CD and showed it to her.  We returned to our browsing.  I said, “Now I forgot what I was looking for,” and she said, “Oh, no.”  I thought to ask what she was looking for, but the previous post had bled into my confidence just enough to stop me.  At the checkout I looked to the bins for her, and caught her quickly turning her head from my direction.  I left the store regretting I hadn’t asked her to join me for a coffee–fully confident that she would have–but I was unable to return and take the chance.

When I got home that regret–along with having just seen a mediocre movie (The Girl Who Played with Fire), finding the bookstore closed again (or still) for the same reason, and forgetting to see the psychic–led me to assess my day out as disappointing.  But there were still two days left to my weekend, and Saturday redeemed and positively reassessed Friday.  I started to say that it didn’t matter that I had to work Saturday, but the truth is that it made every bit of the difference.  With a half crew on weekends the chances of geting on the desk more than once are greatly increased, and with two hours on the desk so are my chances at contact increased.  I made the most of them, hardly with any effort.  I practically kept up a steady stream of patter, entirely shutting out that guy who is afraid of stumbling over his words or making any other kind of mistake.  I made mistakes, tripped over my tongue, and didn’t give a damn.  I connected–or made every effort to connect–with everyone that approached me.

I don’t know how I’m able to do this, except with a dilligence and concentration that sometimes rewards me with that feeling of effortlessness that validates the effort.  I’d like to say that there is no turning back from here, but I am instinctively wary of making statements I may have to recant.  Diligence is taxing–I have faltered and may again–but I have been adn continue to be rewarded for it.  Eventually, I trust, the diligence will reward itself with a naturalness of effort tantamount to semi-retirement.  Perhaps this idyll is far away yet, perhaps around the corner.  It doesn’t matter; I’ll get there.  It’s where the CD guy and the merlot guy disappear and there’s just me.  I’m eager to meet him and not just look at him in wonder from outside myself.  But by the time I get there we won’t be strangers.

Dr. Weekend and Mr. Work

Monday through Thursday, there is almost as little to say here as to Julie, though in both cases it’s a matter of allowance:  Pride doesn’t let me speak to Julie; better judgement prevents me talking about the turmoil that that puts me through.  The problem is not going away.  Not-talking is not the same as not-feeling.  I almost feel a hypocrite or a liar for not expressing these feelings, but I ignore them only on paper.  So I’m stuck just thinking about them, fighting them away.  It’s been about a year since Julie and I had a conversation, so it’s been nearly that long since I ended (I won’t say “finished”) A Bright, Ironic Hell.  I still have many questions, and they fuel the bitterness of my pride, but only in my mind do I allow myself to ask them; and I ask them bitterly, knowing the answers hide within Julie.  We have settled, Julie and I, into an “understanding,” in which not even a word is spoken.  That is not an exaggeration.  Not one word.  When our eyes happen to meet, I can no longer read what they say or know what mine are trying to say to her.  I don’t even know what I’m feeling then.  If I had a more benign humor about this, I’d say this was all ridiculous, but there’s nothing funny here.  It’s not like two people mirror-dancing to get by one another.  The weekend’s advantage got me through Monday, but Tuesday through Thursday threatens to bleed into the weekend, though here, on a Thursday, it’s easy to underestimate the freedom that absence of Julie affords me; and if I still have that in mind when I leave work then the advantage will be mine, and I will have a headstart on a good attitude for the weekend.

“If.”  Where’s the font big enough for that word?  Especially when here it is Thursday night and I’ve been a bad boy, opening one of those doors I’ve told myself not to open and stealing glances at Julie.  And god am I paying for it.  I know I moaned out loud once.  She’s just more beautiful each time I look.  God help me if she doesn’t gleam when she smiles.  And in telling you this I’m going through another forbidden doorway, but it’s this or–I don’t know what.  I nearly kissed her neck tonight.  There it was, the back of it exposed as she stood over a cart looking down, her back to me, and I was drawn, pulled–yanked–toward her, leaning–oh, if I could just get a whiff of her hair….  How good sense turned me away, a foot from her, I don’t know, and I don’t know yet if I’m grateful;  though surely it would have cost me my job, I still see that smooth, pale neck with its brown mole, and I’m drawn still, but the fantasy can’t suffice.  The mind can only pretend to take what the body can’t have.

But it’s Thursday night, and I don’t want to try to sleep with that issue, yet how much of what I don’t allow myself to say is going to fester and spew pus on my weekend if I don’t lance it know?  So let me tell you about the flirt party Thomas and Julie threw Wednesday.  Thomas was in rare form because he had a rare opportunity with both me and Julie in the same room.  At first I’d left, not wanting to see the too affectionate squeezes or to hear Thomas drop his voice to the Barry White register to coo at Julie, but then I dedided I’d let him put on his show and see just how far I could take it.  Of course it wasn’t his cooing as much as her flirting along with him that tested the boundaries of my tolerance.  Thomas flirts with all the women, but Julie’s the only one who doesn’t roll her eyes and avoid him.  It gets harder all the time to believe she’s not enjoying the twist of the knife in my gut as much as the attention she gets from no other male, but we won’t go there, will we?  I gave it about ten minutes before I said to him, “Get out.”  He said, “What?”  “I’ve had enough,” and I turned my back him at my desk.  He said, “Did you hear that, Julie?”  He told me to get out.  What do you think of that?”  I didn’t hear a reply, though the full room had gone silent.  Thomas said, “Can you believe that?  He hurt my feelings.  Do you want me to go, Julie?”  “Oh, I would never ask you to leave, Thomas.”  But he left, and Angie told me later that she was practically dancing with joy when he did.

So, I’ve broken my rules already.  What the hell–it’s Thursday night with three days of no-Julie ahead of me, and a Friday of whatever I want right around the bend.  I feel good, and maybe by Monday I’ll feel great, but I can’t lie my way to that feeling.  Working with Julie will not get better by pretending nothing’s wrong, but nothing’s wrong about enjoying my weekend, and taking work there with me won’t help me do that.  However, taking the weekend into work with me can considerably improve my attitude there.  Call me a prideful coward at work if you like, but you can’t call Julie much less, and at least I’m using three days out of the week to effect some positive change in the rest of the week.  I think “if” is only about eight points high right now.

Looks Like One of Me’s Gotta Go

Despite the mileage on my legs already by then, I went to a movie (The Kids Are All Right) Friday, half hoping to continue the conversation with the bike-coveter.  But I had no conversation, probably didn’t speak ten words, and none of those more than courtesies.  Just the way it is, sometimes, I told myself, trying to hold desperation and disappointment at arm’s length, being “philosophical” about it.  This is becoming a habit, I thought on my way home.  I hate habit; it’s dulling and reductive to consciousness.  I struck out on this mission to climb out of my rut and see what I could see and make happen.  Am I digging myself another rut but just on higher ground?  Not all ruts are equal, though.  Better to dig it in public than private.  After all, the places I go regularly are places others go regularly, which makes us alike in that respect and compatible to that degree.  Aren’t those the people I’m trying to meet?  Isn’t this the way I’ve always tried to believe was the way things worked?

It gets easier.  Each weekend seems less of a challenge, more natural, the standards of success made more realistic and attainable and, when attained readjusted to a higher but still reachable level.  It seems I know what I’m doing, or finally confident enough to do what I’ve always known was right.  At work Monday through Thursday, the goals are unsettled and the confidence absent.  Emotional survival is the short-term goal, an attitude shift toward Julie from disdain to indifference the long-term goal, and I have no viable strategy for attaining either.  But now I’m thinking that the success of the weekend can displace the stress of the week, if only little by little.  After Friday I still had another day to work, but the weekends at work have become virtually stress-free since Julie’s departure from them.  (My weekend begins when I pedal the hell away from Julie Thursday night a little after nine.)  The workweek floated from my shoulders even as I worked Saturday, and by the time I got home form there I realized that I’d looked everyone in the eye, spoken clearly, and made every effort to connect on the other’s levels–even flirting quite a bit.  Before I had quite made it home I stopped at the store.  I’d decided I wanted a bottle of wine, simply because I could not carry a six-pack in the messenger bag on my back.  But I don’t know wine (sorry,Dad!), and I’d been staring at the proverbial dizzying array of bottles for some time when a woman my age appeared beside me looking considerably more purposeful.  I turned to her and said, “I have no idea what I’m looking at here,” and I smiled.  I was talking to an introvert:  The look I got from her she hardly dared give–a side-long gaze that explored with a wary curiosity the motive behind my words.  She tried to project upon me the motive that had not occurred to me–to chat her up–when all I was attempting was to set my thought free.  I was practically out of my body for lack of self-consciousness.  I didn’t even bother to feel slighted by the implication in her eyes.  She didn’t answer me but, unsure how to respond, just smiled politely.  I moved to her other side because I sensed I was in her way, and she moved to my vacated spot.  I faced a wall of merlot.  I turned to her again and asked, “Is merlot a red wine?”  (Honestly, I don’t know wine!)  She said, “Yes, it’s a dry red wine, not so sweet.”  “And what would one eat with a merlot.”  “Oh, steak is good, or even cheese and crackers.”  She pointed to a bottle I’d just been eyeing.  “That’s a good merlot there.”  She pointed to the Riesling area and said, “That’s where my favorite usually is, but they seem to be out.”  I plucked the Woodbridge (2008) from the shelf.  “Sorry to distract you from your mission,” I said–”Oh, that’s alright”–”but I appreciate the advice.” 

I found my body again at the register, but the fit was a little loose, in a comfortable, broken-in way–familiar in a new way.  Can I bring this guy to work?  I’m not sure how to get him in , but I have to fiure it out, though perhaps I can settle for floating through the first four days of the week daydreaming of our next encounter, on Friday.  We’ll be going to that psychic and bookstore that were closed two (three?) weeks ago, though I’m not counting on the bookstore, as it’s going to be very hot again by then.  It will make for another hundred-plus-mile week, but it’s what I have to do, isn’t it?  It’s a habit I can embrace, these extracurricular Fridays.  Against the knowledge of how real the positive possibilities are, the excuses to stay home may never again be clever enough to work.

Mad Scientist’s Lament

There’s a monster I created two years ago that I’m now refusing to feed, yet I’m the one that’s starving.  My obsession with Julie fueled a passionate torture machine.  There is still torture, but passion?  Or is the passion there, too, and it’s inspiration that’s lacking?  The pilot light’s on, but there’s no reason to turn on the burner.  What I put myself through over Julie sprang me a quantum leap to a new level of self-expression, but it was a level of maddening futility that reflected the worth of the object of my obsession relative to my soul’s needs.  As I try to rise to a new level of not just self-expression but maturity I have to leave behind this Marley’s-chain I call Julie.  Whatever purpose it served it has served it.  Whatever it is I feel for Julie, it is not love. That’s the first link unforged, the first meal denied the beast.  How could it ever have been love?  Sometimes I think that falling in love is no more than getting carried away on a wave of hope, swept up in a fantasy that overwhelms all rational faculties, blinds and deafens us to reality.  Yet it’s what we want.  It’s still what I want.  Even pride is subdued.  Until she says, “You’re a nice guy, but…,” then it unfolds from it’s depths and wreaks a terrible vengeance.  But I shouldn’t apply a universality.  Who do I know but me (if him)?  That’s another battle among my many.  Maybe it’s the whole war.  Can I handle another rejection?  Do I dare even risk it?  That’s wy it’s easier to believe that love will just find me:  I can’t trust myself to find it.

I’ve lost my way, in this narrative, in this mission.  What am I trying to say?  What am I trying to do?  These are daily questions.  The efforts toward survival offer little room even for thought, and attempts at it yield confusion.  I’ve thought all the thoughts and am still on the brink.  Thoughts no longer have the power to keep me from taking that last step, that step into…? See?  I know so much, I’m oh so smart, and I’m powerless to help myself.  I know what goes on at work, how staunchly Julie and I avoid interaction, how we do it, and how I feel about it; but I feel that to write it out would be to justify it, and to justify it would make it too real, would give it a life that would once again claim mine.  I don’t want to own that madness again.  That’s not the inspiration I seek, and if that’s all that fuels my writing then perhaps I need to be inspired to not write.  Emotions will have their way, but they can’t write themselves.  Do they have their way with me? or can I choose which ones to express on paper?  I try to choose, but the omisisons often seem to make lies of what I’ve chosen.  They say I’ve made the wrong choice, and they are probably right.  After all, this writing is an exorcism, very likely of itself.  The monster Frankenstein created can’t live, doesn’t want to live with all of the torture and none of the passion of humanity, but the doctor drags it to work with him.  But at the library the choke-chain is around the other neck.  Nothing is funny and music is angry, and breathing is intermittent and emitted in sighs.  To offer more detail would be to feed the beast.  I can think what I wan’t–the beast can’t read my mind–but to write it would be to place the dish in front of it.  But pride is sustenance enough and there’s no short supply of that at work.

I tire of these metaphors, as I tire of the incessant quarrel in my head that comprises my work day and consists of flare-ups of bitterness at the sound of her voice, followed by talking them down with reasoning, which is then slapped down for having already been heard–to obvious ineffect–a million times.  All.  Day.  Long.  Is it any wonder I’m practically a zombie at work?–that and being awaken two hours before the alarm by the argument’s resumption.  There’s your monster–a three-headed goon that won’t shut up.

If Julie ever talks to me again or if my pride allows me to talk to her first (again), I’ll let you know; otherwise, details of our days together, footholds for obsession, are best withheld.  With nothing to hold onto, maybe I can let go, but there’s been nothing for a long time, yet I cling to the Julie that inspired, unable yet to replace her.  Which comes first? the letting-go or the replacement?  The question is all the more unanswerable for the seeming umpossibility of either resolution.  The monster, the machine, the chain:  The metaphors are all much more real than resolution.

Magnum Hopus

Thursday I couldn’t be pulled from my writing to shave and shower for work, but I didn’t get on my bike ungroomed for my day off Friday.  I believe my priorities are straight:  Compared to my social life, work is little more than a paycheck, and as long as both Julie and I are there the paycheck is way too small.  I have work to do outside of the library that’s worth much more.

I got back down to Carytown, but my first stop was well past it–Quirk–an art gallery on Broad past VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University). 

Quirk

The exhibit of handcrafted painted bikes and bike accessories was quite a bit less impressive than I’d hoped, but it had at least brought me back to a part of town I hadn’t hung about since I was selling blood to supplement my paper route money.  (If Id’ known where to sell spunk, I’d be living off the interest of that fortune today.  Hmm….)  It is no longer the seedy neighborhood I knew, but chock-a-block  with art galleries, cafes, and eclectic shops.  I popped into a couple other galleries and ate alone in the

Harlem Cafe

Harlem Cafe.  I could have eaten across the street at Comfort, which just got a big writeup in a Richmond glossy, but that’s the kind of thing that brings in the outsiders and squeezes out the locals, and I didn’t want to be one of those or be among them.  My Caribbean jerk chicken sandwich was excellent and cheap.  I asked the waitress about the place, prefacing with, “I always worry about a place when I’m the only person in it,” but she said they’d been open several years, but that most of their business was at night, with parties, music, and open-mic events.

I was disappointed to find the Richmond Book Shop closed.  Even in my college days a textbook’s toss away and in my woozy, blood-deprived meanderings I never managed to stumble in there despite the decadent allure of the faded posters and hand-written signs leaving only slits to peer through into a murky treasure trove stacked to the high ceilings.  At least that’s what I imagine is inside:  The sun and dirt on the storefront fill in the cracks between the postings, the latest of which, taped under “Closed,” read “Sorry.  It’s just too hot.”  In one of my rare silver-lining discoveries, I just sighed and thought, “Well, there’s incentive to get back down here.”  It’s at least another  mile past Carytown that I wouldn’t otherwise justify if I weren’t already headed to see James on Tobacco Row.

In a triangle park behind Shafer Court, on my way back west, toward Carytown, I stopped to call James.  He didn’t answer, and I moved on.  It would have been nice to see him, but I would have spent the rest of the day and probably quite a bit of the evening with him, stimulated enough with conversation but diverted from my agenda–simply, to talk to people I don’t know. See, in light of my desperation I have to parse my hopes, bring the future closer to the present, live not for love but for what becomes love.  I can’t pull love from another’s eyes, though I might see it there; it isn’t mine.  It might be some day, that love, but not from the eyes I hope or expect to see it in.  I’ll never know it until I’ve met it, smiled to it, said hello to it.  And that’s what I do now.  It might not yet be love I’m meeting on the sidewalks and in the shops, but aren’t the chances a lot better out there than in here?

It was yet another very hot day in Richmond, so that was motivation enough to duck into this shop and that.  Plan 9‘s CD collection has shrunken yet smaller in reaction to the new inventory tax.  I thought I’d augment my Belle and Sebastian collection, but their bin had been wiped out in the two weeks since I’d bought Dear Catastrophe Waitress.  I left with only a card announcing their appearance in D.C. in October, to which I probably can’t go.  (When I got home I slipped the card into a book, All Quiet on the Western Front, to flatten it back out, but forgot to remove it when I returned the book.)  I’ll give the missing CD’s a few weeks to show up in the used bin.

I crossed the street to the toy store, World of Mirth, where I’d gotten the l.s., to buy it’s companion magnet.  I’d retrieved the l.s. from Julie’s cabinet the day before.  It was more than half-exposed.  She had to have seen it. 

"Little something," retrieved.

Good:  Now she’ll know I’ve taken it back.  I decided to give it to Kevyn with its companion; she would appreciate it.  Thunder heralded the rain just before I stepped out into it.  I stood on the sidewalk and sighed, relieved, the soaking cooling my baked skin as the sidewalks cleared of shoppers scurrying for the shelter of recessed storefronts.  The light in the western sky told me it would be over soon.  I walked the away.  I didn’t get a block before it stopped.

Carytown has a psychic now, just past the 7-Eleven.  I don’t often walk up that far.  A sign hanging from the shingle announced half-off palm readings, now $10.  Without hesitation, I started to the door, but it said Closed, without apology, for the heat or otherewise.  I was more disappointed than at the bookstore.  I am a skeptic, but a hopeful one, and at the prospect of finding out (or being told, anyway) something positive about myself and being given some direction, I was willing to leave the skeptic outside and enter with hope.  (This from someone who can’t accept a god.)  This disappointment, as with the bookstore’s, will bring me back ever more hopeful of finding treasure.

I felt like buying myself a ring, so I went up another block to Alter Natives, because they’re local, non-profit and have interesting and inexpensive handcrafts.  The first thing the shopgirl said to me was, “Are you from Richmond?”  “Yep,” I answered, “born and–well, raised,” and I fessed up to my birth and six-month residencey in Hopewell.  I didn’t need to ask the same of her–not that I could tell through my particular atptitude for accent recognition or that her vitals were tattooed on her forehead–she told me:  She was from Chesterfield, came to the city to study world religions at VCU, and still lived down there in the Fan.  She appreciated the irony of my living carless in bike-anathemic Henrico County and having to pedal into town for all my fun.  It was just the two of us in there for half an hour before I left, but by the time I did we knew a lot about each other.  She even knows I’m open to love, because I had to ask her about the traditional way to wear the claddagh I’d just bought, and she looked it up on Wikipedia.  It’s on my right hand with the crown facing away from my heart. 

This wasn’t love, or even attraction–I didn’t give her The Eye–but a friendly, open conversation–all I can ask for right now, according to my adjusted standard.  Applicable, also, to this standard is the perceived need to always be doing what I can to be seen or make contact.  There’s still the reluctance to go home unsatisfied, but the satisfaction gets easier to find each week.

Leaving Alter Natives and heading back toward my bike, I wondered if I was heading home.  I stopped at the T where Belmont Street stopped at Cary to ponder the question.  Live music, unadulterated, undegraded, undiluted by the trip from studio to stereo, blasted crisp and clear.  My ears directed my eyes south down Belmont where they caught figures moving in a square of dark.  Without the warning thunder, it began to rain again.  I followed the sound to the sight.  The guitar and drum seemed slightly out of sync, but the closer I came to the music, the closer came the instruments to each other, as if I were uniting them with my approach.  They were a drummer and a guitarist in a one-car garage on the corner of an alley.  I sat down across the alley on a low wall that kept a tiny, sloping front yard from spilling on to the sidewalk and into the alley, but I hardly just sat.  The drum shoved me this way and that and pounded my foot into the grit, and the guitar, issuing with improbable volume and clarity from a ten-inch box that looked like a fifties radio, smoothed and rounded the rhythm in a wash of reverb.  All this and rain, too.

 ”Hey, man.  Mind if I join you?”

I turned.  “No, not at all.”

He introduced himself as Tyler.  I had a hell of a time getting my name through to him over the music and was tempted to let it go at Leon.  He’d just gotten off work at Weezy’s, a diner on Cary, and had been drawn as I had.  I was surprised there weren’t more behind him, in an unbroken line back to Cary.  Tyler’s glasses were held together at the temples with black electrical tape and tipped from the top toward his cheeks, as if looking down at his feet.  Sandy hair peeked from a dirty baseball cap.

“Man!” he said, “this is just the kind of music I’ve been looking to play!  The Band is my all-time favorite band, and these guys sound so much like them.”  I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so.

Tyler’s been in Richmond, via Harrisonburg, for five years.  He was in a bluegrass band up there, but hasn’t found a scene here to play in. 

The jam came to a consensual close after about twenty minutes.  I didn’t want to disturb the guys, but Tyler yelled, “Great stuff, man!”

“Thanks,” said the guitarist.

So I asked, “You guys gig anywhere?” hoping the verb didn’t betray my ignorance of the culture.

“No, but if you know of anyplace, let us know.”

I nodded.  Me?  Know of anyplace?  Do I look like I ‘d have connections?  I guess I must have at least sounded like it.

Tyler strolled across the alley to them.  I followed, reluctantly, feeling creepy not to.  Chris and Robert, guitarist and drummer, shared this cube with a washer and dryer lined on the wall near the opening, and a tv on top of them facing the wall.  Thin sheets of blue foam rubber suspended from the ceiling flapped lightly against the cinderblock walls in the breeze of a small box fan on the floor.

The rest of the band was in Georgia.  “They don’t get up here too often,” said Chris.  “What’s you band’s name?” said Tyler.

Chris looked at Robert, who shrugged but finally said, “Uh, the Chris Wickham Experience?”

Chris chuckled, said, “Yeah.”

Tyler offered his musicianship, and Chris took his email address.  Tyler’s effusing over The Band seemed to back Chris off a bit.

I watched Tyler shuffle up the alley, then asked Chris, “You think you’ll contact him?”

“I don’t know.  We need somebody, but….”

“Seems a bit sketchy,” said Robert, lifting his forehead from a cymbal he’d been tapping.

“Yeah,” said Chris, ” a little.”

“Well, you never know,” I said.

The rain had stopped.  I left them to their thing, hoping they weren’t rueing the intrusion.  Instead of going back to Cary, though, I trod up the alley the way Tyler’d gone. He’d disappeared pretty quickly, so I figured he lived along here somewhere.  Four doors up I was hailed from the bottom back porch of a duplex.  Tyler sat in a plastic chair at a plastic table.  I followed a buckled sidewalk under the shade of an elm, through a dusty yard the rain hadn’t reached through the tree.  Two concrete steps nearly met the wood porch that canted toward them.  On the table in a plastic glass painted with hibiscus floated sharp ice cubes in tea.  A glass ashtray behind it betrayed a roach.  Tyler’s eye’s betrayed he’d been smoking it.

“Want some?”

I did, but I knew I’d feel paranoid in public.  I told him that.

“That’s cool.”

The guys started up again.  It didn’t carry so well in this direction.

“They’re not going to get back to me,” Tyler said.

In the time it took me to get back to my bike I’d decided to see Winter’s Bone at the Westhampton.  All day I was sure I wasn’t going, that it would be a downer, but then, deciding that it wasn’t about the mood but the movie, and that the movie would probably be good, I headed that way, a couple miles closer to home.

I caught the seven o’clock show.  Of course, it was dark when I got out, and I knew the batteries in my headlight were as good as dead.  A man and a woman stood in front of my bike, talking.  I heard, from him, “structure” and “Catholic Church.”  He was talking about himself.  I crossed the street to take a picture of the theater, but the light was too low.  I continued to the 7-Eleven around the corner on Libbie and bought batteries.

They were–he was–still talking in front of my bike when I got back to it, and they were close enough to it that I had to step to the curb side of it to access the light.

“We were thinking of stealing your bike,”  the woman said to me.  Her hair was cleanly blond–no “dirty” to it–and thick and short.  Black-rimmed glasses hovered over sharp cheekbones aligned with a strong square jaw.

I looked into her brown eyes and said, “Couldn’t figure out the combination, huh?” 

“Nope.”  I’d expected something a bit more clever.

I opened the lock but didn’t leave.  My dinner, half a sub, was already spent, so I sat nearby and ate a nutrition bar from my satchel.  Still he talked about religion and himself.  She was listening, asking cogent questions, making intelligent comments, but she seemed engaged more on a professional level than a personal one.  I hadn’t seen them in the theater.  Perhaps they’d been in Phillip’s next door.  He began to seem much younger than she.  I began to think this was a first date, after an online correspondence.

As I approached my bike she said to me, “Really, we were going to steal your bike.”

“Well, I gave you a shot at it.  It’s been unlocked for five minutes.”

 ”Ah, but you were too close.”

I didn’t want to, but I glanced at the now-young man.  He was looking at her with a creeping dread of losing her attention, and maybe a little guilt for talking so much and precipating the loss.

“Better luck next time,” I said, and winked.  This was satisfaction.  I pedalled home behind a bright headlight.

There’s a long way to go yet.  The transfer isn’t happening.  I got sick of waiting to hear something, so I called the woman who’d sent out the solicitation.  She explained, apologetically, that this was just a flyer for interest, and that they do it every year (though not last year or the year before, believe me!) and put the responses on file in case of emergency openings.  So now Fridays can’t come soon enough and are more deserved each week as I pass through the yet-tighter gauntlet of Monday-through-Thursday of Julie.  Staving off the desperate aspect of my pursuit is contingent upon stockpiling these little satisfactions, making progress as much toward what I want as away from what I don’t.  This also means entirely ignoring Julie–not even looking at her from behind.  So I’m a creep or a jerk–or both–to her, but not caring what she thinks of me is as important as getting into town on the weekend.  I can’t afford to waste guilt on it.  How or if it will ever get better at work, I don’t know, but my efforts at making my true life better are what matter first.  I can’t even afford to care what you think of me.  Where I’m going I’ll get to following my own path.  I have a paycheck coming to me that’s much larger than Henrico County will ever give me.

Cacophony on All Fronts

The war rages on two fronts–work and elsewhere–against separate enemies–Julie and my shyness–but my arms and armor against either in either venue are meager.  My heart certainly has little place at work, and it would be more beneficial outside of it if it had any degree of subtlety short of desperation.  At work Julie is, indeed, the enemy, but it’s a cold war we fight.  There is no aggression but a passive hostility.  Love is irrelevant there, as there is no hope of gaining anything I’d once naively hope for.  What’s left is only a tolerance of the current conditions, and only the mind can effect that, if only by reasoning an ever-thickening wall against the heart’s blind insistence.  It’s brainwashing, plain and simple.  When I tried to give the fight over to my emotions it was because I thought my mind was unequipped to do the job of the heart, when it might more accurately have been the heart’s intrusion into the head’s business that kept the job from being done properly:  My mind offered reality; my heart offered hope to the contrary.  My mind knows the truth, but it would rather believe the lies.  I have been trotting out the old evidence and arguments against Julie’s domination of my heart and recognize my heart’s defense as pride grasping at straws for dignity.  But what dignity is there in groping for love where there is none?  These things I tell myself, and must keep telling myself, to get through even a short day with Julie.

I’m aware that this strategy is analogous to the self-help books that I eschew in that it is, essentially, a trick, a treatment of symptoms, but at least it’s one of my own devising–a better-fitting suit that off the rack.  I’m finally allowing Julie to help, too, not fighting her indifference (and, sometimes, obvious hostility) but allowing its brick to go on my side of the wall.  Why push against the wall she never stops building?  What fight is there against the eyes that stare straight ahead as we pass in the narrow hallway though I am looking right into them?

I will remove the l.s., the cute magnet, at my earliest convenience.  My guess is that it’s still there.  I hope that she hasn’t found it, because she would likely assume it came from me and, so, couldn’t possibly appreciate the sentiment.  I’d hate to have wasted that on her.  I also hate to waste concern for her presence in a room, and I fight hard to not look for her and just go about my business.  I can’t afford to care about her more than she does about me.  Forget the morality of this strategy; forget its cowardice.  It’s all I can do.  I am not spiteful and cruel.  I am doing the best I can with what little I have to do it with.  I can’t look at Julie without hope, and I can’t hope without feeling angry and bitter.  So why look?

I take my heart out to movies, dinner, etc., and come home with it no more content than to be able to say, “At least I got out.”  Though I don’t know what I’m doing, I have to try.  I’ll go to a gallery show tomorrow in town.  I’ll be hopeful, of course, but I’ll hope first that I can enjoy the exhibit and not just be glad to be getting out.  Once I’ve gotten out for a day or an evening I don’t want to return home, where I’m left with just the reflection of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, but that is always stark and pale like the living apparition of terminal hunger.  What is the trick to this endeavor that would pull away the curtain of hope I can’t see through to the life on the other side?  I wake up alone in a double bed and think even my bed is a lie for being so big, with its depression in the center instead of on each side.  What a waste.  I had just dreamt of waking up with another’s hand in mine and feeling it was everything I needed.  I hate that I awoke to the same loneliness as ever, that imagining a soft body beside me to hold and protect is not real enough and seems to become less real each morning, that I cry as I try to finish this and, therefore, can’t to my satisfaction.  I take this all with me, and it all shows, and I hate that, too.  This war–why is it?

Not Crash-Test, Anyway

Shelving, I caught myself looking in Dating for Dummies.  I say caught myself for I felt so stupid reading it that I even embarrassed myself.  I might say, also, that it was a near thing to getting sucked into it, but what I randomly opened the book up to was a section on exchanging phone numbers, and even that seems a stage far advanced from my position.  Dating–I have very little experience in it and none since the eighties, when I got married, even since the divorce eight years ago.  But books only offer tricks–pharm-rep samples pawned off by the doctor to a patient with an undiagnosed disease:  They don’t know me or my problems.  It’s not as if I even believe in dating as a means to my end, believing as I do that what I need will somehow find me in the natural course of my living my life, but who am I to say that that’s not an avenue to take on that course?

I may have renounced online dating, but I picked up a Style Weekly this week to look at the personals.  They didn’t have any.  I’m guessing they’re online now.  Before my Box 049 project, I’d answered a few ads.  I targeted the quirky ones, and because I’m a persuasive writer I often attracted response–even got a few dates–though no second ones.  “Girl with glasses,” had to see my place and paw through the magazines fanned on my coffee table–stopping at the Playboy and saying, “I guess that’s alright”–before we went out.  We saw a movie (at the Westhampton) that I’d already seen.  It seemed to bore her.  On the way back, she told me that her ex-boyfriend had had sex with a prostitute and that she had since had sex with him.  I suppose that was her way of precluding my sexual advances, but she needn’t have flattered herself that I’d ever been attracted to her.

I met a Christian girl for a drink at a hotel bar, where she like to go on Friday nights to meet friends and dance.  She agreed to the date even after a phone chat in which, responding to “What do you thnk of the Bible?” i said I thought it was “good science fiction.”  In the bar outside the dance floor we had a pleasant conversation–even made each other laugh–but decided as pleasantly that it just wasn’t happening between us.  She was eager to get to the dance floor and friends, and I let her go, only a little regretful, but pleased at least that we’d understood each other.

Then there was the woman, who after dinner and a long walk and talk around my neighborhood (then the Museum District), I never saw again, her therapist having advised her against it.  The next date I took to Joe’s.  She wouldn’t order any food, but picked at my plate.  When she returned from a bathroom visit and slid into the booth across the table, she fluffed her skirt, and I smelled pussy.  We looked at each other, her at me with a hint, me at her with a confused query.  What was I supposed to do? slip off a shoe and slide a foot in her crotch?  Maybe so; that I didn’t do anything but eat and try to have a conversation was my failure of a test, I suppose, but of a test I wasn’t interested in taking, anyway.

I know nothing about dating, or a little less than I know about any other social convention.  I righteously declare that I don’t play those games, but it’s a defiant ignorance of the rules that keeps me off the playing fields.  In staking my claim to individuality, I have virtually renounced my humanity.  Forget about connecting to women–I hardly connect to anyone but you, a faceless mute.  It’s not what I want, but that’s where “my own terms” have gotten me.  I spent all day in the apartment before finally getting out to spend two hours in front of a movie screen (Mic-Macs).  I didn’t go down to Carytown from there, but sat on a bench near the theater and considered my relative humanity, fading nearly into a quiessence I felt I didn’t deserve.  (Don’t ask me why.  I can’t tell you yet.)  In my consideration I didn’t include the positive eye contact and frank, friendly greetings I gave to two very attractive, albeit attached, women at the theater.  That I’d forgotten instead of congratulated myself is a sign that it’s becoming more natural.  I didn’t know either woman was attached until the first one, in line before me, bought two tickets and entered the theater with a gentleman.  The second, a compact, sinewy blonde a few years my junior, practically snatched the eyes from my head as she crossed my path at the intersection of the row and aisle after the movie.  “Hi!” i said, then saw her gentleman friend a step behind and, with no time to register my disappointment, I greeted him, too, but with hardly the same enthusiasm.  He clasped her bicep as they descended the stairs, and I wondered how much each of them appreciated my attraction to her. 

I have to believe that the eye contact and greeting will one day mean more than that to a woman, that we’ll find each other in the simple word and long look.  I have to believe that, because dating is so unnatural to me that it’s a lie to my entire character.  What little I know about it might be enough.  I’m no dummy, anyway.

The Norse God of Escape

I have not been back to Carytown since my street-corner recitation.  I’ve hardly been out at all.  I’ve allowed myself many excuses for it.  Being without a car in the suburbs, I often play myself the distance card:  How far am I willing to go?  Less than three miles east takes me to the western border of Richmond and nine more miles puts me out the other side.  That is the range to which I’m conditioned.  North and south, my conditioning is the eighteen-mile trip to work and back.  By Friday evening, my best chance to find a social life, I’ve put ninety miles on my legs, which need some kind of rest (and a good massage, which I don’t get) before the next work week.  I can’t always motivate myself to get back on the bike, especially if (as has often been the case already this summer) I have just plowed through humid, triple-digit heat to get home.  My imagination, or lack of it, contributes to my inertia by claiming, after looking at the movie listings, that there’s nowhere to go, anyway.  Neither have I been encouraged by my efforts when I have managed to get out and about.  No matter where I go, I seem to be the only person there, or if not, am not welcome.  Sub shop, coffee shop–I can sit in there for an hour and no one else will have come in.  And forget about hanging out in a restaurant alone:  One person in a booth?  Move to the the bar or clear out.  The last movie I took in at the Westhampton (Please Give) was a late-afternoon show, so I ate dinner afterwards next door at Phillip’s.  I’d never been served so quickly, but when the check was slipped onto the table without a proffer of dessert or another beer, I knew that I was not experiencing efficiency but expediency.  I had been prepared to stay awhile with another beer, dessert, coffee, and maybe something harder while I wrote, but while it was all conveyed very politely, the message received was, “Get out so we can serve a bigger party and make more money from that booth.”  Not encouraging, but I can either play the oppressed minority or find my way to where I’m welcome, can have a good time, and meet people.  I don’t know where that is, but haven’t I always said I like a challenge?  But that box I’m in contains my imagination, as well.  The answers are all outside the way I’ve been thinking, but my ideas have all rebounded from the walls all the way back to online dating, which I gave up when I finally admitted to myself, two years ago, that I wanted Julie.  (I swore I wouldn’t mention her!)  It’s not the way to go, but every time I chop it down it sprouts up somewhere else.  I never got anything more than conversation–some of it stimulating–from the online scene–certainly not a date.  I am not going back that.

Desperation is a mighty inhibitor of my imagination, distilling all social considerations down to the possibility of “success” (whatever that is).  Of course, by that standard, no venue is worthy of my effort to visit it or my presence there.  But what do I know of possibilities?  Who do I know is going to be at any of these places?  And desperation shows.  Being “after” more than the movie, meal or shopping, is a pretense that won’t hide, is an emanation that repels even on a psychic level.  Often, I can’t look at a woman on the street without conveying desperation.  At work, knowing this, I have tried to dowse the emanation, with the result of hardly feeling anything, even attraction, toward the women I see there.  I’ve all but forgotten how to play my eye game.

I’ve lain all my hopes and confidence upon the altar of Transfer.  I put all my meager faith in it and have effectively suspended “artificial” efforts at finding peace and love.  It’s as good a god as any, I guess; until I get away from Julie I won’t be over her, and until I’m over her I can’t find what I need, or even pursue it.  That is the ultimate excuse, and having accepted that, I have no excuse at all to not just go out and have a good time–one movie, one beer, one coffee, one art gallery, one impulsive purchase at a time.

GMAT, GRE, CLEP…?

I asked Greta again if she knew anything about the transfers, and this time she said that “they” were waiting for the end of the fiscal year before moving on the transfers.  Not much information, but more than I’d had.  I suspect she knows more, but between the bunker mentality borne of her retail experience and the executive privilege of witholding information in the name of professional discretion, what I got was the best I could have expected to get from her.  It’s a straw I will snatch.  No timetable, no process–that hasn’t stopped my hopes from packing my bags.  I even started a farewell letter to Julie, though I’ve already trashed it.  Forget advising myself against high hopes, because at this point they are a substantial boost of oxygen into the hermetic box called the Twin Hickory library.  I’m not blind to the chance of a negative outcome, I just don’t want to entertain it.  I’m even aware that raising hopes for the positive can give the negative devastating power, but I’ve chosen to take that as it comes and not modulate my reaction pre-emptively.  When I look ahead I can’t see Julie, so if I can maintain that focus my attitude will keep me in a job.  Job evaluations were conducted, despite no raises in sight (and Henrico County can see at least a couple more years ahead), and we were required to assess ourselves in writing, demonstrating how well we’ve performed over the last year, how well we reached the goals we had set, and what goals we intended to meet this year.  I was blunt:

I realize that a narrative will not make this part of your job easier for you, but I have to be honest, for whatever it costs me or is worth to you: My heart’s not in it. I do not know what goals I set last year, but I probably did not meet them all. I took no classes and am not interested in taking any. I would rather just do my job, which I like and feel I do well at. I have no further professional ambition as regards the library, except to not be here while a certain someone is, and, of course, I’d rather be closer to home, anyway. Given the impossibility of reaching that goal, I can only concentrate on my job and on strengthening relationships with the coworkers who aren’t afraid of me and will talk with me. I believe in our family despite the strain within it, and I really do want to get along with everyone. Emotionally, some days are better than others. You can probably tell which are which, and I hope I’m not affecting my “siblings” on the not-so-good ones.

I still try to challenge myself daily to make what we do more efficient. I’m glad to see some of my ideas, such as the re-orienting of the holds rubber bands and the sorting hour, were well received and doing the good I thought they would. I’ve weathered the attrition storm with, I hope, a level demeanor; and Java and STEP and whatever other new technological marvel they throw at us will only take some getting used to and is nothing I think will be difficult to master, as has nothing else I’ve had to get used to for my job.

Patrons are always my first concern as I work. Everything I do is with a consideration of their convenience and needs. I still consider myself a patron before an employee and feel it helps me empathize with them better and understand their needs in their words, which aren’t usually from the same vocabulary as ours as employees of the library.

I’m sure there’s much I didn’t cover, many competencies I missed, and I’m sorry. If you need me to do this more conventionally, let me know.

Perhaps that “impossibility” in April is not so much of one now, but my attitude has not much changed, and with summer, our busiest time, upon us, my diplomatic abilities will be strained, at least with coworkers, some of whom seem to be affronted by their duties.  One person in particular, whom Julie calls “Chuckles” but whom I refer to as “Slackles,” does little that lifts him off his ass.  Slackles, a few months ago, was a Head of Circulation at another branch in the Henrico system.  When he tried to take sexual liberties with someone in his office, he was demoted and shipped to us.  Nearly everything he says is full-stopped with a laugh, hence Julie’s nickname for him.  After he took a cell call in the stacks, I told him, “That was not cool.”  He answered, with a grin, “Thank you.”  A designated shelving hour to him means shelving the holds he’s just trapped, and the holds shelves are closer to the workroom than any other.  I could go on.  I have little enough patience with lazy coworkers, and I’ll have none at all at the end of the summer if they don’t step it up.  Even Julie has slackened, and I once admired her ethic.  She was designated to sort one hour, but took a look at the carts and said, “There’s nothing to sort” (a blind-wrong assessment), then proceeded to help the backup discharge books–that is, make work for the sorter.  Yet she wasn’t making the work for herself; she spent the entire hour discharging.  Halfway through the hour, when I realized she had no intention of sorting, I stepped into her job.

Readers of A Bright Ironic Hell readers might recall that it was just three weeks short of a year ago that I made similar disparaging statements about Julie (Steps Forward: Steps Back–especially the comments).  Back then, Julie lashed out, essentially forcing the closure of that blog.  That won’t happen this year, and its not my intention to provoke it.  It’s my intention to leave before I provoke anything, and I fear the summer stress–increased workload, the proportional slack to take up from some coworkers, and Julie–will have increasing influence over the better part of valor, and that as the summer wears on my self-control will wear out.  Of course, I hope I’m gone by then, and my hopes remain high, because it’s what I want–desperately.  But hope can’t be justified.  If all hope needed in order to be rewarded was a good reason, I’d have Julie and you wouldn’t be reading this.

It’s been a long weekend, in a good way, especially for the Monday off giving me an extra day without Julie and shortening the coming week with her to three days, but there’s not another holiday till Labor Day and the heat is picking up, too.  Hope, patience, heat, Julie–what other tests do I have to pass to get to Tuckahoe?  I have to know.

My Child Can Beat Up Her Child

The last post haunts me.  Will this child ever grow up? or will it just grow more powerful, until its tyranny is complete?  I say there will be tokens and notes, then think that because I say that I have the control to not let it happen.  Then I start planning what I’ll write on the repair slips.  I think of removing the l.s., but I don’t want to find it still there, after more than a week.  (It’s become partially visible since I had to replace another DVD case the day after I installed it.)  Every day with Julie more is difficult than the one before.  You should see our accidental approaches:  We scramble for somewhere else to go, something else to do, someone to speak to.  I’ve tried to steel myself against the cowardly avoidance and look her in the eye, but she will not oblige me, and I find myself staring at her, waiting for her to turn to me, but then I feel like a creep.  If I thought I had any real hope of a transfer, I wouldn’t try but cut my losses and get out of there, but Thomas says some people in the system are already trasnferring, so it seems that if mine were to be granted I’d know by now; and if I have to stay at Twin Hickory things between Julie and me have to change drastically, because I’m suffocating day by day, sealed in a shrinking box. 

If not for Thomas I might have suffocated already.  He’s the only person in the library I can talk to about Julie.  Yet I might see him only a few times a week.  On my day shifts I might be on the desk or in the stacks when he brings the branch mail; on the evening shift he’s been and gone before I show up for work.  Thomas has never known about the blogs, and I’d never tell him.  He wouldn’t get it.  He’d shake his head in disappointment and disbelief, but at least he wouldn’t judge me.  I can’t seem to get through to him, either, that I no longer want Julie, but maybe he just knows better.  He thinks I came on too strong at the trainwreck (I don’t call it that with him), that I should have been smoother and slower and gotten to know her, but he has no idea of the months of trial leading up to that.  Love must be a difficult concept for him, too, at least in the context of another guy’s pursuit:  He points to one eligible female coworker after another and says, “What about Soandso?”  My answer is always, “I don’t want that.”  He thinks available is good enough, that sex is the object, but though I often think that it would be a much simpler equation without love, the solution would not be acceptable.  Sex has never been and never could be a casual one-off.  No love, no sex–that simple.  Thomas likes to suggest what it would be like “gettin’ it on” with Julie (“Do you want her to scream your name or mine?”)  and still goads me with reports of the pliability of her flesh under his latest grope in the guise of a hug, but I’ve already done all that in my own mind, and though titillating, it’s only that.  Still, I’m not reluctant to join in, and I especially enjoy it in a crowd of coworkers, whose dirty minds I can challenge with their own inferences.  If he doesn’t see Julie when he comes in with the first hand-truck load of bins he says to me, “Where’s our baby?”  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” I’ve replied.  Across the workroom, I’ve called “Don’t you know her schedule yet?  Want me to write it down for you?”  On a recent Monday when she was off, I answered Thomas, “She’s not here.  She had a rough night.”  Thomas was quick on my implication, bursting into laughter.  “You ain’t right, Dion!”  No, I ain’t.  I’m just trying to grab the deep breaths before Thomas leaves and puts the lid back on the box.

With hope of transfer waning, I try to prepare for the long haul, but the struggle is day-to-day, and I’m already exhausted.  I arrived at work with a headache from muscle tension that ran from my neck to my middle back.  I told myself to give it till five-thirty–a half-hour after Julie was gone–before taking anything for it.  It nearly reached nausea pitch before then, but with her gone my jaw unclenched and the headache dissipated.  And that had just been a half-day with her.  This could be a very long haul; Julie will do nothing about it on her own, and will not accommodate my efforts.  She’s just not equipped.  She believes I want it this way; that’s how she justifies her inaction to herself.  That’s not speculation–no more speculation–but declaration.  If it’s not true, fucking let me know!

I’m stopping–all literary sensibilities aside, loose ends flapping in the breeze, metaphors mixed–fuck it.

Think the Kid Could Do with a Little More Rope?

As I clutch at the thinnest straws for a differences between this blog and the last, I’m tempted to conclude that I have not moved forward in my emotional development.  That may be an exaggeration, but progress at glacial speed is only progress for a glacier.  It seems all I have learned is how to jerk Julie around without getting into trouble.  Yet it’s trouble I want.  I am as desperate as ever for her attention and as certain that I’ll get none of it.  I talk to her here, hoping she reads it, hoping I don’t fawn or go the other extreme and caustically derogate, as if it I could actually do any more damage or hurt her any further.  I want to address her now, but I resist the conceit; though I write closest to my heart when I address her, I am ashamed of what my heart still feels for her, and it crumbles into yet smaller pieces.  I cannot win her.  I am tired of saying that and tired of believing otherwise.  Does it ever end, this awful ride?  How can knowledge and belief be so far apart in one person?  How can certainty mean so little?  Is there any value in what I know? or am I at the mercy of my emotions?  Can I really have no say at all when it comes to what I feel?  Do I really want to feel this?  Do I really want to be this goddamned jerk?  No!  Do you really think I enjoy this game?  No! It hurts it hurts it hurts!  Julie absolutely wins.  I don’t know how much this hurts Julie, but she would be happy to know I’m cooking in my own stew, and would be more than willing to throw a few logs on the fire under the pot.  I scoff now at the l.s. and the petty arrogance that tries to justify it, and I come very close to labelling the act “pathetic,” but I try very hard not to judge my actions but to understand them.  Yet understanding this one is what makes me despair of my emotional growth.  I am, by my own doing, entirely unable to talk to Julie to the extent that I have to provoke her to talk to me.  Beyond the magnet, there is not plan, but I know that for all the non-planning I do I have already set off on a mission, because it’s the same mission as ever, and I recognize the signposts–the token and note, so far–despite being draped in the camouflage of rational justification.  No, I see this path before me quiet clearly:  The tokens will be rare, but the notes will continue, though only on repair slips, and not on every one.  I don’t know what the notes will say, but they will be carefully tuned to a pitch only Julie can hear.  Sounds a bit sociopathic, as if I were trying to settle a score, but my caution is less about not “getting caught” (whatever that would mean) than about not crossing the line into meanness.  That I’ve thought it out this far is both disturbing and comforting in complementary measure.  Maintaining their positive balance is the key , and the thumb on the comforting scale dish is sympathy for Julie.  If my aim is uncertain, I at least know I have no intention of hurting her, and I will do nothing that I think might.  This is not a vendetta.  It’s neither her anger or her tears that I want to invoke.  That I can’t honeslty state what I do want is the thumb on the other side of the scale.  Can one exert more pressure than the other?

It is likely to sanity’s advantage to consider this whole thing an experiment.  It is not without precedent in my life.  In 1988, when response to personal ads was still carried out through postal correspondence, I launched a sociological/literary project in a popular (and still popular) local free paper, The Style Weekly.  Each week I would ask a simple question, like, “What are you reading?” or, “What are you eating?”  Each ad in the personals was given a box number to respond to.  My first ad was given Box 049.  I asked for and was granted permission to keep that box for the duration of the project, which lasted twenty-six weeks–thirteen brief questions, then thirteen brief answers.  The overarching conceit was that I never so much as hinted upon my sex.  It was apparently an overpowering allure to men and women equally.  I had great but happy difficulty keeping up with the correspondence.  If they asked the burning question, I told them.  Of course, the women weren’t surprised and the men (most of them) were disappointed.  One man refused to believe me even after meeting me, convinced I was just a messenger sent in place of the “real” “Box 049.”  I overheard women in the grocery store talking about me.  The whole thing was simply an experiment, and one with no stated objective.  I’m still not sure what it accomplished.

So, here’s Satellite Dance, yet another experiment in public writing but with Julie as the guinea pig and not an objective in sight.  Having cut off direct communication with Julie reduces me to an observer, little more tha a clinician collecting data:  I plant a token or a note then sit back out of sight with my clipboard to record the subject’s reactions.  If only I could believe I were thus emotionally detached.  If I have grown emotionally over the course of Satellite Dance, it is most clearly manifested in a softening of moral judgement–imperfect, incomplete, and slow, of course, but alive and growing.  I understand that the dichotomous combatants, The Wise Man and The Fool, of A Bright, Ironic Hell are actually Father and Son.  The boy may listen attentively to the man and appreciate what the father is attempting to impart to him, but if he understands it at all, it is not in an applicable way.  The father has to be patient, not critical.  He has to allow his son to make mistakes, to sometimes act counter to wisdom.  After all, that’s how the father came to be so wise.  If I have this emotional child in me, it’s because I didn’t receive that wisdom as the physical child to grow into.  I am my own father now, as most of us, I suspect, are our own parents, and this “awful ride” is the frustration of a difficult interaction between the parent and child, with the child trying to claim its autonomy from the parent stressing responsibility.  I don’t judge the man as severely as I do the child.  I strive to judge neither at all and just let them talk, but the child will rebel with rash action, and the parent will react with harsh judgement.  The child of BIH has grown up a bit.  He understands much more of what he’s been told, though he’s also grown more cunningly aware of the limits of the father’s admonitions.  The father is aware of that, but begins to recognize himself in his son and knows his son will make the important mistakes.  Julie is the catalyst for this relationship, like it or not.  One day, the son will be grown and full of the wisdom his father imparted.  He will no longer need the father, and neither will either need the woman they fought over.  That’s what the father thinks, anyway.

Give a Million Monkeys a Million Wrenches….

Did I say, “Paranoia be damned”?  I know I said, “God save me from this love and the fool it might unleash again.”  And so the battle commences.  I’m headed back down that road to hell, and there ain’t one good intention under my feet.  I’ve planted that “little something” on Julie’s desk, and since I have no intention of pretending I don’t want a reaction, I’ll not pretend, either, that I can wait till she finds it and not just tell her where it is.  The moment I bought it I knew where I would put it and how the opportunity would present itself to me, and I was prepared to bide my time for it.  After all, it’s not often I have to replace a DVD case, but there it was–a Wiggles case that would no longer close and had a flap broken from the spine.  Having anticipated a long wait for this chance, I’d slid the “l.s.” face down over my ID badge in its sleeve.  As the badge is necessary to pass from the public area to the workrooms, it would not be off my body all day, so the l.s. would always be at my finger tips.  The first time I had ever been grateful to have a Wiggles video in my hands was while Julie was at lunch.  I lifted open the cabinet over her desk, slid the l.s. from the sleeve, and as I pulled out a new DVD case, I dropped the l.s. in behind the stack, where it adhered to the back wall.  (So there it is, Julie.  I know you’d love it if it weren’t from me, but I know, too, that you won’t give it back, because  that would be acknowledging me.)  Now I wish I’d taken a picture of it.

So, yeah, there’s the “token” I said would never be forthcoming, a few weeks removed from the Frightened Rabbit note.  I made it nearly a year–a new record.  Julie could make it nearly to the end of time without talking to me again–her resolve is about as stubborn as mine in that respect, and in most others is even moreso–so I’ve had to sharpen up the ol’ stick and give her a poke.  It’s a shame, though, that she can’t accept it as affectionate fun instead of as a threat.  It’s a challenge, no denying, but not a threat.  If I were the right guy, I’m sure my efforts would be charming and cute, but I’m not that guy, am I?  Then what satisfaction could I possibly get out of this?   I have to push limits; it’s what I do.  I don’t usually have much more of an objective than to see what happens after I toss the monkey wrench into the machinery.  “Well-enough”, the “status quo”–those are vacuums fit only for automatons.  I can’t live there, and I can’t live with the machines that do.  Most people can remain machines, for all I care, but some people get the monkey wrench–because I care for them or am fascinated by them:  I want to hear their hearts beating.  I know that the boundaries I’m pushing with Julie I should not be trying to cross, because the heartbeat I hear will be an angry one.  If I hadn’t already forced that from her once, I’d say that was good enough, but I want more:  I’ve been given the proverbial inch already; now I want to go the mile.  What I really want to see is her tender side, the side she hides deepest in her trunk of emotions.  That seems a cruel thing to ask of her and a crueller thing to force from her, but the mystery of it attracts me no end.  Maybe I even covet it, seek it like the Holy Grail.

Surprisingly, given that it seems she even refuses eye contact now, I can still imagine us together, sharing.  I can see the brilliant smile and sparkling eyes more open for me than for anyone else before.  How coud I?  How could I imagine soothing her fears, since I have been one of them?  How does a little magnet hiding behind a stack of DVD cases show Julie I am worthy of what she gives no one else?  I’d be a fool to try to answer those questions.  I am a fool, but not that kind.  I’m the kind or fool that tosses pebbles against a soundproofed window and copper lassoes on electric fences.  There is no god to save that fool, because the fool is god’s monkey wrench.  Where the fool lands is out of his hands.

That Was Now, This Ain’t Zen

Life is a crapshoot of self-advice:  When it works it’s luck, but the odds always win.  When it works, I’m a genius; when it goes wrong, I’m a victim of a conspiracy of circumstances.  But we won’t talk about irony; this is no more than intelligence working against the natural order of things.  I’d call it an unfair fight if it were anything other than a refusal to admit that there’s no fight to be had.  I give myself plenty of good reasons to do or not do plenty of things, but all that needs doing is the doing.

The bike took me down to Carytown with no more of a plan than to buy Ugly Dolls for the girls’ birthday.  After that I didn’t allow myself a reason to do anything.  I bought Julie a little something,* bought myself a little something; shopped in shops in which I had no intention of buying anything and bought something.  I might have been grinning most of the time, because most people had a smile for me.  I tried out The Eye on a few folks (even a few guys–what the hell) got no significant responses, didn’t feel a failure.  For once, leaving for home was not regretful.  Actually, once I realized what I had done, I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.

Last week I noticed that someone had read an older post, “Hope Springs Infernal,” and I had to see what would bring someone back to that post and went back to it myself.  I’m not sure of the reader’s attraction to it, but my revisit could not have been better timed.  Sometimes I have to be reminded that I can write.   Reading my own writing can do that, but only if I’ve forgotten it.  I googled myself a couple years ago and among the hits was a post to a copyeditors’ listserv (or whatever they were called back then).  I was confused that it had come up, very impressed with the writing, then shocked that it had my name at the bottom of it (but no longer confused).  Last week I was tangled in a confusion I couldn’t write my way out of.  Enter, “Hope.”  I must be a different person when I write, as I am when I’m on my bike–the person I’m closest to truly being:  I take no stock of that person, don’t question or analyze him, but trust him to be what he is; and I became that person again, on that same street corner in Carytown where life passed me by last week, but this time in broad daylight, with an unfolded sheet of copier paper in my hand.

For five minutes, in a voice I was hardly aware I had, I read from that paper I held taut against the breeze the post that had re-inspired me.  The words sparked flint against flint, and my voice took fire, barking the bitterness, shouting the futility, rumbling down the valleys of despair, clambering tenaciously to the mountain tops of clamant declaration.  Who I was then I don’t know; I was unconscious–perhaps more me than I’d ever been.  But when I was done the fire was doused in my sobs.  The paper crumpled in a fist.  The other hand clutched at the bike for support.  I didn’t dare look up, but kicked the stand from under the bike and rolled wobbley down the sidestreet.

Next week, given the chance, I’ll return to Carytown, with no plan, no paper, no smart idiot advising me against unseemly behavior.  Perhaps the doing will be done again.  I can only hope, though better not to.  A pair of dice should be sufficient.

*I’m still paranoid enough to not tell you what it is, what I’ll do with it, or when.

Cement Shoes or Helium Hat?

Another weekend verges, and I feel desperation crowding into my potential fun.  It can’t be helped, and the inevitability tempts resignation to keep me home.  Of course, that won’t do.  I’m feeling softly toward Julie again; that’s the problem:  My ulterior weekend objective is to hide from those futile feelings, because I can’t see what good facing them would do.  Loving Julie can have no happy ending without her, and admitting that I love her only offers hope that somehow I can turn her my way.  Can you believe I still harbor that hope?  Yet it’s so strong now it’s almost a belief, and I shake my head to rattle out the nuts and bolts of that irrational construct.  God save me from this love and the fool it might unleash yet again.  The possibility, however vague at this moment, of leaving Julie and Twin Hickory for Tuckahoe, begs me to make one last, grand overture for her love–or the final, epic embarrassment for us both.  It’s incredible–even to me–that I can still believe that somewhere in her heart, if only deep below the pain and fear, Julie holds some little affection towards me that I have only to tease out.  Here’s yet another chance I tell myself, if only…if only–if only a lot of things, a mountain of things.  Why isn’t love enough?

Another weekend is just another weekend without Julie.  She is my crushing desperation.  I want to have fun with her.  Otherwise, everything–every minute out and about, no matter what I’m doing or where I am or who I talk to–is distraction, though distraction is still more realistic than finding Julie’s love, if no less disappointing in the end.  I won’t be going out till tomorrow night, but I’m already dreading coming home from it.

Or If It Can Even Pull the Weight

Maddox leaned over my desk and whispered, “Have you read your email?  There’s an email from headquarters about transfers, saying anybody could put in for one, and there’s a form to fill out.”  How cute of him to be so discreet, as if it was any secret that I’ve wanted to get the hell out of this branch for more than half the time I’ve been at Twin Hickory.  My application was in the interoffice mail bin five minutes after I opened the email.  It was a very simple form–name, position, branch,  three choices of transfer.  Tuckahoe was my first choice.  I left the others blank.  The email was not detailed.  I’m not sure why the library system is offering transfers or when the transfers will be made.  I’m already daydreaming about a new start, eight miles closer to home, a million miles from Julie.  I have been careful about what I’ve wished for.  I know what I’d be gaining and what I’d be giving up, and I know the gain would be the easier to accept and would grow more gainful with time.  The losses I hope would diminish proportionally, though their initial store is no doubt double the prospected gains.  I have worked a long time with many of the people I’d be leaving, and I’ve only recently begun to appreciate their camaraderie.

But the balance of gain would hang on Julie:  Which would leaving her be?  I can’t know until I leave.  My clamorous cries to be away from her are merely a desperate admission of a reluctant resignation:  What I can’t change I must get away from.  But at the end of a day of not looking at Julie, as I tug on my bike shoes, I sigh and wish I’d taken that last glance I’d told myself not to take before I snatched the water bottle from my desk and marched away down the hall to change.  This had been no victory, no heroic endeavor, but a cowardly shirking of conscience.  I miss Julie; I’ll miss her then.  I would miss her more than I would the coworkers that have cared to get to know me, and for longer.  If leaving is a good thing, I might not realize it for quite some time afterward.

Yet I stand in the cart and look back upon the road hope has pulled me along, and through the settling dust I can’t see the horse catching up.  The transfer is not guaranteed.  I don’t know how it will be decided to whom the request is granted or when it will be dedided, but the cart somehow still inches forward.  I want to shorten my commute from eight hours a week to thirty minutes.  I want to work in the community in which I live.  That’s all I know of what I really want–or, rather, of what I can actually reasonably ask for.  I wonder if the horse will ever catch up.

Out of Orbit

I’m not sure I ever truly believed I could pull this off. “This” needed faith, hard work and honesty, but faith failed me at the start, conspiring with unwarranted optimism to burden my pen to solve my problems. Inspiration was what I needed, and it was all but entirely absent. “Definitely not really about Julie”: Did I really think that was something I could laugh about? Of course, I was not done with A Bright, Ironic Hell, because it was not so much a choice to end it as a final deferment to Juilie. I regret ending that blog–and I suppose I didn’t really; Satellite Dance is poorly disguised, not that I let myself believe at the time it didn’t stand on its own. I thought by not dwelling on the minutiae of working with Julie, not chronicling the details of contact with her, I could be rid of the obsession; but I had dug myself into too deep an emotional hole, and an infinity of words might not be able to build a tall enough ladder. The chronicling might stop, but not the obsession. I have been able (mostly) to refrain from reporting the contact made or attempted with Julie, but not from stockpiling them to ruminate upon later. I could even refrain from calling myself pathetic or feeling guilty about my behavior, but only rationally: Knowing that feeling that way doesn’t help me out doesn’t prevent me from feeling that way and has barely kept me from letting those emotions control me. I came into this “project” ill-equipped if I really thought I would find love. It’s a fool’s game, and I’m not yet fool enough to understand the rules–and too smart to stop trying to figure them out and just be blissful.

The reason I didn’t want to write this blog the same way as the last was, essentially, to withhold “clues” from Julie.  If she was going to insist on reading Satellite Dance, as her vanity made her read BIH, I was not going to telegraph my intentions. Treating BIH as some kind of operator’s manual, Julie practically gaslighted me with my own words, trying to be what she thought I wanted her to be, according to my previous posting. I was on the brink of paranoia before she admitted reading the blog. And, even now, every time I restrain myself from announcing my intentions toward her I resent her for it.  I want to say–scream!–”Here’s what I’m going to do, Julie, when I’m going to do it, and why.  Move over and let me drive.”

I miss the old way of writing.  I say I want to reclaim my life, but first I want my blog back.  I want to say what I want to say, turn this paranoia on its head.  What do I know about love, anyway?  All I know about is this thing I have for Julie that won’t go away.  On a repair slip for a dvd that I dropped in her basket, I wrote, “Heard Frightened Rabbit?”  That was at least two weeks ago.  She won’t repond, I know, and yet I hope.  Those soft-core fantasies I wrote a while back were a taunt to Julie, but I felt every word, and I feel even more.  I don’t have to see her flesh to know every soft, pliable inch and sensitive crevice.  Yes, I will say what I want.  Let the paranoia be hers.  For some time, I have not been pleased with the quality of my writing.  It’s been herky-jerky and scattered.  I’ve been diligent, but the head has been straining against what I’ve really felt–it’s doing it right now.  But what started as a death knell for Satellite Dance is now a clarion call to reload and charge.  The fire Julie lit that burned so brightly in that ironic hell of mine just isn’t here, and the path I’ve tried to take with SD is too indistinct to follow.  Sure, I can pull this off, but I need a more realistic idea of what “this” is.  I’ve been working hard but blindly and with little faith that I’m succeeding, because I hardly know what the goal is.  I  still don’t, but I can at least say that honestly now.  That’s a start.  “Definitely not really about Julie.”  Well, yeah.  Inspiration?  What is it?  Do I need it? or need to know?  Confusion needs expression, too, so I guess I will be its champion until I figure out where I’m going with this, ploughing through the overgrowth until I get somewhere.

Probably a Yorkstiff with No Tags

So, here I am, with the answers and the attitude, doing nothing about anything.  The mission is no less urgent, but the imagination is no more forthcoming.  Do what I like, I tell myself, but there are no movies in town I want to see, and I can’t convince myself that it’s less about the movie than getting out and finding love’s lost dog.

The last time out was unsatisfying.  I tried this newish cafe/wine bar, Cafe Caturra on Grove Avenue, just for an espresso.  The coffee was the only good taste I left with–snooty staff and a clientele dominated by wife-picked polo shirts tucked into belted madras shorts did not spell my kind of action.  What better could I have expected, though, of a place situated in a neighborhood anchored by two Catholic schools with a private university (of Richmond) between them?  That was three weeks ago, and I’ve since discouraged myself from going out the subsequent Friday nights.  What”s a guy to do in a town in which coffee shops are on the sun’s schedule? because that’s something else I like to do–hang out in a coffee shop and watch the people-traffic and listen and write.  Bars don’t work:  The noise is more loud music than conversation, which all too soon slips from barely interesting to moronic–and it gets expensive.  But I didn’t feel good about staying in; it wasn’t doing me any good; it wasn’t getting me anywhere near love.  I nearly spent another Friday at home, but though I couldn’t get myself to go see Sweetgrass, I could neither forget the weeks’ disappointments nor consider reading blogs an acceptable substitute for human contact.  I went back to Grove but around the corner to the sub shop.  I live in the suburbs–no sidewalks, no traffic not encased in steel and glass (except for the occasional fifty-one-year-old writer/idiot on a bicycle),  and no nightlife.  One has to head east into Richmond to do that.  I was that one.  Grove is the nearest Richmond (about four miles) with an approximation of after-dark activity.  After eating I walked back around the corner, but to Starbuck’s across the street from Cafe Caturra.  For once, Starbuck’s was a choice instead of a last resort.  Still, it closed at nine, and I closed it.  Only two other people came in, and they didn’t stay.  Then I began to think of Julie–all the questions that will never answered, all the regrets I can’t fix–and I knew I couldn’t go home.  Deeper into the city to Carytown.

There’s life on Cary Street–restaurants, bars, and the Byrd Theater with second-run blockbusters for two dollars–and none of it touched me, despite having set myself down smack on the busiest corner for nearly two hours.

Carytown night

 A few looks, a few nods, and one three-beered guy hailing me with “Top of the evening to you!”  I nodded and replied, “And to you.”  Thinking of Julie or not (what do you think?), I pedalled home.

A good portion of my disappointment has come from the same lack of contact at work.  Nothing is happening–no attractive women, no repeats.  Ms. P (for “panties,” if you like, but also her last name) picked up a hold at the window fifteen minutes before I would have replaced Megan there.  I caught her eye incidentally–nothing sparked.  And on Thursday, Greta* puts me on the desk with Julie twice.  Minutes before the second time, I look at the schedule and notice it, and I mutter, “Very funny, Greta.  Very funny.”  Julie was passing behind me as I said it and looked at the schedule herself.  I felt like a jerk.  Maybe I am; I knew Julie was there.  A very, very long hour of leaden silence folowed.

I’m back to feeling there’s nothing else I can do to attract love, make love happen, or get whatever it is I think I want, but to feel that way is to give up to the prophecy.  Besides, I just don’t believe it.  Give me the patience to wait for that movie I really want to see, and, Julie, get the hell out of my head or talk to me.  I still love you, you know (damn me), but I want my life back, so I can give it to someone that wants it.

*Head of Circulation and, therefore, schedule-maker

I’ve Run Out of Metaphors for “Never”

Still, it’s all about Julie, and that spoils everything.  No matter how good I feel about my appearance or how confident I am of my game plan and ability to execute it, her hands are around my throat.  I say, “If only I could find someone else, I could be rid of Julie,” but most days it feels like the other way ’round.  Being in the library with her is a fight for emotional survival.

Some days, I’m just sure I’m not going to make it.  I become that caged animal again, knowing I have to get out of there–permananently–yet despairing of the possibility.  On Monday and Thursday, the two full work days with Julie, I’m looking for her even before I get to work.  As I pedal across the Nuckols overpass, cars criss-crossing in front of and behind me entering and exiting the expressway, I’m gazing ahead to the next exit, where Julie would be getting off.  I always hope to see her on those days–not just see her but pass in front of her at the stop sign and look her in the eye and kiss the air between us.  It has never happened, though twice we have been stopped beside one another at the next light.  She refused to look my way–not even straight ahead–but checked her rearview and shotgun mirrors while I stared at her.  If I don’t see her on the road I hope to at least beat her to work and get changed and ready to work before she arrives.  Monday I’m always scheduled to start the day deleting outdated holds, the ones patrons didn’t pick up in time.  Julie could be anywhere else–circ desk, window, picking holds–but I hope for her to be backup.  There are two terminals at the backup station, one always manned, the other spare.  I use the spare one to delete holds.  I want Julie to be backup that same hour so she can be trapped beside me.  I won’t talk to her, and I’ll only look at her when I’m sure her back is turned.  The torment is exquisite, and I only hope that Julie is at least uncomfortable.  After all, I don’t want ignoring her to make me invisible; I just want it to be annoying.  It’s easy for her to not talk to me, but I don’t want it to be too easy for her.  I suppose all I am or can be to Julie is an annoyance, and I can be that for as long as I want to be.  I know her boundaries.   I can be that fly bouncing against the other side of the window screen, just this side of her doing anything about it.  When I think of it that way I wonder why I even consider her a hindrance to my pursuit of love.  Ask my heart why it bruises my ribs in her presence or my face why it flushes crimson.  In the infancy of my crush, I had a giddy outlet for that energy, running everywhere in the library I needed to go, vaulting desks, dancing and spinning around obstacles–including Julie several times.  But the excitement has turned to dread and the energy now lies coiled, poised for flight or fight.

It’s not always my desire to avoid Julie.  If we are both shelving, I like to be near her, and see her working from where I’m working.  I don’t hide; in fact, I often will her to glance over at me as I stare at her.  It sometimes works, and when it does I take the eye contact as a victory and work on.  The only time I don’t want to be in the same room with her is when there’s a chance she’ll speak to someone.  I can handle seeing her, but anymore just hearing her voice raises my blood pressure.  In the workroom I try to drown her out with music through my headphones if I’m trapped at a desk, but if I’m sorting a cart, I might get up and walk away–way away, like out the back door, for some deep breaths of fresh air.  If I’m where I can’t do either of those, such as at the window or backup, I sometimes mutter, “Shutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutup…” until she does.  Though sometimes her initial syllable comes out at a very high pitch, it’s not her voice that annoys me so much as that she’s not speaking to me. 

We do the avoid-dance as if we choreographed it in collaboration–as if we were an old married couple tired of each other, except that we are embarrassed instead of indifferent upon encounter.  When the music stops and we misstep into a confrontation the eyes meet briefly (that chin-up, defiant glare that used to freeze my blood having been replaced with Bambi fear) –just long enough for recogniti0n–then we take an exaggerated path  around each other. 

If by the end of the day I have dodged apoplexy, I scramble back into the bike togs and try to hit the road ahead of her.  That way, she’ll have to pass me (if I get a big enough headstart).

Tuesday and Wednesday, when Julie and I work oposite shifts, overlapping only half the day, it’s possible to have no contact at all with her, as long as one of us isn’t relieving the other at a service point (desk, backup, window), and even then we both know the steps to that dance, though I sometimes ignore the music just to make her look at me and say, “I’m here, Dion”–another little victory.  At the end of those four hours I am angry (and puzzled as to why), abhoring the resultant vacuum before a baptism of relief floods the void.  I never believe it’s going to happen, but within fifteen minutes I’ve been born again.  Before that point in the day I cannot be expected to bother with conversing with anyone, and if I had any humor at all it was cynical and cruel.  With Julie gone I am very nearly the opposite person–happy, talkative, goofy, my voice clear and expansive.  It’s a good time to flirt.  The weekends, now that she’s switched, are virtually holidays.

But these two lives are one life too many, each in the shadow of the other, each mocking the other.  Neither can be sincerely lived (and certainly only one deserves to be).  I insist on claiming back my self from the emotional tyranny I imposed with the obsession over Julie, but I also insist on continuing to oppress both of us as punishment.  I can’t be rid of Julie until I let her go, but as I told her about being in love with her, “It’ll be over when it’s over”; there’s nothing I intend to do about it–or, rather, nothing my pride will alow me to do.  Rationale gets no say.  Perfect sense is still not wisdom.  So nothing will change about the life I don’t want, because if I don’t change it it won’t change.  Julie will never make the least move toward change, any more than she would initiate a conversation or greet me in the morning–any more than I am willing to do it myself.  I play at pushing aside that ugly life, displacing it with the more attractive one, but I can only carry it, like a hump on my back, like that constant knot in my shoulder, and drape it with vanity as I play-act my way across the more scenic stage.  But acting, however good, is still just acting.  I know what I’m up to–both the good and the bad–but just as rationale will not effect wisdom, neither will laying moral judgment upon myself effect action toward healing.  The changes needed will make themselves.  Talk is cheap, and pretty words don’t mean much.  I’ll move on, Julie will move on, the tension will fade.  I’m almost sure now that that will have to happen before I can have a meaningful relationship with another woman.  Until then, emotional survival at work will remain a challenge, but, with patience and confident foresight , should be more endurable.  Another lofty game plan, maybe, but at least one not consciously executable.  It might all just amount to muddling through, but was I doing any better strategizing?  I’m at least able to recoginize futility.  Sure, it’s still about Julie, but one day it won’t be, just won’t be–no grief or relief on its departure, because its departure won’t be noticed.  One day.

More Than a Kewpie Doll at Stake

She wore a short denim skirt and white panties.  The skirt I noticed when she walked through the library security gates, the panties when she knelt to find her hold on the shelf–a bright triangle between shiny tanned knees.  She stood empty-handed.  I followed her legs to her face, reaching it as she turned to me at the circ desk.  I locked onto her eyes, smiled, and silently invited her to come talk to me.  Her smile accepted.  Her hold was not where she had looked for it because it was waiting at the window for her to driveup for it.  I recognized her name when I scanned her card and knew that she picked up all her holds there, though I’d never actually seen her at the window.  I got it for her.  The title was something like When Food Is Love.  As our engagement was mutual, at parting I gave her the test:  How long would she maintain eye contact as she left?  She dropped her eyes to her book and slid it off the counter to her other hand, and as she turned to the entrance her near eye swivelled to me and smiled.  If the same light hit my eyes, I suppose I returned the same.  I’m sure I felt the same.  I watched her out the security gates then turned back to her name, still on the monitor before me, and clicked on it.  Fifty-four years old!  You’re kidding me!  I was pegging her for five years my junior not three years my senior.  She suddenly became even more attractive.

Such an encounter as that is now my goal for my hour on the circ desk.  Accepting that that won’t always happen doesn’t tempt me to lower my standards but to practice as intensely as possible.  And that I don’t practice on every woman but the ones I find most attractive shaves my opportunities to the bone.  (I’m a picky guy.)  But I’ve stumbled onto something–speed dating at its quickest and least embarrassing.  Simply, it’s first-eye-contact.  In that moment is the most significant moment of the relationship–in fact, the moment that decides the possibility of that relationship even happening.  And if that moment tells me it’s not happening, where’s the rejection?  Brilliant!  It starts with self-accepting the initial attraction and then conveying it.  I saw this woman (whose name I will withhold for compromising her vanity) before she knelt in front of the holds shelf, but she did not look my way until she didn’t find her book.  I was already attracted to her; now I had to let her know by looking in her eyes.  That she returned my smile with her own did not necessarily mean she was attracted to me–I could have just been a friendly face willing to help her–but it did mean she was willing to accept my friendliness.  That’s all I can ask, isn’t it?  It’s easy to discreetly test the waters from that point, as we are now open to each other, relative to being strangers.  After the initial positive connection I do not fear tripping over my tongue or saying something inane or innappropriate and have little trouble maintaining eye contact; plus, I will do anything she asks and offer to do yet more.  But how can I be sure I’ll see her again?  I can’t be sure I’ll be on the desk the next time she comes in, or on the window when she picks up there.  That’s why I have to intensify my practice.

Matt invited me over for lunch Memorial Day.  Being a bachelor (or just being me), I accepted the free meal.  “Oh,” he added, “Chris invited us over for a cookout later.  Do you think you’d wanna come?”  “Yes!  To tell you the truth, I would hope to see Jackie there.”  I told him about seeing her at the yoga studio.  (He doesn’t read my blog.)  “I really could use the classes,” I told him, “but I haven’t done anything about it because it still feels like a pretense to see Jackie.”  Well, guess what?  It must have been.  My hopes were already in the way when we got to the cookout, so my tongue was tightly knotted.  When someone asked, “Jackie?  Where’s Brian?  Is he working?”  i knew my game was over, but I was as relieved as I was disappointed–and I no longer felt the nine-mile trip to the yoga studio was worth my Wednesday morning.  At least I hadn’t committed myself to the hope and inflated it beyond proportion.  I could easily have done that in the months since I’d seen her, but unlike the months it took me to ask Julie out, I wasn’t reminded of my hopes by seeing her every workday.  If I’d been paying attention when we first saw each other at the cookout, I’d have already seen in Jackie’s eyes that our interests were not correlative.  My day wasn’t ruined; it’s knee wasn’t so much as skinned; it didn’t so much as cut itself shaving.  There was no lament or woeful wail, but a shrug and “Oh, well.”

I play on.  I keep looking, keep looking into eyes, looking for…what?  A connection, then a deeper connection.  It’s there, somewhere, in someone’s eyes.  It’s not a game–I shouldn’t call it that–and it isn’t play or sport.  I might know what I’m after, but getting it doesn’t get me the broken tape and the top step on the tri-level dais.  No medal will be hung around my neck, but a millstone might be lifted from it.  This is serious work and might amount to a life’s-work in the end, but…but the thought is too complex for me to express adequately, and, despite my normal analytical bent, I get the feeling that I should accept it being so, that even an understanding, much less an explanation of what I’m doing is not only unnecessary but detrimental:  Codifying what I do is what makes this a sport, a game for its own sake.  I want to see beautiful women; I wnat to meet them and talk to them.  I want to fall in love; I want to love myself.  That I feel good doing what I’m doing only means I believe I’m doing the right thing.  Whatever comes of that must be what I deserve, and the only way to accept what I deserve is to know I’m doing right:  There’s my circle.  I have to trust it not to be a snake eating itself.

Running Toward Dear Life

It’s been a few days since I listened to Frightened Rabbit, but “Things” still pulses in my brain, the music and the singer both running, frantic, until desperation is quenched in the baptism of another, knowing, soul.  That I connect deeply to this song still does not seem to be the complete reason it resonates.  What keeps the tape looping is the absolute surety that Julie would love this album.  It speaks to me, not for me.  It can’t tell Julie how I feel about her, but it can show me the necessity and ability to move away from her.  I wouldn’t expect it to tell Julie this; I just expect her to like it.

Don’t expect me to try to make conversation with her over this.  I still hope for too much from her to not be disappointed with the usual outcome, the outcome that history gives me every reason to presume–and presuming the outcome will not change, I will avoid that disappointment until I’m sure I would no longer feel it.

I feel myself turning bitter again when I think of that disappointment.  I wanted to say that telling her about Frightened Rabbit was a step toward just being civil to each other, but the usual hopes stoke an infernal anger.  This thinking I’m over her never lasts long and seems always to end by exploding all over my ego.  I’m filling paper bags with water, delusions with reality.  Was that previous post a delusion?  I can’t believe I even sustained that attitude for a thousand words.  Now it all seems false.  I haven’t listened to the album since I wrote that post, and I get an almost sickening feeling thinking that my emotional life is so shallow as to be dependent upon music to–

I can’t finish that sentence.  Instead, I put on Frightened Rabbit.  I wish I could pour this music onto the page–words seem just impossible for me sometimes, given the choice of repeating myself, proving how little I’ve progressed; and an ineffable state of virtual stasis of mind.  The entire album is about rebirth, self-baptism.  I hear despair, the certainty of what must be done, the determination to do it, the crushing pain in doing it, and the validation in living through it–redemption.

What I’m going through can’t be so clearly defined or so dramatically undertaken, but it can’t escape being characterized as a quest for redemption.  My sometimes strident righteousness is the wall I hide my guilt behind.  Of what I feel guilty I’m not sure, and so it is not a motivator of my actions.  Neither is the guilt strident, so it will not push its agenda–even if it had one.  So from what do I seek redemption?  This behaviour toward Julie that I have so glibly rationalized?  That she has implicitly accepted it has suckered me more than a few times into believing I’m doing the right thing, but my conscience knows better.  I do nothing about it because the rewards I seek, the assuagement of my guilt and (yes, dammit!) the love of Julie, are spurious and ridiculous, respectively.  Redemption will just have to wait, I suppose, until it’s got better reasons for my attention.

So, that last post was not a lie.  It’s what I need to do.  Last Thursday night, I cast around almost maniacally for activities to fill that Friday off, to distract me from Julie and get me a little closer to my real life, but I awoke Friday with too much sense and decided I should rest my cycling legs.  So I did little, and the idleness of body turned to the playground of mind, and there romped Julie and my bitter hopes, laughing at my stratagems, dancing aound me, strapping me to the maypole.  I can’t let this weekend, or any weekend, turn to that.  With a three-day weekend at the end of this week and kids out of town, I have to strike out in earnest toward a real social life.  Come the workweek, I will lose two steps to Julie, so I have to take some giant steps over the weekend.  If this seems urgent, well, it is, but if I concentrate on the effort I can remove the stress from it and focus on the long run, and that right simply means getting from one weekend to the next without a step backward.

If Julie loves Frightened Rabbit, I had better not know it.  I don’t want that taken from me like she took XTC and Prefab Sprout.  Luckily, I’ll have no way of knowing; she wouldn’t tell me.  Anyway, it’s Morphine in my head right now, even if it is “All Your Way.”  I won’t even pretend Julie would like that band.  Step away, Julie–a giant step away.  Clear the way for a weekend without you.  You be the frightened rabbit and scurry off at the thud of my foot or stand still in the camouflage of my disdain.  Baptism?  Redemption?  How about reclamation?

I Can Almost Believe Myself This Time

Though I try to believe that love will just find me, I think it needs some help.  It won’t come  bursting through my door, so I have to go out and meet it.  Not find it, just…run into it.  Maybe it won’t be in the movie theater, but I might find its wallet on the sidewalk out front.  Maybe I’ll bump shopping carts with it or laugh at an embarrassing event it had hoped no one saw.  However it comes, I expect it to come unexpectedly.  This attitude relieves the desperation of the endeavour, if not the urgency, because it’s a role that suits me.  I believe in serendipity, but like luck, it needs a catalyst sometimes.  So, I’m getting out of my bubble to do things I like.  I may no longer be getting my money’s worth out of Netlflix (I kept Stranger Than Paradise two weeks), but spending two-thirds of my monthly fee on one movie in public is more cost-effective for my purposes–eventually.  I think. 

But of course I spend half my waking life at work, so I have to seriously consider the library as a site of prime opportunity, and for direct, captive contact the circulation desk is the place to be, where the patron will first encounter library staff.  Each week there’s a chance of not getting an hour out there one day.  On that day I feel caged and wonder what opportunities I’m missing and hope that I can at least get out into the stacks with a cart of books to shelve, maybe get a chance to help an attractive woman find something.

On the circ desk, the patron has to come to me, but I can attract them.  Two people are assigned to the desk, and if I’m really intent on getting on my game, I’ll try to get the terminal nearest the entrance in order to make the first contact with the patron and try to steer them my way with a smile and greeting.  If it’s a woman I find myself attracted to, I consider her mine and will be disappointed if I don’t get at least a smile in return.  If she steers to the desk I lock onto her eyes.  This is especially important when she approaches head-on from the stacks (as opposed to the entrance, whose path is parallel to the desk) and is deciding which clerk to visit; first eye contact almost always wins.  Having won her my way, I look for the glint, the bright band of connection, the bridge from soul to soul.  Quite often it’s there, and when it is I am that much closer to being at ease and myself.  I can throw away the professional scripts and be Dion instead of Mr. Library.  Discreetly, I look for the ring and try not to let finding it close me off.  After all, contact is the thing, and I’ll take all the practice I can get.  (The last time I was on the desk with Julie, after the failed conversation, I enjoyed a banter with a woman my age as I checked out her books.  We had a very easy time making each other laugh.  There was never a thought of romance in my head–I knew she was married–the conversation just flowed, and afterwards I realized how important that kind of rapport is and how Julie and I never had any of that, how strained, even in the best of times, our converse had been, and how our humors had rarely met.  If only I’d recognized then the signs of incompatibility….)  I maintain the eye contact as best I can (that doesn’t come naturally to me, either) especially at the parting, as significant a moment as the greeting.  The duration of eye contact at that moment is very telling:  The longer it lasts, the brighter and stronger that band of connection becomes.  But as strong as the connection might be made, it may never get a chance to be made stronger.  With maybe one hour on the desk a day, and rarely the same hour, reconnection is, at best haphazard.  In fact, I can’t think of a good connection made twice with the same woman.

Still, I psych my self up for the opportunities.  My vanity, formerly attended to strictly for Julie’s audience, had, until recently, fallen somewhat lax, but on most days now I bother to shave and wash my hair.  I’ve discovered my physical persona as a rugged, outdoorsy guy, and I like him, with his perpetual tan, his sleeves rolled up and his hair in a ponytail.  If my physique falls a little short of my ideal–Michaelangelo’s David–I can at least say that I’m comfortable with it–in fact, a bit smug about having chiseled it from my chosen lifestyle without that narcissistic artificiality of “working out.”  I like wearing what shows it off and showing what the clothes are supposed to be covering–a boy’s ringer tee tight around the biceps, a tad short at the waist above the low-riding jeans, flashing skin between the belt and shirt reaching to the high shelves, squatting to show off a rim of colorful underwear.  I embrace the exhibitionist in me as I try to embrace all those other mes I used to deny as flaws to be expunged from my character.  “Me first” is not, in my case, selfishness in the derogatory sense; it’s the place to start.  It should be easier to complete myself that way than to seek someone to do the job for me. 

Is what I’m completing the vessel to hold love?  Instead of bumping into love or finding its wallet, will it just flow into me?  Or am I sewing a cap and begging for love to be dropped into it like loose change?  I suppose my attitude will decide, and right now my attitude says “vessel.”  If it ever points to “cap,” I hope it does so with an impish grin and a wink and doesn’t thrust out the supplicating headgear before finishing a goofy soft-shoe.

Tunnel?

(There are actually four paragraphs in this post, but WordPress seems to have lost the ability to separate them.  I hope it’s temporary.)

 

For a moment, I saw an infinite meaning.  The redbud bent away from me in the wind of a lowering sky.  Somehow, I could hear a robin through closed windows and over traffic; and there was the life beyond the words and the world beyond the life.  And then it blew away.  I took a half-day off Wednesday, the first half of the evening shift, so I had an entire day to myself before going in at five.  Monday was when I asked for it.  It has become impossible to write in the evenings, and by the time I get a morning to myself, there’s too much to write before I have to be at work in the afternoon.  This life is becoming increasingly more important than the library.  Even now, I sit, shirtless, wet hair dangling just above the page, scribbling, half an hour before I have to be out the door, lunch not eaten, dinner not made, clothes not chosen and packed.  I too easily now accept being late for work.[Paragraph]

I had work to do Wednesday, work more important than the work I’m paid for, work that more nearly defines me.  Writing looms large, but be it a wraith or just a shadow, it has no power to lift me out of this concrete world of responsibility and plant me in what is yet an abstraction of the life I should be living.  Those things I’ve collectively called a distraction–movies, music, books–have resumed the role they’ve always had, of the dig site of my soul.  What evidence do I have that I’m digging in the right place?  Would I know the evidence when I saw it?  Those questions show me my futility and stop me reading, watching movies, and listening to music.  They don’t stop me writing, digging…a well or a grave?  And the way it presses on me, I don’t know if I’m digging my way in  or out.  I only know that by the time I’d stepped into work at five Wednesday the load was off–I’d finished and published the previous post and missed a day of working with Julie.[Paragraph]

This isn’t a sustainable life.  I can’t take that half-day off every week, and I have to work with Julie.  I write for a way out, but the way out doesn’t seem to be in the direction in which I’m writing.  (The incessant soundtrack to this post is “Things” by Frightened Rabbit, an anthem to a desperate rebirth.)  But it’s not so much the way out of the library I’m trying to find as a a way away from Julie, and I already know writing won’t do that.  Writing won’t find that life I saw swish through the redbud; another metaphor won’t bring it back into my view.  How can I hope to find it in someone else’s creative output?[paragraph]

In a place transcendent of all those things is my life.  Yours, too?  We are the satellites dancing round our orbits, never meeting, never changging course to make it happen, always looking for each other, always missing each other around a just-turned corner.  I’ve been thinking I’d find you at the Westhampton some Friday night.  I’ve been to two movies the past three weeks, twice as often as the past two years combined.  I thought that was you behind me in City Island, the only person laughing with me in several places in the movie, but you left before the credits finished, so it couldn’t have been you.  I knew at a glance you weren’t with me at The Story of Kells–only four couples and me in the whole theater.  Too bad.  I thought of you.  I thought of Julie, too, but I’m sure youd have appreciated it more.  Maybe next week–there’s always something new there.  In the meantime, I have this life of words, words, and more words; the library; and Julie.  Please come to the library.  Don’t be afraid of Julie; she doesn’t care.  It gets lonely there–especially when she’s there.  Help me find that meaning again, that meaning beyond the distractions, outside of Julie, and within you and me.  Because here I am, late for work again, and I’m caring just a little bit less than yesterday.

20/20 Blindsight

What did I ever see in you, Julie?  How could I have been so wrong about you?  Was hope really that blinding?  Was my attraction to you built on little more than extrapolations inferred by this hope?  The impossibility of knowing won’t stop me asking.  The questions are to no degree rhetorical.  I’m even wondering if my fascination for you is real.  I kept myself believing that below the surface of what you showed me was a fascinating, complex woman, but honestly I had no proof.  You revealed nothing but the blandest tastes.  Goddammit, I know there’s more to you than that!  What are you at work but somebody trying to fit in?  What’s wrong with who you really are?  And why should I care?  I started here by trying to talk myself away from you, but I’m maddened by the chances you didn’t give us.  All I have left of the things we have in common (and there are a lot more of them than you know) is the understanding that we differ in our appreciations of them.  They may be complementary differences, but we can never know that, can we?  Whatever you thought was my anger towards you was frustration, cage-rattling frustration, that you couldn’t get the hell out of your comfort zone and dare to not be lonely.  Yes, easier said than done–I know.  I’m an introvert, too.  Remember?  For me, there were only three times when you were real–the two times you blushed and the time you nearly cried because you were so angry with me.  I needed a reaciton.  I needed to see that real person.  God, no! i didn’t want to make you cry, but those near-tears showed me, in the cruelest most shameful way, that there was a real, feeling individual in there.  I knew it damned well, already, but I wanted to feel it, know that you could feel something–anything!–for me.  A part of me felt that even that wasn’t enough, that you should have hauled off and hit me, kissed me with your fist. 

I am most definitely not your soulmate.  Beyond the insatiable fascination, I’m not sure anymore there’s even an attraction to you beyond the physical.  I try to conjure it when I look at you, but it doesn’t appear, and I can’t remember what it was like, though it has only been a week since your haircut turned me rapturous.  (If you don’t get another before you leave us, I just might make it over you.)  I can’t quite say your beauty is just skin deep, because it’s not where my love started, but as my hopes and fantasies are supplanted by the reality you supply me, so is my motivation to look more deeply upon you arrested by the accumulation of futility at finding anything beyond:  The wall has finally grown too high to scale, much less see over.  What I ever saw in you–or hoped to see–withers on the other side.  We are not for each, but you are still for me.  Until I began writing to you here, I aborted many attempts to address all this to my “audience,” but the passion turned into logic and lost its soul.  This is why there will be no more notes or tokens from me:  I can give them to you from here and at least believe that we share this much.  All I see in you now, Julie, is the woman I hurt who may not have forgiven me (but, at least, is unwilling to hit me), and, when I dare look at it, a body I might still lust after.  Not enough, but what I get, with your permission or no.  What more could you give me?

Here–Hold My Breath

Pascal is over me, I guess.  I haven’t heard from him in a long while, not even a response to my last email.  Did I hurt him, or did his passion burn out?  Did he suddenly see I was not the man for him? not the man he’d thought or hoped I was?  I am not angry or sad that I’ve lost Pascal.  Neither am I happy or relieved.  It was warming to know that someone felt so strongly for me.  But was it just my picture?  Did he read the words I didn’t write just for him? the words you read here?  Our correspondence might have been the difference.  These questions Pascal would consider unnecessary and anoying but the neurosis they come from “cute.”  Cute is a far cry from the fiery sexual fantasy of the early messages.  Cute doesn’t sustain passion, but passion is a fire, and fire dies out.

What does being “over” someone mean?  Is it just the scales of hope falling from one’s eyes? the stark new light revealing flaws one just can’t accept and love?  I think it is that plus the diminishment of embarrassment and shame for having felt so strongly toward someone:  Suddenly, this person is just another person, and you can’t imagine any longer what made you feel the way you did about them.  In fact, you can’t imagine the feelings themselves.  This is all theory–fantasy, even–because I do not know.  I know too well what I have always felt for Julie, and I was reminded of that on a day that began with me confidently believing that the feelings had diminished by such a significant degree as to be simply put aside like clothes that no longer fit.  By the end of the work day I was shoe-horning myself back into them, sadly acknowledging the delusion and its control over me.

It didn’t help that Julie came in with a new hairstyle exposing her neck and sweeping her bangs across her forehead.  Dammit! i thought.  I don’t need this.  Nor did I need her to wear blue, which turned her eyes to glistening cerulean marbles.  God, did I want to tell her I liked her hair! but I doubted my ability to handle even a thank you in response.  In other words:  I was a goner.  But, otherwise, I bravely, stubbornly pushed through, performing little favors for her, such as helping her offload the discharge cart onto the sorting carts, and other little things that we do for everyone else but each other.  I was soliciting thanks, which I received with emotional neutrality, but was also heading off the guilt I knew I’d feel if I didn’t perform these simple acts of professional kindness.  Later, I even alerted her to some new donations,  Nancy Drews from the forties.

If I had studied the schedule more closeley I might have chosen to suffer the guilt, instead:  A couple hours before closing we were to share a desk hour, such a rare occurrence anymore that I’d begun to take it for granted as a thing of the past.  Still, I was able to convince myself that it was no big deal and did a pretty good job of not working myself up about it or planning what to say.

“Did you find anything interesting in the donations?”  That’s what I asked her.  The rest of the conversation doesn’t warrant transcribing.  It was virtually the same one we ever had on the desk, where I’d ask a question, she’d answer, then…nothing.  I’d wait for her to say something anything, without prompting, and, so, the rest of the hour would be spent in a congealing silence.  No, the details, though vital to the drama, would only invite obsession and inflate hopes–as it did the rest of that workday with her.  The old jealousies and hopeless hopes floated up from the bottom of my emotional cesspool.  Allowing those feelings to pull me in would have been to drown me.  I can acknowledge that I’m not over Julie, but I cannot afford to celebrate.  Don’t I want to be over her?  (As I wrote that, the question expanded to monstrous, insatiable proportions.  I will render it rhetorical, for now, by simply not answering it.)

Getting over Julie might be a simpler matter if I could believe she never felt anything for me (which would require her to tell it to me herself).  I remember how giddy and jocular we both were the rest of the day after I asked her out, but then I remember, too, the wall shooting up through the pavement between us ouside athe end of the day when I expressed my frustration with not being able to get together that weekend.  A switch had been flipped, and I find it impossible, still, to understand what changed and why, and how she turned so quickly from excited to scared.  If I can’t stop wondering, though, I must not speculate.  Speculation without clues is just obsession.  Nothing a mind fabricates from the whole cloth of neurosis is to be trusted to be worn in the light of day. 

So, Julie, you are stuck with me.  For nearly an entire workday I thought we could work this out your way–you know, pretending it was already worked out–but you are still afraid of me, and that’s hardly back to “normal.”  (My fear of you has never changed.)  Yeah, I almost thought reparation, such as might need done, was all up to me, but I’ve done what I can do.  I waver between appreciating your inabilities and being frustrated with your acceptance of and submission to them.  Perhaps things are already as good between us as you care to have them be.  Keep thinking it and you might believe it some day.  Do you really not mind things this way?  I’m not dancing alone here.  This is a tango, baby, and you know it.  Maybe it has lasted so long because it didn’t flare as hotly as Pascal’s for me.  Maybe you can be grateful for that, anyway.  Or not.  Were I Pascal to you, would you still be embarrassed now?  At least I would be over you.  Would you have been flattered at all to have been a masturbation fantasy?  By the way, how’s the sofa thing working for you?

Ah, but nothing will change, Julie.  In fact, you know what?  Nothing has changed for so long that we’ve reached a new normal.  Maybe I should stop whining about you not talking to me, since I can’t change that, but I don’t expect that to change, either.  I know you’re in control,  so whenever you feel things need to be different you can let me know.  Don’t be too subtle, though; you know I can’t take a hint.  Maybe I’ll let you know when I’m over you.  Probably not.  By the time I’m over you, what will it matter?

I suppose I still love you.  I lust after you, anyway.  Is that an improvement or a downgrade?  It’s easier, in any case, being so far outside the realm of possibility as to be unencumbered by hope.  Can you believe that I can desire your body? a body you don’t like all that much yourself?  Or is lust another of those things you take for granted from men, as if it were less a personal, individual desire than  universal biological imperative indiscriminately applied?  (Do you lust?)  Lust is maybe all I have left for you.  If I can’t access your mind or heart, I can at least imagine the feel of your skin, the contours of your flesh, the smell of your hair, the taste of you lips.  Clothes can’t hide your shape; they are no defense against my imagination.  You are naked.

I did not intend to talk to you like this, Julie.  I did not intend to talk to you at all, but you are a more tangible audience than (most of) my other readers and it’s been you I’ve been talking to all along, anyway, right?  I’ll feel the need to keep talking, but you can’t stop me as easily as you did with A Bright, Ironic Hell, with an indirect attack through one of my readers.  My obeisance will not be granted so easily; that I am doing you harm will need proof this time, because my hope is no longer on your side.  You can rid yourself of me as easily as I (inadvertantly) rid myself of Pascal–with honesty.  Ah, what scales would fall then!  Is that what you want? for me to see you as ordinary, unexceptional?  How would we get along then?  I bet you really couldn’t go back to that.  Could I?  Does it matter?  Think about it and get back to me.  You’ll be surprised by what you feel.

Hope Springs Infernal

Goddamned hope.  Goddamned ridiculous, obfuscating hope.  What have I been hoping for but what I can’t have, what I don’t even really need?  Julie.  I’ve not been hoping for love, but for Julie.  Hope has kept me lying to myself.  All I say or do is still in effort to attract her to me–damn the impossibility, full-steam ahead!  Every word I write I hope (and fear) she will read and is meant to charm her (in my tenderest mood) or taunt her (in my bitterest), but never is it meant to alienate her, actually push her from me, as I doth protest so much I’m trying to do.  Friday night I pedalled east, into town, to do a little shopping, maybe make a connection–or so I unconvincingly told myself, all the time wondering as I pedalled if I would see Julie’s car.  Sometimes I’m glad for rationality:  I was kept from actually looking for her or her car by the sure knowledge that she would neither venture this far nor step foot in a Barnes & Noble if her life depended on it.  I had a good time–spent some money, spoke briefly with a few store clerks–but not a good enough time to obviate the usual reluctance to head home.

All weekend I didn’t write, pretending the hope wasn’t there, not wanting to write about Julie, ashamed that I wanted to, barren of other, more pressing ideas.  Then I awake Monday with this constipation of ink clogging my heart and choking my mind, and I feebly lash out at work by changing the desktop of the driveup monitor from a closeup of a purple flower to a blank blue.  It didn’t get better, and at the end of the day Mike, ever-caring Mike, asked if I was okay.  “You’ve looked…disgruntled.  Or are you just tired?”  “No, ” I said, and paused, reluctant to bring it up but grateful for the chance.  “It’s just the same old…stuff.”  “Work?  Or is it personal?”  “Yes.”  My vision began to swim, so I turned away from him and knelt to pack my bag.  The emotion took me by surprise.  I said, “Someone here.”  “It’s not Julie, is it?”  I laughed bitterly at the incredulity in his voice.  The tears receded and I was just angry and ashamed at myself for not being over all this.

When Julie stood before me the next day, smiling and courteously informing me I had a phone call, I stared, mesmerized into her (gray) eyes, and when she was done said, “Thank you,” and I was angry again, this time at her, for so easily pretending things were all right  between us; and I returned to that declaration she made at the Trainwreck, as unbelievable and incredible (in the most literal sense of each word) now as when she first spoke it, that people get to know each other best either at work or by living together. …  But this is where I turn bitter, and know I know that road goes nowhere–doesn’t deadend, just doesn’t reach a destination–so I’ll stop.

Truth is, all there is between Julie and me is my pride.  Nothing else.  Do I even love her in any greater sense than I love anyone else I care about?  Hope wants me to believe a lot of things, but it can no longer make me believe I am in love.  Whether or not I was ever in love with Julie is irrelevant; it felt like it, and that’s good enough.  I don’t feel anything for Julie.  When I look at her I feel only for myself–regret, shame, remorse, (yes) hope.  I no longer even see the woman I’d hoped she’d be for me; hope can no longer blind me to that reality.  I’m left with a sparkingly stunning woman, and, my pride aside, that’s enough to silence me in her presence.  It’s difficult to accept the things that remain unresolved, but they are things I cannot change and must, therefore, accept.  I’m a long way from acceptance, as far away as someone else’s control over it.  I can turn bitter again at this point and ask, Whose idea of resolution is more important? but I must stop again, before I throw my brain against the emotional wall.

I am standing still against hope, tacking against its push into a candyland of faith-full joy.  It’s a vacuum; it would kill me.  Instead?  Pride?  There must a be a hope that does not indulge delusion, a hope to believe in.  The hope for Julie’s love won’t die easily, no matter the sober words against it, no matter, even, the emotional detachment I have claimed.  Pride is the last and densest barrier, the insatiable monster at the gate of the treasure cave who can neither appreciate his riches nor allow the more deserving to have them.  I wait for emotional evolution to sate the beast, but patience is hardly a friend, either.

What Lies on the Surface

The Picture, the one of Julie I can’t show you, was taken nearly two years ago.  The picture is much different now, but with which eyes am I seeing the difference?  I’d worked with Julie  for about a year by then, and my hopes for most of that time were no less modest than they ever were relative to any attractive and eligible woman my age:  Don’t embarrass myself in front of her and try not to show her my attraction.  It’s amazing I didn’t blow that the first time we met.  Or did I?

Julie was the last to join our crew before the library opened a month later.  On that day, we gathered in the meeting room and were given a personality survey and the results of our Meyers-Briggs tests.  On the survey, we were to list so-many regrets and so-many dreams, then tell one of each to the room.  Only my regret and her dream do I remember.  “I regret buying my first car.”  My last one had given me up just a month before.  The HR rah-rah who facilitated the gathering said to the room, “Wow, that must have been one bad car!”  (The meaning was lost on her, but James got it, at least.)  Julie’s dream:  “I would most like to take a bike tour of Scotland.”  We had not been introduced.  Upon first seeing her, upon her entry into the meeting room, I had sized her up only as attractive and maybe my age, though the extent of graying in her hair made me wonder if she weren’t actually older.  I don’t remember which came first, my assumption that she was married or my hope that she wasn’t.  At lunch the assumption was dispelled.

At the break I sought her inside but spotted her outside from Children’s walking toward a small  semi-circle of benches.  I beelined for it.  It’s only now that I think of how bold that was of me.  If it had been a simple case of attraction–if I’d thought she was girlfriend material–I’d never have sped down there and asked if I could join her, but I was excited to find someone who longed to do what I’d done twice and longed to do again.  I was after a friend.  Perhaps I hadn’t even found her attractive then.  Coming on strong (read “needy”) is, in my history, the dominant characteristic of the pursuit of friendship, and this was no exception.  Within a few minutes, Julie knew my parents were from Pittsburgh, I was half-Scottish on my dad’s side and Campbell on his mom’s side.  I look back on the encounter and think, “What a dweeb I was!”  I’m sure she marked me off right then and there as boyfriend material.  Soemhow, amidst all my chatter, I found that she had been to Scotland twice already–with her mom as a graduation present, and to see Trashcan Sinatras, her “favorite Scottish band.”

The next day, she gave me a sticky note with the titles of their four albums.  Her handwriting mesmerized me–he “a” approximated the typographic one, and the “e” was a “c” with a slash through it.  Soon after, she lent me two of the titles, I’ve Seen Everything and Happy Pocket.  I played them quite a bit, and on the way home from a Vegetarian Society picnic Stacey took us to on July Fourth, four days before the library’s grand opening, I told her that one song, “Earlies” from I’ve Seen Everything, was “impossibly beautiful.”  I had not talked to her all day, unable to muster conversation, because, by then, I was already hopeful of more than friendship and could not relax around her; and, so, desperate as I was to be with her, I could feel her discomfort with my presence and didn’t push myself on her.  She didn’t remember “Earlies” in particular and I was disappointed, having hoped to connect with her that way.  A month or so later, she asked after her cd’s, and I replied that I was “wearing them out.”  She wasn’t amused, and I was annoyed and a little hurt.  I put them in her basket the next day.  She never mentioned it.  (That annoyed me, too.)

What happened between that summer and the following spring, when I finally had to write, I’m not sure, though I can guess without too much strain on my imagination that I became more and more nervous around her, less and less able to talk to her, less and less able to be myself, and more and more the awkward dweeb dying for her attention.  A Bright, Ironic Hell, of course, takes it from there.

I really wish you could see the picture.  The proverbial “thousand words” allotted it wouldn’t, being mine, come close to doing it justice.  The most interesting–and annoying–aspect of the picture is the perspective:  Julie is not looking at the camera, but just to the left of it, as if she were attending a reporter while the cameraman filmed.  Gay Lynn, who took the picture, told me that Julie, in dramatic jest, had thrown her head forward to cover her face with her hair then thrown it back to expose her face again, at which moment Gay Lynn snapped the shot.  The annoyance is in not being able to look directly into her eyes:  She’s not looking at me.  Perhaps her eyes would have been a different if she had.  I usually describe her eyes as dark blue, but in the picture they are gray.  I actually had a disagreement with Thomas about it, and he said he asked her the next day, and she stepped right up to him and stared the foot upward into his eyes and confirmed his conviction.  I said, “That’s not what I see when she looks at me.”  The storm rolls in when our eyes meet.  Her tossed hair thinkly veils her near eye.  The flash glistens lightly on her chin, nose and high, round, taut cheekbone.  Her smile gleams with an upper row of perfect teeth, nearly all of which are visible.  Her thin, mostly gray hair lies flat and styleless but shiny clean to the sides of an off-center part.  Her eyebrows are light brown, and I can only assume her hair was also once that color, but I have difficulty visualizing it.

What do I see now?  Almost nothing is the same but for the hair.  The smile I never see.  The Julie I see now seems to sag under various weights–her mother’s death obviously the heaviest.  Her skin has lost it smooth luster, and her hands betray a Julie older than her years.  There is the weight of what might have been and what’s left sandwiching the meager filling of what is:  a barely adequate salary, a life barely lived, hardly loved.  Julie will be fifty in Semptember, a fact no one would be wise to remind her of, as she’s been calling herself old for at least a couple years now.  In the background of her picture is a book, a tour guide to Scotland gleaned from the donations.  It’s still there.  I wonder how that dream has fared.

Me?  I had a picture taken, too, minutes after Julie’s.  I’ll show it to you when I find it.  That was me at the moment I began to transcribe the journal I’d started two months before into A Bright, Ironic Hell.  If you’ve read that, you know how my picture has changed.  I have my own catalog of misspent moments and maps of wrong turns, but falling in love is not among either.  What is falling in love but a hope of being fallen in love with?  How rarely that hope is realized doesn’t diminish it.  Sometimes hope is all there is–is, in fact, the last thing one can give up.  Through all the bitterness, cynicism and despair, hope prevails–transcends.  I may never get back to Scotland to walk the drove roads or visit the homes of my favorite writers–that all hinges on practicality–but I expect love to find me, despite there being nothing I can do about it, because I believe it, and there’s always hope.  The real picture I can’t show you–yet–is of that hope realized.

When a Ten-Foot Pole Just Won’t Do

There is a lot to be said for the separation theory for getting over Julie.  By Monday, I will have worked with her for only four hours out of eight work days.  During that time without her, I became a silly, confident chatterbox at work.  The library has very nearly become the home I’d always hoped it would–a vast meeting house full of diverse ideas and open minds and hearts, and things that need to be said that are actually heard.

I talked with Valerie as I leisurely registered her for a card.  I have no doubt that everyone is Valerie’s friend.  She is intensely curious and entirely without social fear.  Valerie told me how years of military service on an island off the West Coast created her unusual accent, how she has had ten operations and has a terminal disease (she’s only forty-five), but she told me with neither self-pity nor a desperate grasp for mine.  She has died, she said, and she is not afraid of death.  “You know how love feels?  Well, what I felt was a billion times that.  But I came back.  My brother saw the sheet over my face going up and down.”  I tried to imagine that billion-fold love and could only stare with wet eyes into Valerie’s under the potato-chip brim of her cowboy hat.  She smiled, said, “Yeah,” and we both laughed, me with a tear running down a cheek.  “Don’t sweat the small stuff, Dion.  Those little details”–she pressed her thumb and finger together between us–”don’t mean a thing.”

Michelle is as mellow as Valerie is intense.  Michelle is Future Wife–only not.  The bike came back and I spent my lunch hour beside it with no return of the owner.  But I left a note this time, and while I was one the desk a woman stepped up and told me so.  I was disappointed at first sight–she was stout–but she was pretty and natural and in her low/mid-forties, near the low end of my age range.  Her son Michael, about ten or eleven, was with her (explaining the smaller bike near hers).  He was very patient (as was Brian, upon whom I’d sloughed my duties) as we talked for much of the hour.  She couldn’t tell me much about the bike (she got it at Goodwill), but she told me a bit about herself:  She’s from Santa Cruz, been in this area a few years, renting one of the few farms left in the area, keeps a community garden on land.  She cried for a three-hundred year-old oak that was taken down because it, supposedly, was in the way of a water line coming through.  When she found out I’d lived in Richmond my whole life she was surprised, by both my Mid-Atlantic (non-Southern Southern) accent and my liberal consciousness.  By the end of the conversation she’d become quite attractive, indeed, and she left me with an open invitation to drop by.  “We’ll throw something on the grill.  My husband’s laid-back–well, I’m laid-back and Michael’s laid-back.  My husband’s not laid-back.  But he’s cool.”  Ah, well. …

A younger woman (early thirties) flirted lightly with me as I helped her with the copier, but I was caught off-guard and put off my game.  I probably blushed.  I’m always shocked (and flattered) by younger women flirting with me.  Are they bolder than women my age or just enough less subtle about it that I’m actually able to recognize it?  I know it’s spring, and the human is no exception to the rutting instinct of the season, but if Julie were around how much chance would I give myself to find a mate?  I go to more trouble now to look my best on the days without Julie, and the weekend’s casual dress code gives me more leeway to be myself–out of the khakis and into the jeans and t-shirt.  I’m eager to get on the desk, where I can see (and be seen by) people and meet and talk to them.  The library is where I have to do that, because it’s where I like to be (most days), where I live much of my life, and where I’m most likely to meet minds and personalities meeting my needs and standards.  I’m saddened to think that I can have this only by closing myself off to Julie, but what else can I do?  I hate this game, where the rules tie my hands and stuff a sock in my mouth.  I’m leaving Julie those rules and playing by my own.

I had no intention of being bitter.  This was to be a celebration of a new direction, of territory reclaimed, but though I am off in a new direction, and I have reclaimed a little of what’s mine, the cost gives me pause, and Monday I will give back much that I gained over those eight work days, including a calm consience.  Or maybe I will talk to another Valerie or Michelle, or I’ll see the blushing woman again and get to say more than “Hi” to her.  Maybe I can actually do that with Julie in the library.  Have I gained that much distance?

Stewardship

What is this life I need to reclaim?  Scattered about the grown-tall grass, all the pieces can’t be retrieved.  Is it now simply a life to be claimed in the first palce? the other having lost any context, atrophied into oblivion?  I’ve nearly forgotten what I use to enjoy.  I’ve read only four books this year (and can’t recall any of the titles) and have abandoned three others.  My mind, never satisfied with diversion when there’s stimulation to be had, cannot seem to find either in a book.  The garden is green, but the weeding waits and waits to get done.  I don’t want another spring to get away unnoticed–they are so short here in Richmond, before the heat comes, that it’s hard to get one’s fill of it without total immersion in it–but it’s hard enough to let the fresh air and birdsong in, much less go out in it when I don’t have to.

Just as I don’t know whether to reclaim my old life or claim a new one, I don’t know if I have lost my way or found a new way.  I’ve been wondering, even, if I were still in NEW or had been kicked out with nothing to show for my journey but a new kind of confusion.  But I know I’m someplace new, whether I understand it or not, and I am more reluctant to try to understand it every day.  I’ve just about convinced myself now:  This is not so much about getting something back as about letting something go–turning the old into the soil to nourish the new.

And the new is…?  The three very different books I impetuously checked out Saturday?  The stacks of music I’m listening to and foreign movies I’m watching?  It’s enjoying what I enjoy regardless of anyone else’s opinion of it, connecting with people who matter to me, saying what has to be said and doing what has to be done wihtout waiting on approval; making friends of strangers.

At least several lives compose the life I seek, though I’m not sure what they are or even why I state that so assuredly.  Each place I go, I’m someone different, because I go there for different reasons, and being there sets me at different levels of poise and comfort, different levesl of ability to meet myself.  In town, in Carytown, especially, I have very nearly spotted me several times in any number of shops, just hanging out, an individual fitting into a crowd of individuals.  At home I’m still the individual but often difficult to relate to, hard to entertain–so little time, so many choices–so much necessity in the way.  And when the kids are over, who is this “Daddy”?  There’s this Eligible Bachelor guy, I sometimes see in women’s eyes.  I like him.  He seems to have some charm he’s not aware of.  I’ve seen him at the store many times, but he’s showing up at the library, too, now, getting the doubletakes and the hypnotic stares.  Just Friday he stopped himself twice in mid-conversation to watch the same woman come then go past the circ desk.  A small woman with sharp cheekbones and thick gray-brown hair barely contained.  He addressed her each time.  The first time, she smiled back; the second time, she blushed and smiled bashfully, flattered, to herself.  She glanced back over her shoulder to spy if he was still looking.  He was.  That guy’s got soemething.  I wish I knew what it was.  He and the guy on the bike would get along well.  That guy takes what’s his (but no more)  and has gone toe-to-toe with a county cop half-again his size to assert his right to take it.

Such lives:  How could they be one person?  The writer thinks he knows, but don’t ask him to explain; his head might explode.  I mean, c’mon–it took him a week to write this?

Yes, because I’m losing touch with my role in all this.  I thought I was a chronicler, but am I only an enabler?  Or is life the enabler of the writing?  I don’t seem to know anything anymore, or just not how to express it.  I’m looking for a logic outside the mind, a roadmap through NEW.  There are still no landmarks or mileposts.  There is no turning back, but only because I don’t know which way to turn to get there.  Is this particular life, the one as a writer, the one inspired, first, by hopeful heartache, and, then, by hopeless heartbreak, the life to be sacrificed to the others in order to effect my wholeness?  No–quite the opposite.  It’s the reconciler, the light-bringer, the rake combing the grown-tall grass, the gatherer, the assembler.  If there is a glue to be applied to these disparate lives, a thread to run through them, this must be the life that does the handiwork.  If there is a life more important, then I will find it this way, and I will have to allow it to supplant this one.  So, it isn’t, after all, a life to either claim or reclaim, but one to allow to come together–a facilitator, not an enabler; a letting-in, not a letting-go.  What the spring brings is for the summer to take care of.  I can only trust them to their jobs, and me to mine.  What more is there for me to understand?

Pedalling to Distraction and Back

There was a moment Friday, alone in the workroom on a third straight Julie-less day, that I thought, Maybe her way is the only way to do this.  It seemed, all of a sudden, that my asking for resolution from her is like asking for justice for blowing the cover off A Bright, Ironic Hell:  No one wants it but me.  Even my believing that it would be the right and best thing for everyone doesn’t make it so.  Who has any stake in resolution or justice but me? and are they victories worth winning?  What damage have I done, not letting go?  But I’m getting myself down.  Pretty soon I’ll have to be asking justice of myself.

On a rare Sunday without the kids, I thought I’d try to think as little of Julie as I could , not work myself up into the usual frenzied dread of the next day.  I headed to Carytown after lunch with a Zone Perfect bar and a navel orange.  Of all the places I wanted to go, only Plan 9 was open.  I bought six cd’s–Stranglers, Simple Minds, Sparks(2), Spoon, and Elvis Costello.  Three hours in Carytown, still bustling despite most of the shops closed, and I hadn’t spoken to anyone besides a guy asking for spare change.  Lonely and disappointed, I headed further east, to a headshop, Katra Gala, that Judy told me her son had some glass pieces in.  I thought I’d get Colin something as I hadn’t for her birthday just passed.  We were alone, the clerk and I, and finally I had someone to talk to, if not of anything consequential–the proliferation of such shops in Richmond, the legal euphemization of “reefer” into “tobacco,” “bong” into “water pipe,” etc.  I wasn’t attracted to her, though she was cute in a way and very friendly.  I probably had twenty years on her, what I consider to be an unbridgeable cultural gap for the purposes of romance.  It was enough for me, though, to have made her laugh.  I love to make a woman laugh.  (I got one genuine laugh out of Julie, long ago, pre-blogs, when someone mentioned the coming time change, and I said, “Finally, my clocks will be right!”  But I’m supposed to be forgetting about Julie.)  After about twenty minutes, and not having bought anything, I got a fillup of my water bottle from her and left for points yet further from home.  I ate my orange in my alma mater’s Shaeffer Court.  VCU has changed in seventeen years, but I probably blend in better now than then, with the long hair and bike.  I made no connections with my fellow students back then, being too old but not too old enough, I guess, and looking every bit the married man part.  In the time I ate my orange I made no connections, either.  Then, a few more miles east, maybe twelve miles from home, to James’ doorstep on Tobacco Row.  He lives in a secured building so I had to call his cell.  I had to leave a message:  “Hey, I’m outside your door.  I guess I’ll hang around a bit doing…I don’t know what.  Hope to talk to you soon.”

In Shockoe, nine blocks closer to home, at the end of 13th Street, I sat at the foot of a former monument, its plaque pried off, its statue cut from the steel beam that now protruded, jagged and rusted, from a crudely cemented pyramid of large, smooth stones, and ate my nutrition bar.  My phone rang as I finished.  James was on the canal on one of his writing walks.  He didn’t know his phone had rung until he opened his backpack to stuff in his notebook and it alerted him to my message.  I invited him up.  He was only a block away.

James had been writing poetry, a new medium for him, he confessed, but one he felt to be the best to express his latest Kristen inspiration.  Kristen is a waitress at Bottom’s Up, a pizza restaurant and watering hole, and James is in love with her.  He told her so, too, drunkenly, at a Super Bowl gathering at the eatery.  Guess what?  She didn’t run screaming to management to have him shut up!  (What? me bitter?)  He’s had that luck twice since he left the library, and though neither girl felt the same way toward him, they were (and are, in Kristen’s case) still friendly with him.  Kristen actually appreciates his company.  Simply the extrovert’s advantage, methinks, though James is quite bashful around women to whom he’s attracted.  However, his bashful is probably equivalent to my brashful.  (His cute would be my creepy.)  But Kristen is a lesbian, something James knew long before his declaration.  Hope for romance is suppressed by rationale and his concentration at making a friend of her, which he seems to have pretty well in hand.

James and I sat under the budding oak at the base of this monument to political correctness for a couple hours.  Of course, Julie came up but I diverted the conversation to the state of the libary–our attrition, the continued militaristic culling of our not-even three-year-old collection, and the bookstorification of the public library due to its unfounded fear of competition–until both the sun and my blood sugar fell to warning levels, and I had to go.  Knowing I couldn’t get home for The Simpsons, I got Chinese takeout in Carytown and ate on the sidewalk.

I’m never in a hurry to get home from the city, where on my bike I’m an actual vehicle and people are not only allowed to walk but are given places to walk on and to.  Would you be eager to come back to a place where you are considered an obstruction–even by police–if you aren’t driving? where cars honk at you every day (yes, every day) and people yell at you, “Get the fuck off the road!” and “Pedal on, you faggotty ass sonofabitch!”?  It was nine-fifteen when I got home.  I didn’t read or write or watch tv, or even listen to any of my new music, but soaked in a warm bath and went to bed.

The Sunday outing worked to a small but significant degree, though I could not, in my deepest dread have imagined a worse Monday than the last.  It was a Monday better than most.  Our first encounter was sudden and gave neither of us time to throw up but the most meager guard.  I even almost said, “Good morning,” but it just wouldn’t come out.  Instead, we settled for brief, honest eye contact and shy, tight-lipped smiles.  Thomas made her blush later that day–I could see it sixty feet away–and I was jealous and sad, wishing I could do that again, but the next hour, when I was on the desk and Julie was again shelving dvd’s in front of me, I again stared at her as she worked, but, this time, could not work up a passion:   She was there, and little more, though, still, I could not stop staring.

At the store that evening I seemed to be attracting looks and smiles, and at checkout was transfixed for a moment in the clerk’s hazel eyes as she handed me my bags.  If only I knew how this state was induced, I’d climb into that bottle and close it up behind me.  Is it a glimpse of who I really am? of what I could be for someone else? a preview of my reclaimed life?  Sometimes I can almost visualize–literally see–the distance between Julie and my own life.  I can almost take a deep, calming breath and say, “I can do this,” and choose to have my life back, to let Julie go.  Spring is well and truly here, and I don’t want to miss it as I did the last two.

All of those ideas and strategems and conclusions my brain wrought in A Bright, Ironic Hell have turned out to be true, according, now, to my heart.  Before Julie even knew about that blog, before I even admitted I was in love with her, I screamed for separation from her.  It’s been nearly two years since I started writing about this (though it seems like ten).  What would I have to say without her? What would I need to say?  Feeling her departure imminent, I have my last words to her ready.  I will not speak them to her or even write them here (now).  A card will go ’round, and I will write them there, for her and everyone else after me to read–one last embarrassment, one last public announcement that, this time, she can’t drag me out to a coffee shop to avoid.  Her leaving would be a good riddance for me, though, of course, I would miss her; but the void would be filled, I suspect, and hope, by deep calming breaths, a life of my own, a heart that beats more like a man’s instead of a hummingbird’s, and a heart I can give to someone who wants it.  I can do this.

Future Life

My future wife was in the library, but she got away before I could find her.  Or, that’s what I told everyone there.  Tyger dragged me out to the bike rack out front to show me the coolest bike–a girl’s model from the fifties or sixties with a front drum brake, built-in generator for front and rear lights, full wraparound chainguard, and fenders, topped off with the bicycle equivalent of a hood ornament, all of it original–and I said, “I have to find her.”  I scoured the library for a bicycle helmet, in vain.  I must have bordered on indiscretion, maybe even mania, judging by the looks of some patrons at computers and carrels.  I went back to my shelving, distracted, leaving it every five minutes to make sure the bike was still there.  Another hour till lunch:  If the bike was still there then, I was going to camp there beside it.  But a half-hour later the bike was gone.  I didn’t think to leave a note.

Had Julie been at work I might not have made the fuss, or at least not have broadcast it.  In fact, with her gone, I was practically human again, joking and chatting with nearly everyone, going out of my way to find a bond in every encounter.  When I arrived at work I had been already beaten down by an angry morning and was not looking forward to even a minute in Julie’s company.  But even upon realizing Julie had taken the day off, I was angry.  It quickly wore off in the presence of people who carried no grudge against me, who would talk to me and listen to me.  I have found Angie to be particularly comforting.  Of course, she’s no stranger to the Julie saga or its chronicles, but to her I was never the sad, creepy, obsessed guy that so many of our co-workers considered me.

With Julie gone, I can flirt and joke about my failures and foibles in romance.  I can fall in love with a patron I’ve never seen or one that’s just strolled by the circ desk.  I can laugh and have opinions without giving a damn who hears them.  I can be attractive, so I am attractive.  I can feel like I’m showing off my arms in my ringer tee, because I can feel that someone will appreciate them, and I can appreciate the appreciative glances.  Julie’s off today, too, so it will be a nice, long weekend without her.  I’d like to believe the time will give me an insurmountable headstart away from her, but Monday will come soon enough–too soon.  What I’m actually counting on now for that distance is Julie’s leaving.  It seems realistic, though I’m not sure what gives me that feeling.  Maybe it’s just wishful:  Seeing as I have no realistic means of leaving this workplace, it’s not me that has to go from this place that isn’t big enough for the both of us plus a white elephant–and the elephant’s not leaving on its own.  In every workplace there are people who, from the moment they arrive, seem to be looking for a way out.  Julie’s been trying to escape for longer than I’ve been a thorn in her side.  I’m not content at my job (Julie aside), but I like it.  I last gave librarian school serious thought before I finished my English degree.  By then I knew I was not a librarian, was not going to pursue a career that didn’t define me.  I’m a writer, and though I harbor only the most desperate hopes of writing my way out of this day job, it’s what I am, regardless of how many publishers would disagree (if I gave them the chance to).  I won’t make a cent in this forum, but I’m saying what I need to say the way I need to say it.  I don’t know what Julie is, and maybe she doesn’t, either, but she’ll possibly try to find out the way many people do, by getting another job or another degree.  Anyway, I don’t expect her to be here through the year, and I’m almost counting on that to keep me patient for the end of my torment.  Don’t ask me if I want to see her go, because I can’t answer honestly.  I want my life back.  I want to not love her.  That’s not true, but the only alternative is to want her to love me, though no more likely to happen.

With Julie gone, I’ll be free to love someone else, or free to pretend that I want to, anyway.  I don’t want to see my future wife.  I don’t want to be married again.  Do I even want to fall in love again?  If Julie leaves without making peace–and, yes, it is up to her–I will still be in love with her, but making peace would allow us both to move on.  Does Julie have any less at stake than I do?  Monday gets closer and closer.

Ouila Fortune

Another reposting.  (What the hell’s going on, WordPress?)  This one rightly goes between “Homecoming” and “Naydream.”

If this writing is, as I claim, my therapy, what good has it done me besides  prevent a catastrophic public outburst of emotion?  Just made it less public and more slowly and lastingly catastrophic?  I may very well be healing myself emotionally, but I am far from over Julie.  I will have to settle, eventually, for an ugly scar.  Julie appeared in a dream last night, an infrequent occurrence and a rare tender one.  I am frustrated, of course, by not being able to talk to Julie, and I am more so every day; and the white elephant looms so large now in the library that I want to attack it, plunge the longest, sharpest  sword into its dense hide over and over again,  slice it through until I can step straight through its carcass and command Julie to talk to me.  And then Julie passed me on Nuckols road Thursday night after work, and I wanted to flip her the bird.  That’s when I began wondering (yet again) how to get through to her, and I wondered all the way home.  My head and my legs went their different ways, but my legs knew the way home, where I arrived with an uncomfortable solution:  The written word is out of the question–too easy to ignore .  Confrontation is all there is for it–hit-and-run, have my say and walk away confrontation.  Subtlety is not the watchword.

Then the dream, or what I remember of it:  Julie and me together, looking over a note I’d just given her.  The paper tried to curl, so I held it down.  She made a gesture toward the paper that brought her hand under my spidered fingers and in light contact with the outside edge of my hand.  I glanced sidelong at her, but she seemed to place no significance to the gesture.  Neither did she remove her hand.  “What are these lyrics here?” she said.  I was flattered she would call my words lyrics but noticed a gap at the very end.  “The last word is missing,” I said.  She asked what that was, and I said,  “Wee-la–o-u-i-l-a.”*  I won’t pretend to decipher meaning from this fragment, meaning from this fragment, but allow me to puzzle over its friendly tone, considering that only hours before I’d stifled the urge to show her my middle finger.  I’d sure like to know what I’d written.  It seems to have been the right thing.

Working from my hope-made theory that getting over Julie is contingent upon finding someone to (realistically) replace her, how will I do either as long as I write publicly?  This is the slow and (ever-?) lasting catastrophy:  Google would not be my friend.  Everyone googles everyone.  I’ve dragged Julie right to the top of the search results my name conjures.  Is that something I want that special someone to find?  (It never was before.)  And suppose that that someone does?  Instant red flag?  For the majority, no doubt.  But someone, surely, eventually, will not only not see an obsessed creepy,  desperate exhibitionist of emotion but will find a man with nothing but his heart on his sleeve, his head on a stick.  Whatever that’s worth, it’s me, and if these blogs have made that, well then, I guess I’m a self-made man.  Is getting over Julie waiting for someone to find me in my words?  Do your worst, Google–I’ll keep up the good work on my end.

*“ouila,” a web search tells me, is, indeed, a lyric–in a song called “Raba Raba” by Khaled.  It is also in the title of a song by the same artist, “Ouila Ouelet.”  Neither song is in English.  A little help?

Surrender, Desperation

Daughter Emma is reading Walden, my favorite book.  I thought of picking it up again, but then considered that its continuing relevance is indicative of its diligent necessity:  We haven’t learned from it; more that ever do more and more of us lead quietly desperate lives, afraid even to grab the bars of our cages, much less rattle them, even just for attention.  My desperation is louder every day.  It might never again be so quiet as that of Thoreau’s majority of men, but it might always be as desperate.

Mondays are the most desperate–the first workday and eight hours with Julie–and this was the worst Monday ever.  She just gets colder and colder towards me, until I think she must any day now freeze in her tracks and crumble into ice cubes right in front of me.  Julie now refuses, pointedly, to even meet my eye.  Am I being punished for something?  I never wanted to not talk to her or not look at her.  I’m not acting out of spite in avoiding her–she knows that.  I just cannot talk to someone who has made it abundantly clear that they don’t want to talk to me.  What can I do about that?  I can try to get along with them, but that takes two, as well.  Julie’s resentment seems fueled by willfullness.  At least three times I left her presence because my heart was beating out of control and my shoulder turned to stone with stress.  Once, I stepped out back and stared into breaking clouds for ten minutes.  My heart had not calmed, but I had to suck it up and get some work done.  That same hour, I left again, to the public bathroom, where I suddenly interrupted the drying of my hands to pound the dryer.  I felt the lonelier all day for all the chatter weaving haphazardly about the workroom as I quietly trapped holds and repaired books.  I didn’t get an hour out front, so I didn’t even get to talk to someone who wasn’t afraid to talk to me for sensing my torment.

If this were a war, I’d be surrendering unconditionally, but I can’t give in to that attitude.  What would winning or losing even mean?  To consider this warfare is to have already lost.  I don’t want to fight.  During the last hour of the day, I’d resolved to confront her with, “So, what will it take to get you to talk to me again?” but I knew it to be coming from anger.  It was not the confrontation we need to have, so I left before I could encounter her again.

Once I was on the road and out of sight of the library (not that I would look back), I was comparatively euphoric, out of prison.  But I took the bars with me, and I will rattle them loudly wherever I go, especially from this rooftop called the internet, because I will not let my desperation live quietly but will drag it kicking and screaming to its exhaustion and surrender.

Naydream

Julie, two hours before my frustration tempted a crude gesture aimed at you, I watched you from the circ desk, stared at you as you shelved dvd’s.  How I got from there to frustration I don’t know, because I enjoyed the view and the show my imagination made of it immensely.  Your hair lay limp against your neck, but even from twenty feet away I could lift it with the back of my hand, lean in, and push a soft breath on your warm skin to cool the light sweat.  I could then bury my nose against it, breathe deeply of you, and taste your salt with a kiss.  Your hair slides through my fingers and I think of a deeper, darker, hotter jungle I long to explore.  As you bent over the cart, squatted in front of the shelves, and stood again, the cling of your slacks and the clench of your buttocks defined the borders of paradise.

Then into the scene stepped Mr. Gold, your other would-be library paramour.  I had you to myself until he spotted you as he made his way to the copier with a newspaper.  His glance down at you as you knelt on the floor instantly turned his expression to resignation in a tight-lipped frown.  He lifted the copier lid and placed the paper on the glass.  You turned at the sound, recognized him, and turned back to the shelves.  He brought down the lid and turned to look at your back.  As he returned his attention to the copier, I caught his eye.  He reacted to my glare as one chastised, though I have felt pity for him since hearing your backroom derision of him.  Returning to his seat in the periodicals, he tried to catch your eye with a lingering look, but you didn’t oblige.  My reverie dissolved.

The last time we were on the desk together, a few weeks ago, Mr. Gold found a library card on the floor on his way out and started back to the desk with it.  You were busy, I wasn’t, but he wouldn’t come to me.  A week or two before that, I was called for backup.  I came out to see Mr. Gold in line behind a patron you were helping.  He didn’t want my help:  He mouthed something and pointed at you.  I turned on my heel and left.  Julie, is Mr. Gold someone else who needs to go away?  He won’t go away, I won’t go away, no one who wants you will go away.  Which one of us all will you not refuse?  How can you tell who will love you as you are, with your silliness and your sadness, your warmth and your fear?  How do you know it’s not me? i wondered when you whizzed by me at four times my pathetic speed, so easily leaving me behind.

Homecoming

Far from Julie, at Colin’s near the ocean, without internet, writing tools deliberately left behind, Julie’s power became only a dot on the western horizon.  Sunday and Monday nights, as I lay on the hideaway in the living room, nebulous thoughts of her eased me to sleep and woke me the following mornings.  My sisters and I hadn’t been together for more than part of a day for seven years.  I had difficulty connecting the way I wanted to, from my new place.  I conjured Julie a few times, wondering what she’d be doing then, but I didn’t let myself think of the library for long.  As I drove home with Kevyn Tuesday evening, my first time behind the wheel in more than a year (and my first with a stickshift in ten), Julie loomed larger the closer we came to Richmond.  Her image was a comfort.  My heart leapt a few times upon seeing a car like hers (a seafoam Corolla), but dropped again knowing she was still at work.  And this morning, I still feel good thinking about her, as if upon my arrival at work she would greet me with that joyful relief of not having to miss me anymore.  Yet, the fluttering of my heart now is not the anticipation of that moment but the nervous knowledge of the true moment awaiting me.  Distance from Julie did nothing but idealize her, turning her into someone to come home to, because, hard as it is to be with her, I missed her.  She did not miss me–I know that–but she was no doubt relieved to be without me for nearly a week, so I have done her a favor and can at least pretend to feel good about that.  I’ve come home to the old anxiety and will take it to work with me as usual.  It missed me, but I don’t welcome it with the same open arms it offers me.  No distance or time from it is long enough to mellow me to that homecoming.

Common Ground

This is a re-posting.  The original disappeared from the site and even my dashboard list of posts sometime over the weekend.  I can only assume it had been flagged.   Only ten people looked at it.  Can ten people censor me?  Is that all it takes, a few prudes, to form a fascist coalition?  If you don’t like it, don’t read it, don’t pass it on–but don’t you dare decide for someone else what they shouldn’t read.  WordPress didn’t say a word, did not alert me in any way.  By the way, Pascal has given me full permission to quote his correspondence.

Pascal has cooled since our spat, and I miss it.  I suppose that beyond feeling flattered was that of being appreciated without judgment or stipulation, even being a source of inspiration.  But did I step off a pedestal when I protested his passion?  My insecurity couldn’t believe someone could feel such a way for me.  Did Julie feel any of this when I told her she “fascinated” me? or when she found out about being the object of a blog?

Pascal and I have been talking about Julie.  I sent him some snapshots of myself, and he asked for a picture of Julie, so I sent him The Picture that nudged the little snowball on its way down the mountain to where we are today, the picture I am terrified to have but will never relinquish.  Upon seeing it, he said, “Besides being pretty, she is a warm, open and generous person.  Her smile shows [it].”  I replied, with bitterness clouding the truth, “She has not been that to me in over a year.”

Pascal called me a “neurotic romantic,” and how could I disagree?  He understands me.  That’s what I want.  Not advice.  I haven’t gotten much of that that I haven’t given myself, and even from myself it’s just rationale.  Pascal listens without pitying me, without scrambling for words to make me “feel better.”  Even my family can’t listen the way Pascal does.  A Bright, Ironic Hell elicited embarrassment from my father, self-guilt from my mother, threats of intervention from older sister Kevyn, and advisement to seek therapy from psychologist younger sister Shawn.  I don’t know if youngest sister Colin read it.  I’ve let none of them know about Satellite Dance and would be reluctant to talk to them about it if they brought it up.  The writing is my therapy and the intervention.  What might I have done with these emotions had I not had this outlet?  What kind of fool would I have made, and still be making of myself if I had not picked up a pen, instead?  My father would say I’d made fool enough of myself this way, and the rest of the family might simply think it, but I’m no more fool than anyone else and probably less of one than anyone who cannot or will not take a good hard look at their pain and try to accept it and love it, listen to it and hold it.  I cry as I write this, and I’m not ashamed or afraid of it or pity myself for it.  It’s how I feel, and if you cry as you read this I guess you understand (but it’s not requisite).

I told Pascal I missed his passion.  He was amused and not at all surprised.  He said it is my “seduction assets”–”all of you from head to toe and inside.
Knowing how to please and be desired…hair on your chest. your
fore arms, your eyes, lips, fair, cock behind sexy trousers…” (I didn’t send him that kind of pictures)–that I am insecure of.  Though my imagination would describe Julie’s seduction assets with a bit more subtlety, they are no less powerful and maybe even less appreciated by her than I am of mine.  I want to enumerate them, but my pen falls.  I stare at The Picture and can see only the woman I miss.

Stuck in the Middle with Me

Pascal has cooled since our spat, and I miss it.  I suppose that beyond feeling flattered was the knowledge of being appreciated without judgment or stipulation, even being a source of inspiration.  But did I step off a pedestal when I protested his passion?  My insecurity couldn’t believe someone could feel such a way for me.  Did Julie feel any of this when I told her she “fascinated” me? or when she found out about being the object of a blog?

Pascal and I have been talking about Julie.  I sent him some pictures of myself, and he asked for a picture of Julie, so I sent him The Picture that nudged the little snowball on its way down the mountain to where we are today, The Picture I am terrified to have but will never relinquish.  Upon seeing it, he said, “Besides being pretty, she is warm, generous, and open.  Her smile shows [it].”  I replied, bitterness clouding the truth, “She has not been that to me in over a year.” 

Pascal called me a “neurotic romantic,” and how could I disagree?  He understands me.  That’s what I want.  Not advice.  No one’s given me any of that I haven’t given myself, and even from me it’s just rationale.  Pascal listens without pitying me, without scrambling for words to make me “feel better.”  Even my family can’t listen the way Pascal does.  A Bright, Ironic Hell elicited embarrassment from my father, self-guilt from my mother, threats of intervention from older sister Kevyn, and advisement to seek therapy from psychologist, younger sister Shawn.  I don’t know if youngest sister Colin read it.  I’ve let none of them know about Satellite Dance, and I would refuse to talk to them about it if they brought it up.  The writing is my therapy and the intervention.  What might I have done with these emotions had I not had this outlet?  What kind of fool would I have made, and still be making, of myself if I had not picked up a pen, instead?  My father would say I’d made fool enough of myself this way, and the rest of the family would just think it, but I’m no more fool than anyone else and probably less of one than anyone who cannot or will not take a good hard look at heir pain and try to accept it and love it, listen to it and hold it.  I cry as I write this, and I’m not ashamed or afraid of it or pity myself for it.  It’s how I feel, and if you cry as you read this then I guess you understand.

I told Pascal I missed his passion.  He was amused and not at all surprised.  He said it is my “seduction assets”–”all of you from head to toe and inside.
Knowing how to please and be desired…hair on your chest. Your
fore arms, your eyes, lips, fair, cock behind sexy trousers…” –that I am insecure of.  Though my imagination is no less vivid, I would describe Julie’s seduction assets a bit more subtlely, but they are no less powerful.  I want to enumerate them now, as I stare at The Picture, but my pen falls.  I can see only the woman I miss.

Grownups, Better and Worse

Pascal and I had our first spat and have gotten past it.  I tried to quell his expression of sexual passion for me by telling him I could never feel the same way about him.  However true (he said, “You don’t know that”), I didn’t need to say it, and I’m not sure why I did, except that I couldn’t join in his pleasure.  From a woman, yes.  But I didn’t mean to hurt him.  We come from such different cultures, lifestyles, and upbringings that there have to be misunderstandings along the road to knowing each other.  But we’re over it, like grownups.

My fantasies with Julie I will never send to her, of course, and I could never call our misunderstandings a spat, something we could simply set aside in order to move on.  What moving on could there be when one of us pretends it will just have to go away and the other pretends that it will be resolved amicably?  It won’t just go away, because, for Julie, it likely means me going away; and, for me, an amicable resolution is her falling in love with me.  Neither is a realistic solution to the problem, and either neither of us knows what that solution is, or we don’t have the strength to effect it.  I am in love with Julie.  What solution is there to that?  I recognize my fantasies as hope disguised, so they cannot be fantastic enough for me to hide in from the reality.  How far I go with Julie on her sofa does not get me any closer to penetrating her sadness, which seems deeper every day.  What can I do?  Last week I broke through and asked her, “How are you?”  We had not spoken to each other in quite some time.  She responded brightly, maybe a bit surprised, “I’m fine!  How are you?”  I didn’t really want her to ask me back, sincere as she may have been.  I turned from her smile and eyes and said to the computer, “Okay.”  That was all we said that hour on the circ desk, a week ago today, and have said nothing since.  We are acting like grownups, but shy, non-assertive grownups.  We are not a couple, so this cannot be a spat.  We cannot agree to disagree, apologize  and move on, still wanting to be friends.

What are we?  What can we be?  Fantasy can’t entertain these questions, much less answer them.  But neither can Julie, it seems, and I seem to be pursuing the answers through an ever-denser thicket of emotional and psychological brambles until I just have to stop and imagine the stings gone and the wounds healed in the arms of a small, soft, lyart-haired woman.

Sofa, So Good

I have been spending a lot of time on that sofa with Julie.  Nigel treats me with sharp disdain, jealous, though he has no idea how much moreso I am of him.  He, at least, is not imaginary, nor is the lap he often fills.  But there I am, anyway, imaginary, pretending:  We’re watching tv, maybe Fawlty Towers or As Time Goes By, on dvd.  I’m leaning back where she had been.  Julie is between my legs, lying back, head on my chest.  I try but can’t reach her hair with my lips. When I think that I would rather be watching Me and Mrs. Jones with her, I realize how much I would miss her big, open laughter.  Besides, I have no say and don’t want any.  I will enjoy what she enjoys.  I have spent a lot of negative energy trying not to like what Julie likes, but there was never any truth to any of it.  My energy can be better spent, more positively expended, just sitting here and letting her share.

Julie turns off the tv, softly moans with contentment, and sinks further into me.  My deep breath heaves her, my long sigh brings her back to me.  She tells me why she likes British shows, but though I listen, my imagination can’t hear her explanation.  She is too real.  I can’t make her up.  She isn’t a fictional character on whom I can hang traits like ornaments, dress up to my standards, and carry about like a doll.  There is much I want her to be and want her to like, but I don’t know who she is or what she is like outside of work, and my imagination can’t fool me to my satisfaction.

I can imagine sitting on her floor as she pulls out box after box of a massive music collection and talks about her dj days in college, both of which I’m achingly envious of.  But I don’t want to hear about the music I know we both like–Trashcan Sinatras, XTC, Prefab Sprout, Squeeze–because the reality is that I can’t yet listen to them again.  I can easily imagine her liking The Smiths, NewOrder/Joy Division, and The Cure, but I want to hear her rave, too, about OMD, Heaven-17, The Jam, Simple Minds,  and Split Enz.  I want her to tell me she likes The Psychedelic Furs so I can tell her about seeing them in Glasgow in ’81.  I can’t hope that she’d like Elvis Costello before he married Diana Krall, but I imagined too vividly that she liked James until, on that black Tuesday last week, when after listening to Hey Ma at work, I nearly fell to pieces, prompting me to throw it on the donation pile the next day.  (Right now, “Under the Waterfall” runs through my head.)  Until there is an “us” of me and Julie, I don’t want to know she likes Belle and Sebastian; they are mine until she is, too.

There are, though, certain imaginings that reality can’t obviate, and they take us back to the sofa with my arm across Julie’s belly under her pajamas.  It slides up until her breasts rest upon it.  Under her chin my other hand glides down her throat, thumb and middle finger diverging at the bottom to trace her clavicle, my palm slowly flattening against the top of her chest….  That much of Julie I can imagine quite well without the “knowing”, and I’m grateful that she can be at least that real, since the reality of her is not available to me.

Am I the Prince or Cinderella?

Someone is in love with me.  He is a reader.  His passion is startling and unabashed.  He is thousands of miles away across an ocean.  To say I’m flattered would be to marginalize his ardor.  No, “flattered” is rebuffing a friendly advance from a member of my own sex.  I’m kind, letting them know I’m both flattered and heterosexual. I don’t think I’ve ever hurt anyone’s feelings that way.  Angie,  describing a gay friend’s troubles, said, “Well, he chose to be that way.  I guess he doesn’t mind.”  A choice?  Imagine, getting all the attention I could handle–only, I don’t want a man.  Though being the idol of a man’s masturbatory fantasies is a little uncomfortable, I’m still flattered.  Hey,  someone  thinks I’m “hot and sexy”!

But am I in Julie’s shoes now?  I try to convince myself of the absurdity of that question, but I’m not laughing.  Pascal’s passion is flattering but frightening, like something I might have to defend myself against yet not trusting my battlements to withhold the onslaught.  Is that Julie?  Is Pascal’s passion also mine for Julie?  This is a mirror I really don’t want to look into, knowing and fearing the naked image staring back, saying, “Look at me!  Stop pretending I don’t exist!”–my other half, my compassion, my connection to humanity, my understanding of Julie, my total immersion in New Emotional World.  Yes, I’m in that world, but the umbilical to the old is long and tough.  I’m sorry, but I just can’t look.

Yet I’m feeling more vulnerable than perhaps I ever have.  I was a quivering wreck at work yesterday from the moment of our first non-encounter in the hall:  I stared, she glanced till recognition, then pretended not to see me as we passed one another.  I stared at her every chance–goddammit! why can’t I not look at her?–and was not discreet about it.  God, I must seem such a creep!  She came within inches of me, politely asking permission to squeeze in a book on a cart in front of which I knelt.  I mumbled assent and stumbled frantically out of the way, though I would rather have fallen the other way, into her.  Oh, what I wouldn’t pay for just a touch!  And another half day with her today before I’m away from her for a long weekend.  There is a chance, I know, for today to be better than yesterday, but I know, too, that it would take a leap beyond quantum proportions to affect it.  I would have to be the man I wish I were–assertive, confident, extroverted. My resolve to greet her when we first meet dissolves instantly when I see her eyes hardened against it.  Is it a challenge?  What if I stood up to it, actually smiled and said, “Hello, Julie”?  That would be more than a baby step.  Then I think of all I’m not allowed to say to her, and I want to resolve to say nothing till she speaks to me.  I know she’s trying, though, and it can’t be easy breaking through to me, either.  Besides the awkward encounters, Julie has tried to be nice to me, but my inability to respond in kind has not encouraged her.  I have to be the man and step up.  I can’t live this quivering, anxious life.  I imagine that man and know I could be him for Julie, given the chance.  Is it a chance I have to make, or is it a chance Julie has to give me?  I can’t see–or just can’t look.

A Guy Can Dream–If Nothing Else

What is it like, Julie, for someone to be in love with you and not be in love with them?  What is it like to be beautiful and not believe it?  Who is the man you can believe and love?  So many questions, so many more yet.  My imagination can answer them, but not in your voice, so my heart won’t believe it.  Imagination has taken me far–right up to your moat–but from there I can only shoot peas at the drawbridge.  But though I can’t walk across it, I can at least see through it:  You on the sofa in pale pink brushed-flannel pajamas sparsley printed with small butterflies.  An herbal tea steeps in the same teacup as always on the same corner of the glass coffee table.  Nigel, purring, lies like a laying hen, feet tucked under him, on the afghan across the back of the sofa.  Your feet are curled to your haunches.  You lean on the sofa’s arm.  What is that book in your lap?  What’s on the tv?  Which are you paying more attention to? Or do your own thoughts dominate?  It’s harder to see what you’re thinking.  At work you don’t converse about ideas but things.  But then who at work with whom you talk has ideas?  Who do you trust with what you think?

Do you trust anyone with what you feel?  I think you are very active outwardly at denying your inward activity.  You don’t want to be alone, but you don’t do anything about it.  What’s to do?  Who could possibly understand you?  You struggle with a lifetime of unexpressed emotion and aching needs  you don’t know how to fill.  I wouldn’t believe you if you denied this.  Deny it to yourself–you are much better at it than a I have been since I met you–but I’m not fooled, because in you I see who I once was.  Maybe you have admitted the resemblance.  That could be reason enough to not want to have anything to do with me:  Who wants someone who reminds them of the traits they would like to overcome?  Misery doesn’t want company, but why assume the company will also be miserable?  Misery is always alone.  Company changes misery.

What does it take to be loved by you, Julie?  What do you love?  What do you need?  What fantasy soothes your heart?  Big, hard arms to enfold you within them?  A warm, thudding chest to nestle into?  Calloused hands to arouse the sensitivities of your body?  My fantasy is to match yours–to hold you as you want to be held, to touch you as you want to be touched, to kiss you here, here, here…and right there.  Just let me dream of you, Julie.  It’s so much better than not knowing you, so much more fun than stealing glances of you.  This way I can lay your book aside, turn off your tv, and slide a hand under your pajama top and across your belly.  Let your tea grow cold; you’re warm enough now.  I am not the man you will allow to love you, but I will love you, nevertheless, for there is nowhere my imagination is not allowed, and you are its favorite destination.  Lie back, close your eyes.  I’m right here.

Two Divided by Pride

My way of showing my love to Julie is cruel.  I searched for a better word, but I was searching for a word to ameliorate my guilt, to rationalize my actions, actions dictated by pride.  It’s deeper, even, than that, or perhaps just ingrained now.  There’s a layer I need to break through, chip away at to get to the compassionate human inside me.  I can’t keep hurting–myself or anyone else.  It is not a perverse indulgence of my vanity to believe that I have hurt and am still hurting Julie.  If she were not hurt, if she had laid all this aside, she would not be afraid of contact with me.  Of course, the same could be said of me, and that’s where we stand:  Two hurt, headstrong people unable to get past pride to reconciliation.  But, at this point, what is reconciliation?  One of the most truthful and meaningful (and last) personal things Julie said to me was that our relationship was “damaged.”  Our respective interpretations of that word are no doubt different.  The designation itself is open to interpretation; in fact, it’s still difficult for me to understand just how I did the “damage.”  I fell in love, and I expressed it.  I did not tell her such, and I did not express my frustrations, either–to her.  She was not meant to know them, but she found them out.  Thus, the damage:  I had cast bitter aspersions meant only to relieve my hurt, meant only to be read by the sympathetic, but, indiscreetly, I allowed them to circulate.  I had also recounted private conversations between us.  I don’t know which she found more unforgivable, but the grudge sits there between us, square-jawed and defiant.  My grudge sits opposite–the same prideful grudge, but with softer, supplicant eyes begging forgiveness, pleading for escape from this tyrannical standoff.  But nothing will be done.  Two people, fearful of each other’s–and their own–emotions will only step close enough to add another brick to the wall pride builds between them.  Wouldn’t one step more lightly without the brick? advancing to remove one, instead?

Cruelty abides in my love for Julie as a pain of unrequition, but that pain is no one’s fault; no one did that damage.  I must move that pain to a place of its own, where it can live out its days in seclusion.  There is no room in my heart for it.  I must make more room for compassion.

Love Regardless

Another weekend without Julie is closing, but I achieved no distance from her, and her smoke will envelope me tomorrow.  Saturday, just stepping outside made me hopeful of running into Julie, an unlikelihood at the best of times, an impossibility now that we don’t work the same weekend.  I wonder how standoffish she’d be if we did chance to see each other in public, or what attitude I would take toward her regardless of her own.  I would be tempted, as it would be my only chance, to tell her what she won’t allow me to say at work–which is anything that is in any way a reference to what’s gone between us or how I feel about her.  That’s all I have to talk to her about, in or out of work, anymore.  I don’t want to taunt her about it.  I want to air it out, get it out on the way, laugh about the absolute absurdity of two people grudging each other civility over perceived slights, none of which either understand.  Julie cannot laugh about this.  I can laugh about it only with Judy, Sujatha or Thomas the courier.  What makes the way I feel about her embarrassing to her?  I’m not a puppy humping her leg.  I love her, and if she doesn’t love me back, what’s to do about it?  Nothing.  No notes, comments, tokens–those days are over for good, for, much as I might like to rouse her emotions, the only one I would ever get out of her would be ire, no matter the friendliness of my intention.  I don’t doubt that she knows how I feel about her.  What frightens her about that?

Oh, Julie, what are we doing?  What is shifting weekends or me transferring to another branch going to solve?  Do you really think that all it takes to make things better between us is separation? that that will allow you to ignore the threat to your emotions?  What about the next man to fall in love with you?  Where will you hide from him?  I love you, and if that means nothing to you, then why do you sometimes look at me with such hardness that I think you want to slap me?  Did I tell you to love me back? or force you to make a decision?  The power is yours, and always has been, to make things better for yourself.  I haven’t even the power to defend myself should you attack, which I think you have wanted to do for quite  some time.  Forget the part of you that knows  better.  How do you feel?  I won’t go to my knees to plead for your love, or climb upon a white horse to gallop to your glass castle, but neither will I pretend that you are just another co-worker, just another woman.  You are simply the only woman I’ve loved.  You don’t have to love me back, but you don’t have to hate me, either.

Monday, Julie will do her best to ignore and avoid me, and I will do my worst at pretending not to notice.  Thomas will give her a squeeze then tell me privately how good it felt, how soft she is in certain places, and I will make his day by burning with jealousy.  That’s why he does it, and we both know it, but last Monday I told him, “Sometimes I think she does it for the same reason you do–to fuck with me,” and that any room with the three of us in it was too small and I would be the one leaving it.  I have been true to my word.  I can hide from Thomas, but Julie will asphyxiate me.  The weekend did anything but build up my defenses against her.

NEWhere Man

NEW is a horrible, raw place, but I can be nowhere else.  I could easily go back to the old place, but as comparatively safe and familiar as it is, it is not a good place to be; and as painful as NEW is, it’s pain I must go through.  Old pain for new:  Constant throbbing pain for intermittent, white-hot-dagger stabs to the heart.  NEW is still not a place for words beyond those most humble.  That’s why they come so slowly–little sentences between big, watery stares out the window at the waning winter.  Spring always comes–life from death, new hope. 

NEW seems not a place for a man, though it must welcome everyone.  The tears come closer every day–yesterday at work, this morning when Emma smiled at me at the breakfast table–but I’m a man.  A man’s tears are not consoled with sympathy but shunned with embarrassment.  That angers me and shames away any chance of catharsis, and that angers me more.  Where words fail is where tears come in.  Denied the words, denied the tears, what is left to express what I feel?

Better the Julie I Don’t Know

The library at which I work is open till nine the first four days of the week.  Each of us works two of the evenings, our day starting at twelve-thirty.  Friday and Saturday the library closes at six.  Half of us work alternating weekends.  Before Julie was on my radar, we worked the same schedule–Wednesday and Thursday nights, same weekend.  Before I asked her out, she switched her Wednesday evening to Tuesday.  A couple weeks ago, she switched weekends with Becky.  I now have two whole days and two half days with Julie.  This is Friday.  Julie was at a training class yesterday.  Monday is a full day together.  I may need more time to write this.  Without Julie I have much more room.  She fills the library when she’s there, like smoke.  I take small breaths so I don’t choke.  Emotional survival is my only goal.  Her absence does not stop me thinking of her but stretches and thins the emotional wall to an  opaque veil, until I can almost think of her irrelative to my desire for her.  I need to be in that state from now till I finish this.

What is Julie to me now?  Julie is not May.  May would, of course, would not exist but for Julie, but Julie is just the framework for the character.  The rest I make up from what I know, filling the gap of my ignorance with imagination, extrapolating the girl I want from the girl I know.  But May would not exist if I knew Julie.  I would not be projecting my hopes onto May, because they would have been realized in Julie.  What Julie is to me is a fascination, a toy I can’t put down, a puzzle half of which I don’t have–the half in the box with the picture on it.  She is a regret:  I chose ego preservation over compassion.  I had the chance to get to know all about her.  I attacked her, instead, already digging out my pound of flesh for the perceived wrong of rejecting me, never considering how hard it was for her.  What I heard as patronizing–”If I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know”–was a nervous attempt at appeasement, appeasement I was too proud to accept.  She had considered my feelings, something I hadn’t done for either of us.  At last, I’m grateful for that.

My fascination with Julie I’ve never been able to quite trace to its source.  Perhaps I simply wanted to be fascinated by her.  Perhaps I really had no choice.  It has continued unabated and grows with each offhanded, overheard snippet of information she proffers to coworkers who aren’t me.  Those snippets plus what she told me of herself while she still trusted me add up to the Julie I know:  The fourth of four, the others boys; the third died in his early twenties after a very long illnes; the oldest predated her by sixteen years.  She “grew up in” northern Virginia, though her parents lived in a few different places before settling there.  She worked for Borders for thirteen years and is bitter about being let go.  She has a horticulture degree but would rather have (in hindsight) studied voice and/or “design.”  Her father died six years ago, her mother a month ago.  Add a few like/dislikes and personal observations and it’s only just enough to madden my curiosity.

The Julie I extrapolate from what I know and have observed was not born in northern Virginia but likely moved there before school age.  Her father I’ve narrowed to two professions–college teacher or military, leaning toward military, based on something else I know:  Julie was not on the academic track in high school but distributive education.  That is, she was preparing herself, it seems, for a commercial career, not a liberal arts education, which I can’t imagine would sit well with a teacher-parent.  Northern Virginia tells me “government job”  for retired/decommed dad.  It also tells me “very white upringing in a vast surburbia,” evidenced also by the fact that she had to ask who did “Ball of Confusion.”  Julie isn’t two years younger than I am.  If she didn’t hear that song on the radio, then she was a in a demographic that wouldn’t have been exposed to it that way.  Her brothers, I surmise, were not so much her protectors as whom she needed protection from (oldest brother excepted).  This I make out from her being so tough (outwardly), self-protective, and emotionally guarded.  As the youngest and a girl, she was likely daddy’s little girl and not real close to her mother.  I doubt she’s ever had many true, lasting friendships–plenty of acquaintances but no confidants.  She aches to be more outgoing.

Julie’s darkness attracts me perhaps more even than her beauty.  I want to know that darkness (though maybe I do already; my own might not be dissimilar), be with her in it, walk out of it with her–but I am not a knight, or a prince;  and if that isn’t what she needs, it’s at least what she wants, I would bet.  A bigger man than I would be happy to see her happy with the right man.  I want her to be happy, but I want the right man to be me.  When that man comes along–and I really do want him to–I don’t want to see it.  I don’t want to experience it in any way.  I would be happy for her, but I woud be devastated for me.  There is heartbreak in her darkness, and shame and regret.  I recognize it.

I accept all the attractants that tie me to Julie–her beauty, her darkness, all the common interests, her sexuality.  The pedestal on which I’d placed Julie has never been more than a shabby simulacrum of rotten wood and mis-hit nails.  She’s always been a whole woman to me:  It hasn’t been just her lips and neck I’ve wanted to press my lips against, not just the contours of her face I’ve wanted to trace, not just the hair I could see that I’ve wanted to comb my fingers through.  Why am I only now able to admit this?  (The more I consider the answer, the more rhetorical seems the question.)

This is Monday now, long after work, close to bedtime.  Julie has made no effort toward reconciliation; I have not made another.  I suppose for Julie it is just not worth the effort, or she just can’t make it; or she doesn’t trust me–or herself.  I want to get along, and I can’t believe she doesn’t at least want that, too.  This isn’t going to get better for either of us until she wants it to.  I may be asking her to be assertive beyond her usual capacity, but isn’t that what growth is?  We’re both stunted, rooted firmly in a barren clay of stubbornness, but I’m not content to wither in this rotten excuse for soil.  There’s better to be had.  Doesn’t knowing that obligate one to pursue it?

A Bright New Purgatory

This new world is so featureless as to have me floating in a white space. Or is the light just too bright? It would be ironic of me to try to describe it further, but who’s afraid of a little irony?

The irony is that I might have to write about writing in order to see anything here. I’m struggling against the pull to the style of A Bright, Ironic Hell—a chronicle—as Julie begins to dominate Satellite Dance. I’ve talked of no one else for what seems a long time. I don’t talk of pursuing love. I hope I’m not pursuing Julie, because, in this place, I might be powerless to stop it. Right now—god—I just want things better between us. Hope would make a lot more of it than that, but it doesn’t have the sway it once had. Hope of Julie loving me is a fantasy, and I know what’s real: I reached out today. I said “good morning” to Julie. Her identical reply practically ended with a question mark. I didn’t try to make eye contact. It was the best I could do. Nothing more all day. Julie made no effort till the end of the day when she said, nearly out the door, “Goodnight,” without turning back. Mike and I were talking as I was finishing donning my rain gear, so she was addressing both of us. My only hope—and this is not a fantasy—is that she will greet me one morning soon. I just want to know that she thinks it’s worth it. I want her to come out and play again.

The king of this new emotional world (let’s call it NEW from now on) is not the despot the old one was. It does not shout for retribution or justice. It lets the old king do everything it used to do but with a detached benevolence that could almost be inferred, by pride, as a patronizing indulgence. The lion is now a mouse, its roar a squeak. The new king is a new kind of despot. He leads with a silence pregnant with hopefully expectant instruction, but he doesn’t so much as give examples to follow. He’s the government that governs least, but I don’t know what to do with the responsibility he’s left me.

I trust him, but I don’t feel encouraged by him.  He’s like my father that way.  I talked to my father the other day.  He’s glad I’m writing but wishes I weren’t so publicly emotional.  Not that he put it like that.  He didn’t even mention the blogs (he never would), and I’m surprised to think that he’d even have read any of them, but he cares me for me, in his way, and always has, I know, though his way has not been enough for me.  That is how he and the new king are not alike.

Over the course of writing this post–it seems like a week but has only been a few days–the NEW landscape has still not taken on a topography.  I’m disappointed to still be floating without orientation.  I’m in a transiti0n to a place that doesn’t yet exist, or I’m there and can’t see it.  I want to get there but don’t know if I’m moving toward it or away from it, or if I’m moving at all.  Despite the frustration, I trust.  At least it’s a bright place.

What the Hell’s on the Other End of This See-Saw?

This emotional life isn’t easy to live.  How could it be, for someone not bred to it?  I used to refer to myself in this state of sensitivity as a “raw nerve” or an “open wound,” but it’s simply the opposite horizon from cold, rational arrogance.  It’s the words–they don’t know what to do.  The problem is not that I don’t trust the words, but that they don’t seem to belong.  They are humbled by a world they once dominated.  I’m not concerned with bringing the words back to dominance, but with how to express my heightened emotional sensitivity with the humbled words–and without irony.  The man behind the curtain has been exposed.  It’s time he fessed up to not being all-wise and all-powerful and to use his true skills to lift one from the knees he had cowed them unto.  Words have a lot to learn here.

Ten seconds of Julie Friday, and I was just about ready to hand the reins back over to Words.  Julie came in to shelve to make up some snow time.  When I first saw her, I thought, “Dammit!” and said, “Why does she have to be here?”–quietly, I hope.  She stayed in Children’s the entire two hours, I think.  Anyway, I didn’t see her again until I emerged from the mailroom into the adjoining corridor, where coats are hung.  She had just shrugged on her coat and was bending to pick up her plastic grocery tote.  Dammit, again, but I said nothing.  Her back remained to me even as I turned the corner around her, it turning with me.  I stared at her the whole time, but could not get through the shield.  I thought if I made eye contact I might be able to at least wish her a goodbye.  But I knew I wouldn’t, because I’d decided the moment I saw her there that I wouldn’t speak to her, and my conscience was taking the beating of its life.  For the next two hours I worked myself up close to tears.  When I wasn’t angry and self-hating, throwing books and smacking the computer screen, I was practically catatonic, heaving great sighs while staring at nothing.

I wanted someone to talk to.  On my weekend shift there are only three sympathetic choices–Angie, Megan, and Mike.  My intention, once I’d narrowed the field, was to bribe someone with at least a drink to listen to me whine for a while after work.  But Angie and Megan, I knew already, were going to second jobs after work, and Mike, who doesn’t drink, is, well…a guy, and, nice as he is, he is not experienced with women.  Anyway, I really wanted to talk with one of the women.  Faced with that impossibility, I suddenly felt better, relieved.  There was nothing I could do about it, so I let it go.  It was not even a decision but a a matter of course.  If my conscience was still beleaguered, at least the flogging had stopped.

That was also the moment I realized I had to speak to Julie–not have a talk with her, but say “Hello” or “Good morning.”  I can do that, though not much, if anything, else.  No small talk–I don’t want to hear “How are you?” because I can’t yet pretend to be on that casual a basis with a woman I’m in love with.  How could I possibly answer “Fine” when my temperature has just spiked two degrees, and I have to roll up my sleeves and open another buttonhole on the front.  By the time I left Friday, I was not exactly happy, except to be out of the depths I’d dug myself down into.

This emotional life, I know, is not just the opposite horizon but the other extreme on the spectrum.  Of course, I’m ultimately after a balance of the emotional and the rational but often overcompensation is the only way to tip the scale back to center.  I don’t know how much compensation is overcompensation, but surely I’ve made a difference.  If not, I have very long way to go yet.

Is There a Toolkit for This Job?

I was about to ask, “Do I really have a broken heart?”  I’d thought that perhaps I was unworthy of such a state.  I mean, it’s not as if Julie and I actually had any intimacy together.  Can you break up a non-realtionship?  Who’s responsible for my heart?  Who can break it but me?  A heart is broken by dashed hopes–one’s own hopes betrayed by reality.  Reality can’t be faulted.  In my more bitter moments, I try to blame Julie, but for what?  For not sharing my hopes?  I broke my heart by not accepting that reality.  It’s difficult to deny a hope its due.  Sometimes it seems hope can only wait so long before it accepts a proxy.  Hope accepts the proxy by turning a deaf ear to the heart.  A heart is broken by not being heard.  That is why my heart is broken.  The heart is the seat of humble wisdom, the head the loud, arrogant bully with all the answers. I never could stand confrontation.  But this isn’t a war.  I want it to be a conversation.  If the brain could just say, “I’m listening” and the heart could just say, “I understand,” what more would either need to say?  An ideal:  As I consider the possibility of ever reaching that ideal, my thoughts turn bitter and my ears thunder with the pressure behind the eyes that want to cry.  How much more can a heart break?

I am just self-conscious enough to care about sounding self-pitying or maudlin.  My words are honest, if unsure, treading in a wordless place.  I wouldn’t dare turn back, though (if I can help it).  I want my words in a dangerous place of difficult, nearly invisible terrain, the going arduous and outwardly spiralling to no destination.  Hardly seems worth it, huh?  But the head has had its way; it’s time it was led.  Let it take notes, lay down bread crumbs, but don’t let that know-it-all presume to know where it’s going.  Not that I can stop it trying or interfering.  How else will I write the words?

Am I pitying myself?  To say  that I feel sad and that I’m emotionally sensitive–moved to tears by pop songs and greeting card sentiments–is only an acknowledgement of the sadness and sensitivity.  I sometimes despair that I will always be sad, but I welcome the sensitivity.  I still laugh and enjoy music; and I still hope and wish and fantasize–more often now with a glimmer instead of under a cloud.  No telling for how much longer–no need to care.  I love Julie,  Why should there be anything to “do” about it?  There is no hope to be drawn from that fact, nor from the fantasies of her that thrill me:  I stared at her today–from behind, of course–and I felt three fingers of my left hand on the right side of her neck gently sweep the hair aside, like parting a drape, and my lips land softly in the down under her ear.  (Oh!)  That is what I have.  It may be all I have, but what’s to pity?

My heart is broken.  I’m sure of that.  It will heal.  I’m sure of that, too, but it’s hard to have faith in it.  I felt angry at Julie when she said that fixing our relationship was all up to me, because I thought she was saying she didn’t care enough about it to do anything for it.  Now, I know she was right.  I’d broken my heart without her help.  How could I ask her to fix it?  But how can I even ask me to fix it?  What can I do but be a friend to it–listen to it, comfort it, love it.  That will be hard enough; I haven’t done that for anyone yet.

Father to the Man/Child

My girls are now closer to fourteen than thirteen, and boys are showing interest in them.  A boy asked Emma out.  She was surprised.  All she could say, after recovering from the shock, was, “I don’t think so?”  The boy said, “I failed, ” turned, and walked away.  A friend of hers thought he did it on a bet.  I told her I thought  it might have been more of a dare (if that), a push from his friend to do what he was afraid to do.  I was washing dishes when Emma told me this, and I looked down in the sink at my yellow-rubbered hands and saw an important opportunity to move this generation of young women in the right direction.

I said, ” I hope you can appreciate how hard it must have been for him to ask you out.”

“I’m sure it was hard,” she said.

“I asked a girl out when I was thirteen.  It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.  She said yes, but the date was the second hardest thing to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t know what to do.  I didn’t know what to say.  I was so boring.  It was excruciating”:  Two hours watching The Paper Chase in a dark theatre, all the time wanting to just touch her, then standing outside waiting an eternity for my dad to come pick us up.  I’ve blocked out the agonizing details from my memory.

Emma doesn’t have feelings one way or another for this boy, Taylor.  She was neither flattered nor repulsed by his advance.  It’s just what boys at this age do, and what girls at this age prepare themselves for.  It’s not love or romance, and it’s certainly not sex–ironically, considering the whole ritual is put into motion by hormones.

A boy told Keely she was the prettiest of the Burn triplets.  She didn’t know what to say.  Her sisters weren’t envious.  Claire, as far as I know, has not been attended upon by boys, but Claire might not tell me if she had.

Every day with them–and I get fewer than two a week–I feel less a man than a father.  My problems mean nothing while I try not to lose touch with teenagers growing away from me.  Soon enough I won’t be “Daddy” anymore.  Next year they’ll be in high school.  Will it be then that I become an embarassment on Wednesday mornings waiting with them and their peers for the school bus?  They are all I have, but I am not all they have, and they will have ever more as they move deeper into adulthood, and I, it seems from this gloomy end of the tunnel, will have that much less.  I can’t see a woman taking their place (it wouldn’t be her place, anyway), though I can see my desperation for companionship increasing in proportion to the growing distance from my daughters.  Or will my desperation manifest in a pathetic clinging to my daughters?

It’s doubtful that I’ll allow any boy–or man–to be good enough for my daughters, but that could stretch the gulf between us to an unnavigable distance.  How can I be both a man and a father when I feel so inadequate as either?

The Other Two Days I’m in Purgatory

At the beginning of this month, this year, I began to think of Julie as a sad thing of the past, an embarassment of my immaturity.  After all, there was Sandra now, and Jackie–possibilities, ways out of this now lustreless hell.  But there is no Sandra, and how seriously am I really considering Jackie when going to see her I’d hoped to see Julie?  Holidays, comp days, illness, and family emergencies conspired as well in the delusion:  Julie’s physical distance is my emotional distance.  She’s back, and I can’t be sure of anything, except that I still want her and will never have her, and that moving on emotionally and psychologically means moving on physically.  But I’m not going anywhere but to hell and back five times a week.

When Julie was not around this month, or I not around Julie, I had fictional May with whom I could sympathize and allow myself to try to understand.  I could listen to the band James and hear intelligent sensitivity.  With Julie at work again, James is preciously pretentious, overproduced and hopelessly stuck in the eighties.  Last month, before May came along, I gave up on Julie’s favorite band, Trashcan Sinatras, to the extent of taking the CD’s of them I owned to work and throwing them on the donations heap in the workroom, where they languished conspicuously for a couple weeks before I decided to take them back for “May” to listen to.  They weren’t there.  I suspect Julie of having taken them, finally, after initially vowing not to, herself suspecting correctly who put them there and fearing the notes that surely lurked inside them.  (This speculation is not as far-fetched as it appears.  My first conversation with Julie featured Trashcan Sinatras, and shortly trhereafter she lent me two CD’s.)  I left no notes.

May languishes now, but I hope the present long weekend affords me the distance from Julie that brings me closer to May.  I try to consider Julie as no more than a specimen, a model for May.  It is, of course, ironic that it is the only way I can empathize with either.  When I thought I was over Julie I thought I would also lose my motivation to tell the story, much as I thought when I began the story that I would lose motivation to continue Satellite Dance.  I fight both ideas.  May cannot be real without Julie, but cannot be real enough without a full transference of emotional attachment, and that would seem to entail a detachment from my hopes of Julie loving me, the true “sad thing of the past” I had thought was Julie just a month ago.  If I can’t have Julie, I can have May, but what new girl wants the old girl hanging around? especially when the only thing keeping her around is the boy?

Holding My Breath Waiting for Satan to Slip on His Ice Skates

Julie’s mother died last week, about a year after her stroke.  Still, I managed not to talk to Julie.  At best, I’m horrible at offering comfort in such a situation.  It was not a lack of compassion.  It hurt and hurts still to think of Julie alone in her mother’s house, her brothers eventually leaving town again to get back to their homes and families; Julie surrounded by her mother in the shape of what she left behind, sifting through the memories of intrinsically valueless things in a practical, necessary effort to distill sentiment into a portable burden, the burden anyone with such a loss carries.  And I’m jealous.  Her mother’s funeral was Saturday.  I was working.  So were others, but some still took the time to go.  Mike went, and I couldn’t have been greener, though I’ve always known he’s not attracted to Julie.  I was jealous of the attention Julie got without me, but if I’d been there, I’d have wanted her attention.  I told myself she wouldn’t want me there, as if my presence could possibly have dampened the surprise I’m told she felt upon seeing coworkers there.  Only for my sake was it best I wasn’t there.  Even now, when I consider how it would have been at least a nice gesture to be there, I wonder what kind of points it would have scored me.  How could I ever have thought I was worthy of her love or capable 0f giving her mine?

Julie took off today, the first workday after the funeral, and I spent the entire time thinking about her.  I will tomorrow, too, no doubt, as I avoid her, stare at her furtively, and try now and then to make eye contact.  I wish I knew what love was.  I want to know if that’s what I’m feeling for her.  I think I love her yet am not in love with her.  I think that’s possible.  I think it would help if it were.  But if I loved Julie I would be kinder to her, not expect and hope for so much from her.  I’m not going to say I’m a horrible person.  I’m not.  It hurts to be the way I am toward her, but I don’t know how to stop.

I thought about her on the way in to work, too, and by the time I got there I was angry, having yet again revisited her betrayal of A Bright, Ironic Hell to all the managers in the building and how a week later I get an “apology” passed through one coworker and another admitting she “overreacted.”  And I just can’t let it go.  When will I ever?  How far am I from love when I feel that way?

What Is This Position Called? and Can I Ever Hope to Get Out of It Again?

After all, maybe there’s Jackie.

The weekend after Christmas, Matt invited me over for dinner.  He also invited Chris, who I hadn’t seen since his party Memorial Day, when I’d hoped to see Jackie.  In the second grade, when I was still an outgoing kid, Jackie was my “girlfriend.”  On the side of my house one day after school, Jackie asked, “May I hold your hand?”  “Okay,” no big deal.  I didn’t see her over the summer.  When the school posted the new rolls on the classroom windows in August, I couldn’t find her name.  Until I moved into the city five years later, I didn’t know where she’d gone.  Once again, we shared a neighborhood, but in the ten years I lived there, I never saw her, never went to the same school.

Chris had a Super Bowl part in 2006 (2007?–the last year Jerome Bettis was with them).  When Jackie walked in we were introduced.  She said, “Didn’t you used to be Kevyn’s brother?”  “I still am,” I answered, not a little peeved at the second-hand recognition, but amused by its wording.

At dinner, Chris said to me, “Jackie was asking about you.  She was real sorry to miss my party, because she’d hoped to see you.”  “I had hoped to see her, too,” I said.  Wow.  Interest.  Mutual interest!

Chris dropped me off home that evening.  I told him as I left the car, “Would you tell Jackie I asked after her.”  “Sure.  I’ll see her Saturday.”  So it’s been how long?  Four weeks?

Back in the summer, I overheard Julie tell Tammy she’d brought her a brochure from a yoga studio.  “Yeah,” she said.  “I sometimes ride my bike in Bryan Park, and then I go to this coffee shop I like on MacArthur….”  Stir Crazy.  She was talking about Stir Crazy, the scene of that humiliating non-date of ours.  How could she go back there, much less claim it as a favorite of her own?

Monday was a holiday, for Martin Luther King.  Though Stir Crazy is nine miles away, I was determined to get there, despite Caffespresso being within walking distance.  I’d already had my coffee and it was already three when I was ready to go, but I’d finished my errands–dishes, clothes, groceries–and had the rest of the day free and clear.  This yoga studio is at the opposite end of the short retail strip from Stir Crazy.  Jackie, a massage therapist, works there.  I hadn’t really come for the coffee.

I wasn’t sure I’d recognize Jackie–I couldn’t form her face from memory–but I knew who I was looking at when two women stopped in front of the coffee shop between my bike and me inside:  The long chestnut hair curling lazily at the ends, the sharp nose, the spark shooting from the eyes nearly buried in the wrinkles of an open-mouthed smile.  They didn’t come in but continued on.  I leisurely finished the americano I hadn’t needed and followed.

The two women were at the counter.  I acknowledged the one I didn’t know, bashful at the possibility of recognition.  (Much as I wanted it, I was afraid of giving away the game.)  I asked for information, and Jackie moved away, down the hall.  Helen gave me a brochure and explained the various classes.  The only one that fit my schedule was Jackie’s.  Helen asked me what brought me in, and, stumbling in my mind over the urge to confide my pretense, I finally mumbled, “I can’t say.”  Whether Helen sensed an ulterior motive or just chalked up my havering to a muddy mind, she did not press me but immediately offered me a tour.  In each room of the converted post office I looked first for Jackie.  When we found her and were introduced, Jackie’s eyes flashed.  “Burns?”  I didn’t correct her.  “Um-hmm.”  I made no pretense at the “surprise” of finding her here.  We hugged.  Helen left the rest of the tour to Jackie.  I reminded Jackie of the Super Bowl remark and she laughed at herself.  She gave me her card and we hugged at parting.

I know this sounds dangerously like pursuit, and I won’t deny that it is, but I actually have been seeking yoga instruction for quite awhile.  Of course, I might still be seeking if I hadn’t found Jackie at it, but she’s as good a reason as any to end that particular pursuit.  Don’t think that I’m going to push the love agenda, either.  I’m not in love with Jackie and will not pretend to be so.  I don’t know Jackie yet.  Maybe I can’t fall in love with her, but maybe I can enjoy a friendship.  The hope is there, of course, but I’ll give awareness precedence over expectation and appreciate what’s given me.  Maybe.  I hedge my bets on the future against the lessons of the past and the realities of the immediate.

I Didn’t Land on Razor Blades, But the Fall Was Farther Than Expected

Melissa wrote me back.  No, no exclamation point, either of despair or elation.  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I know for sure that Sandra is only interested in friendship right now.”  I wrote back, “That’s not such bad news.  Thanks for getting back to me.”  That was the best I could do–mask my disappointment with blandness.  Melissa went on to suggest that I “friend” Sandra on Facebook.  I doubt I’ll do that.  I may not have gotten my hopes up high enough to make the news a crushing blow, , but to readjust my hope is tantamount to accepting the second choice, and I just don’t do second choices.

James, upon finding that Kristen, the most recent woman he’s fallen in love with, is gay, has seemed to have accepted both the impossibility of a romance with her and the possibility of a friendship with her, and has struck a rapport with her.  Whatever it takes to be able to do that I don’t have.  The best I can do is know that and not inflict it upon anyone else.  Perhaps in time I can grow that special ability of James’, but in the meantime I can at least hope to find someone whose flaws are complementary to my own, mutually neutralizing and sympathetic.  I s that really what this about? a balance of flaws?  A balance of flaws must also be a balance of strengths, and that is a completeness.  Haven’t I always known that?  I know a lot of things.  I have accepted very few of them, stubbonly clutching contrived principles to my chest as if I could press them into my heart.  The heart knows, but I don’t know my heart.

Maybe it’s backwards; maybe it’s about what will work for me; but I want to find friendship with a woman through love.  Is that the first acceptance I have to make?  The first principle to let go of, then, would be the one that states it works the other way round.  I don’t know how my heart feels about this, but I can’t let my head simply invert the principle.  I’m already thinking too much about it. 

I have not fallen in love with Sandra, and I may never attempt to make her my friend, but it is not a connection I’ll sever.  It wasn’t such bad news, after all.

Risking Life In Limbo

I followed through on my two vows.

I talked to Julie.  It was nearly as difficult as the time I asked her out, but I finally spit out, “Julie, how is your mom doing?”  “Not very well,” she answered, turning to me.  “She’s in hospice care.  All we can do is keep her comfortable.”  “How are you holding up?”  A patron interrupted before she answered.  I let it go, but when the patron left, Julie said, “I’m hanging in there.”  No more was said by either of us to the other while we were out on the desk.

I was right about how I would feel–relieved, a bit righteous, humble, hopeful.  I wanted this to be the end of things, the beginning of better things.  I had put the ball at her feet and wanted her to play.  Four days later, I still don’t know if anything has changed.  Until yesterday she still wouldn’t meet my gaze and when she finally did today it was with that defiant glare I’ve come to know all too well–chin tipped upward, jaw clenched square.  Yet yesterday she had opened and held a door for me and my cart of juvenile non-fiction.  I looked at her, thanked her.  She smile and replied, and I stared at her.  Still she smiled.  I’d missed that smile more than I realized.  I devoured it.  I missed the doorway and banged the frame.  But now?…

I wrote Melissa on Facebook two nights ago.  I have not heard back, and the worst assumptions grow in my mind:  My message didn’t go through; or she knows that Sandra doesn’t care for me and doesn’t know how to tell me.   I can’t imagine a best-case scenario, and it’s difficult to even consider the realistic, neutral possibilities.  The longer it takes to hear back from Melissa the less worthy I feel to be in a relationship.  I’m steeling myself for bad news.  But as I imagine, with apprehension, waking up with morning breath beside someone, I also think of those things I said I want–someone to talk to and be and do things with–and there’s that hope that the positives, if they become real, will melt the negatives.

I hope they would also melt my feelings for Julie.  Listening to Belle and Sebastian last week, I nearly convinced myself I was still in love with her.  I can’t quite trace the mental path that brought me so close to that conviction, but I think it began with the character May of my novel, who is modelled after Julie.  I’ve begun to feel very close to the character empathetically, and I think I began to wonder if I could feel that way without being in love with Julie.  Then came that defiant glare of hers yesterday, and I just became angry.  Whatever my feelings for Julie, I would expect a meaningful relationship with another woman to extinguish the most passionate of them and leave me with, at least, indifference.

I am out of vows for now; until these two are reacted upon I don’t know what to do.  There are no contingencies.  I hope my life means more than waiting for women to talk to me.

Unless Maybe a Bed of Razor Blades Cushions My Fall

Matt and Hinckley both have exhorted me to not let my attraction to Sandra lapse in inaction.  Coming from two men with no more romantic experience than myself, the advice was surprising–until I thought about it.  Matt and Hinckley (James from now on) were speaking from experience, but from an experience of regret of having n0t done what they now urge me to do.  As I have been reticent to attach importance to my attraction to Sandra, so was I reserved in telling my friends about my New Year’s Eve encounter.  But I told them, so my coolness did not fool them, because they know I don’t speak to fill a silence or hear my own voice (or to read my own words, in James’ case).  Matt and James support me as friends do–with the greatest, most honest empathy.  Their hopes for me are my own.  Matt has been married more than twenty years.  James, twenty years our junior, has not been married, but has been passionately but unrequitedly in love twice in the nearly fours years I’ve known him.  Matt doesn’t want me to play it so cool that it grows cold.  “If she is attracted to you,” he said, “the longer you wait to try to find that out, the more she’ll believe you aren’t interested in her.”  James told me, “If this is to happen, you will have to take at least one other step in the direction of making it happen.”  Faith isn’t going to do it.  Zen isn’t going to bring Sandra into my orbit.  I found Sandra on Melissa’s Facebook page, and I looked at her photo self-portrait on her page.  I lingered on it.  It was all I could see; her page was private.  I didn’t solicit her online “friendship.”  This was before my friends’ double-barrelled exhortation to action.  I’m still not prepared to contact Sandra.  What I am prepared to do is contact Melissa and ask her if Sandra has expressed any interest in me.  Not daring, but  a step forward and no chance of rejection–for the fear of rejection has been at the heart of my reticence:  I wasn’t sure I could handle it.  I’m not sure still, but the longer I wait to do anything, the higher hopes climb and the greater the difficulty in reaching them.  If I jump now, the fall can’t hurt me.

Julie-Bitten, Twice Shy

I’m trying not to think of Sandra.

Big sister Kevyn took me to a party New Year’s Eve.  Eight people, she said.  I wouldn’t be able to hide (I said). She reeled off the names–nobody I knew.  On the way there I began to dread the event.  I felt out of place for awhile, but everyone was genuinely friendly, and I relaxed without having to tell myself to.  Everyone had known each other for some time, so points of reference in conversation were often implied and I found little footing.  Before I was drawn into talk I noticed there were only seven of us.  When Sandra showed up it was a while before she joined the group, possibly talking to Melissa in the kitchen.  She had not hailed greetings when she came in, so I assumed she was not the eighth but maybe Nadal and Melissa’s daughter, because at the first, brief, glimpse she appeared much younger than anyone else there, and I was the youngest.  When someone plunked down beside me on the narrow wicker loveseat, I did not expect to see a new face when I turned my head that way.

I really don’t (I think) want to think of Sandra.  We had a first-date kind of conversation–kids, jobs, etc.–and I felt a creeping suspicion that this was some kind of set-up.  I didn’t let that suspicion creep too deep.  I knew I couldn’t continue to have this conversation if I blew up the whole scene into a conspiracy.  It was tempting to jokingly bring attention to the suspicion, but I didn’t see a win in that effort.  But by the end of the evening it was too late.  Kevyn and I were the first to leave, and by then I felt as if I’d been adopted by a new family–hugs all around, until Sandra and I were face-to-face, and then it was muttered, polite farewells as we dug our toes into the schoolyard dirt and avoided eye contact.  On the way home I said to Kevyn, “Sandra’s a very attractive woman.”  Kevyn only said, “Yes, she is a beautiful woman.”  I ventured no further, either that night or the next day before Kevyn left for Staunton.

Melissa, our hostess, friended me on Facebook, and I thanked her, in turn, for the hospitality. I struggled to find a way to mention or ask about Sandra without seeming obvious, but I knew there was no way and so left off altogether.  It occurs to me now that if Sandra is on Facebook she’s on Melissa’s friends list, and I wish I’d remained clueless on that count.

I’m afraid of a lot of things right now.  They may all be one thing, but I can’t trace it to its roots, or even chase the branches to the trunk.  I don’t want to commit to what isn’t a sure thing.  I don’t want my desires whitewashing the realities, sending hope soaring without wings over a beautiful precipice and falling into love.  I’ve not quite fallen back behind rational ramparts–I know my emotions must be served–but I can’t help being cautious after Julie.  Though Sandra and I enjoyed a rapport that Julie and I never had, it was, still, just a conversation.  Perhaps that’s where love starts, but I’ll not presume that this is such a case.

I’m afraid of losing Julie, too, though in what way that I haven’t already, I’m not sure.  Dammit, she still fascinates me, but that might come down simply to the impossibility of ever satisfying my curiosity about her.  In Sandra’s light, Julie seems almost a child to me now, missing a certain maturity or wisdom that would prevent her from ever connecting with me beyond mutual points of interest.  That saddens me immensely.  I’ve tried many times to make eye contact with Julie this week, but she refuses.  I’ve already vowed to not let our next desk hour together be silent, regardless of the hopes of my heart.  I’m not eager to talk to her–there’s almost nothing to say–but this is a horrible way for two people to treat one another.  If she can’t rise above it, I have to.

Maybe I really would rather be thinking of Sandra regardless of where it takes me.  It can only be a better place.  What’s wrong with hope?  There’s always a better world ahead than behind, real or not.  And what does it hurt? except maybe my next encounter with Sandra, when I might not be able to get my teeth out of the way of my tongue.  So what–a chance I’ll take.  I’ll think of Sandra if my mind wanders there (and I will let it); I just won’t tell anyone about it.  That has not been hard to do with Stacey’s example before me.  No cry-wolf humiliation for me.  Thinking about Sandra won’t make me fall in love with her.  Knowing her might, but right now that’s a galaxy far, far away.

When I Get Writer’s Block, It Will Be “Antagonistic”

When the first two lines of my novel came to me, I was suddenly more conciliatory toward myself.  (But it was also my birthday, and I still feel good about birthdays as long as I can share them with someone, and I was treating Matt and Hinckley at Joe’s Inn as I did last year.)  Conciliatory in what way, I’m not sure.  I may be using the wrong word.  For what should I apologize to myself?  I have been very hard on myself lately, but as a drill sergeant to his “maggots”–to force change, if not conformity.  I don’t know if I’ve graduated the basic training, whether I’ve made myself a better person, but I know I deserve better treatment.  So does Julie, of course, and I thought that would follow.  For a start, I thought I could ask how her mom was doing (I’d heard she’d taken a bad turn) but not show any interest toward Julie herself–not to continue my disdain but to keep the feelings between us as much out of the way as possible.  I thought I could ask about her family holiday.  I couldn’t do anything.   An hour on the circulation desk together would have been the perfect opportunity, had I taken it, but before I’d even stepped onto that road I could see the end of it–the hope that Julie would love me; that I’d laugh at all my silly machinations, accept her as simply a coworker, and get on with life, only to have her then see me as the sensitive, well-meaning man who found her fascinating….  You (and Hollywood) know the end of that fantasy.  Absurd.  So, the hour was silent between us.  I didn’t even dare glance at her for fear of betraying my interest.  I have trouble now recalling her face.  I see her only from behind now, and when I look at her I stare.  It’s the best view my pride will let me take.  I try not to argue over whether or not I have feelings for Julie, for what I insisted while I was in love with her–that this was not an affection of convenience–now seems untrue:  There she is, here I am, there we are–why not?  Pure practicality, easily put off.  No love, so why bother?  I look at my verbal sparring on these pages about my receptivity to love and its chances of finding me and I know that there’s nothing to do, either, about my feelings toward Julie.  The think is, I’m still bitter about allowing her to put a stop to A Bright, Ironic Hell and angry at myself for not questioning her on just how this blog was hurting her.  I considered it, then, an act of compassion to end BIH–and it was–but, increasingly, I think that what I was hurting was her vanity, because she didn’t even have to read the blog, and I see myself as weak to have bowed to such a shallow god.  It’s only unanswered questions that keep my hurt alive.  “Conciliatory” is definitely not the word I should have used.

Or Seven or Eight Lives Down the Road

Another birthday looms.  It’s not a milestone–the fiftieth was last year–but it’s also just over a year since my workplace humiliation at the hands of Chris and Julie, and I wonder just how far I’ve come since then, how much I’ve grown–or not.  But, like the growth of a tree, it’s hard to tell what’s changed in a year; and if you’re the tree, it’s impossible.  I was talking to Phoebe as she sorted a cart yesterday, asked her if she’d done a Meyers-Briggs test.  “Oh, yeah, half a dozen or so.  Always the same–ISTJ.”  I’ve taken it once, nearly two-and-a-half years ago, the day I fist saw Julie at work.  I wonder if my INTP has changed.  It seems like so much longer ago than last year that my emotional world took a tumble.  I virtually bared my soul, but have I become any more open to the people around me?  Strangers from around the world know what I’ve been through, but who that I encounter in the flesh knows me?  Even the coworkers who read A Bright, Ironic Hell–certainly I should be closer to them by now.  But who talks to me? and who doesn’t pretend that they don’t know what I’ve been through with Julie?  How can I connect with someone who can’t be honest with me?  Every workplace is a microcosm of society.  The society I work in is emotionally stunted, at least towards the men.  The women working at the library easily commiserate with each other, even if they have never otherwise gotten along.  The men (not just me) are left to their own emotionally devices, which are, at best, inadequate.  When Julie found out about  BIH and, in a panic to have it stopped, spread the word to the few who didn’t already know about it, the female troops rallied round her.  I, villified, was left wondering what I’d done wrong and where my friends were.  Julie was afraid and I was angry.  Which emotion is the easier with which to sympathize?  Which emotion “belongs” to the woman and which to the man?

I’m still angry, and hurt, more than a year later.  Is that growth?  What have I become but more bitter?  I have probably grown in a good way, too, but isn’t it always easier to find disease than improvement?  Another year and I’m still almost bitter enough to tell Chris, “I’m writing another blog.  Just thought you’d like to know, so you can tell Julie.”  Only knowing-better stops me from doing it; nothing stops me from thinking about it at least once a week.  I can only assume I’ve progressed.  I can’t see the signs.

I’ve become more needful of social contact, or less denying of the need.  The difference is irrelevant but for the vaster, more gnawing void it creates.  The void can no longer be filled withdistraction, its hunger not so easily sated anymore.  I made good efforts to come outside myself to meet my social needs (and made one grand effort toward Julie), but rebuffs have taken me nearly back to square one; that is, I still try, but with more of a feeling of necessity than confidence–a use-it-or-lose-it mindset.  In conversation, after listening, I try to ask a question about what they’ve said before offering up my own experience on the matter.  Inwardly, I chalk one up to my social development, but at the same time consider how pathetic it is to claim such a victory that so many others could claim countless times unconsciously every day.  But, sometimes, I take what I can get.  As with love, I want to believe that living my life is enought to attract social contact, but what’s changed about me over the past year that can redeem the previous fifty?  Because of this heightened need, I’m lonelier, more desperate, less patient with passive receptivity.

The heart has taken over some of the duties from the head.  Most of them it doesn’t understand and won’t take care of, but the head won’t take them back; it’s tired of making sense of the insensible.  So the mundane doesn’t get done, and commercials make me cry.  The week afte Chris exposed BIH to Julie I lost the mirror reflex to yawn.  It has not come back.  If that is as correlative to compassion as has been suggested, I should be a less compassionate man.  I don’t think I am.  I once, and for a long time, believed I was without compassion.  My father even called me “misanthrope” when I was nine when I dismissed my little sister’s crying over a horsefly sting as just whining over a “bug bite.”  I had to look up the word.  I was defined.  But I am not without compassion.  I am without the reflex, perhaps, to express it.  When I succeed in expressing compassion, it’s time for another sad self-pat on the back.

The best progress I can say I’ve made over the past year is that I’m less likely to pity myself, though I am no less likely to berate myself.  I still can’t let go of perceived injustices against me, but my indignation has been tempered by resignation and the knowledge that there was nothing done to me maliciously.  Impetuous ignorance of consequences I must, grudgingly, consider as extenuating.  Still, apologies would significantly loosen my grip.

Pride?  Well….

So, I’ve grown, if little other than a year older.  The bark is thicker, without a doubt.  I can only assume I’ve grown taller, too, but the sky is so high I can’t tell how much closer I’ve come to it.  Perfection maybe too high a goal to set.  Give it another year?

John Gray Is From Uranus

Stacey didn’t take my advice.  Eric called her, she didn’t call him back.  She’d met Alex at church soon after she’d met Eric.  Alex was better.  When she told me about him, she didn’t call him The One–not for not wanting to but for knowing the scepticism of her audience.  I took news of Magic Alex with a mine of salt.  A couple of guys over the past year have been The One.  Now Alex is over.  He broke it off–too many red flags he couldn’t get past.  Before Eric, another guy had broken up with her–same thing.  The guy before that she just started to ignore.

See the trend?  When the guys break it off, they’re straightforward, honest.  Stacey breaks it off–sort of–by hoping it will go away if she ignores it.  The guys were not cruel–they didn’t want to hurt Stacey’s feelings–but they knew that it was best to be honest.  Stacey knew all that, too, so why couldn’t she be honest?  Now she’s embarassed to go back to that church or that store and the places the other guys worked.  There’s little sympathy coming from me.  I didn’t know any of those guys.  Stacey is a friend.  I don’t like to see her in pain, but the embarassment is the bed she made.  The one time I compared my difficulty with Julie to her difficulty in frequenting the places where she met these guys, she said, “But you didn’t sleep with her.”  “No,” I didn’t say, “but I was humiliated by her.  You didn’t have to sleep with those guys.”  Stacey knows I can’t side with her, that I feel she did Eric wrong, and that she’s got to lie in that bed.  I don’t speak Julie’s name to Stacey, and Stacey does her best not to whine about the places she can no longer go, and no one’s the better off.  Julie is not redeemed.

The Ink/Voice Imbalance May Be Insurmountable

There was time–probably most of my conscious life–that I believed I liked being alone.  Last year I finally admitted otherwise.  Thanksgiving, when everyone I know, including my kids, are busy elsewhere.  I usually enjoy a quiet day of solitude.  This year I was restless.  There was no solace in the freedom to do as I pleased, because what I wanted was to talk to someone.  Not that I had anything pressing to talk about, but someone on the sofa next to me watching the football game would probably have been enough.  The only plans I had made for that day were to watch the game and eat at the Tiki-Tiki on the next block, but the restaurant wasn’t open, and as I had no other food, a sandwich from the convenience store was my meal.  I tried not to think of that as pathetic.  I had nothing to say to the clerk.  Sincere conversation is unrealistic  to expect from someone jaded and suspicious.  The day was nearly devoid of warmth.  And today is the coldest this season, and wet.  The wet won’t stop.  I don’t need half my fingers to count the sunny days of November, and December is playing right along while adding its own character.  I feel almost a malevolence in this weather that makes me want to lash out at it, to curse it for keeping me inside, alone, safe as that may be.  Sometimes I hate safety, too.  In defiance, and with the excuse of Christmas shopping, I may go out, anyway.

Yesterday  there was little sun, but at least no rain, and I spent most of it talking.  I visited Susan Hall (“Your hair is astounding!”) at Diversity Thrift, where she volunteers, and coaxed her out to lunch at Copolla’s.  We talked about books and writing and our previous lives.

Back in Carytown later Keith Mason and I discovered each other in the Capitol Coffee Shop.  We hadn’t met since a Buzzcocks show ten years ago.  He’s my age but not physically well.  He introduced me to Sterling and Jenny.  The three of them meet daily to work on the crosswords from the Washington Posts and New York Times‘ in the newspaper basket.  Keith and I remained for a couple hours after Sterling and Jenny left, doing a little catching up but mostly just conversing.  Our mutual friends are actually few, and we’d never been more than friends-of-friends to each other, but our conversations had always been stimulating, though I give him most of the credit.

It was eight-thirty before I got home.  I hadn’t written a word that day, but I’d spoken my share to an audience of two and felt more meanfully productive than I did in stringing these words together so prettily for an audience of . ..?  I have long thought that if I had any facility with conversation I wouldn’t need to write, that writing was just the lesser of two tortures.  I hone my writing skills in order to better avoid doing the same for my speaking skills.  When I got home I felt I should catch up on the work I didn’t do in the morning.  I dutifully sat down with pen and paper, but I didn’t write.  I didn’t try, or, rather, I didn’t force anything. I was content with what I’d already “produced” that day.  Then I felt alone–no one to talk to, no one to share with.  Except you.  And you don’t talk to me.  Writing is lonely.  Today, at least, I prefer talking.

To BFE of the Soul

All I wanted to do was write about love, but I find I know nothing about it.  It’s an ideal, a goal I have no idea how to reach, a goal I’ve tried to tell myself I’ll reach in good time.  I’m thinking it’s time to stop being so rational.  I’ve had concerns about my mental health, but I awoke in that rare noiseless hour of the morning to realize, somewhat comfortingly, that it was my emotional health that needed the most immediate care.  In that quiet I grasped emotionally for a connection then egotistically rejected it as a loss of self.  I am emotionally frail, and rather than admit it, I’ve chosen to claim a mental imbalance.  How far the ego will go to hide frailty!  I’m not afraid of frailty so much as concerned with how it outwardly manifests.  I don’t want to appear frail.  It turns women away and alienates me from men, who I desperately want to admit are just like me.  I can’t talk myself out of the idea that men have to be strong for women, but I can’t talk myself into being strong.  How strong is any man?  I wonder if I should even call it frailty, but I tire of semantics.  If I’m lacking strength, it’s to hold up the facade society seems  to be asking me to keep before me.  Poking out eyeholes was not enough; it has always been a barrier, and I’ve always held it unsteadily.  It’s just too heavy.  I’m sensitive.  I take rejection badly–that is, personally.  I set myself up for it with high hopes, hopes well beyond a one-off good time.  The higher I climb. …  So it takes me a long time to try, when my hopefulness finally crests my fear of rejection.  There’s my vicious cycle.  I like attention, but I embarrass easily except with close friends, of which I have only a few.  I beg for attention as I beg for love–quietly and desperately.

Every layer has another below it.  Mental health to emotional health to…spiritual health?  In search of answers, the spirit realm is the place I am most afraid to explore.  Each successive layer seems more deeply ineffable than the previous.  There’s less and less I can say, or want to say.  Words don’t reach all levels.  Perhaps that’s what scares me:  I may be going someplace I can’t talk my way out of.

Nowhere Near “Postal,” Anyway

Work without Julie is a relief.  That, like many another thing I’ve said, is not true.  There was a time when it was true.  There was also a time when I was unhappy without her there.  This is neither of those times, though it strongly resembles both.  Her not being at work relieves me of watching out for her in order to avoid her or openly show my disdain for her.  It deprives me of that, too.  It relieves me of very little stress.  See, if she’s not where I am she’s relieved of me, free to live without me.  Free to be happy.  Free of my dramatic disdain.  I could say I don’t want that for her, because I feel that way, but I don’t believe it,  and I don’t want to hate myself yet more by talking myself into believing it.  I’m just lonely, jealous, and brittlely insecure, and Julie is a target for my projections.  What I can’t take responsibility for I blame her for.  There’s my awareness.  Where’s my corrective action?

The solution is beyond my intellect–not smarter than it, but transcendent of it, impossible to consider.  What’s to do when thinking won’t do?  We come back to faith, a frightening place, a place without control.  A humble place.  A place without Me.  A lifetime of looking for myself, and this is what it comes to.  I thought I was through with irony.  This soul’s not big enough for both faith and pride, and it’s easier to keep what I’ve always had than to replace it with what seems an ambiguous entity that will claim control of my ego.  Pride has not altogether blinded me, or I would not be questioning its worth, but sight is the price I would have to pay for faith.  With what, then, would I look in the mirror?  How would I avoid Julie?

I still have my little game of flirtation with the patrons, but the big game I play at the library is with Julie, and I lost it at the tip-off–even playing by my own rules–simply by getting her to play with me.  Winning now means losing my ego.  I tell myself this is all an experiment, a test of limits and reactions, but it’s really no more than poking with a stick.  I don’t honestly want her to hate me.  I’m even beginning to doubt that I’ve fallen out of love with her.  Was saying I was no longer in love with her just another of those hopeful deferences I made to Julie? or was the lie the declaration of love?  (Wow, Irony, you don’t mess around!)  If Julie changed her mind about me, do you really think I’d say, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel it anymore”?  The supposition says enough.

I’ll play my game.  I’ll avoid Julie as I avoid doing so many “right” things:  with awareness of the actions and their consequences, the guilt of knowing and not-doing, and the pride of doing the wrong things well.  Awareness doesn’t change anything but my level of self-loathing.  Do I have a limit I must reach before I change?  For how long can I work with Julie before I reach that limit?  Will awareness keep up?

Am I a Man Dreaming He’s a Butterfly? or a Butterfly Dreaming It’s in Hell?

Among my rich, myriad delusions, a recent favorite is that all I need to straighten my life out, make me a perfect person, and fill in my bald spot is a girlfriend.  I’ll no longer be an asshole–I’ll talk to Julie again as to someone I never had the least inclination to fall in love with.  I will like myself and be popular.  But let’s say that that original catalytic miracle happens, that some woman actually falls in love with me as I am now.  Here’s what would happen:  I’d have her come to the library for lunch with me on every Monday, Thursday and weekend–that is, every full workday with Julie–and flaunt her shamelessly.  I would brag on her loudly in the workroom to anyone but Julie (but with her always in earshot).  In other words, I’d be a loud-mouthed jerk (as opposed to the tight-lipped jerk I am now), and my girlfriend, flattered though she might be at my apparent pride in her, would get very little attention otherwise. I wouldn’t change a bit.

Perhaps I’m being hard on myself.  (Perhaps that’s another delusion.)  Does awareness of a self-delusion make it less of a delusion?  Awareness of my depression doesn’t seem to lessen the depression, but are my delusions as organic?  (Hm.  Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that.)  It’s one thing to be aware of the delusion; it’s another to take action against it.  I’m not likely to do that.  My pride generated the girlfriend delusion as a rationale against its own dissolution.  But even knowing that doesn’t hasten pride’s demise.  No, pride has the upper hand here, engineering my demise.  I could stop being a jerk to Julie–at least say “hi”–but not without making a point of it in order to satisfy my ego.  But I’d vowed not to write her any more “notes”–or “Notes!,” as Julie practically spit in my face the last time we had it out–or, rather, she had it out on me.  The best I can do right now is nothing, since anything else would be provocation.  If awareness of my delusion is not enough to dispel them, then it is my punishment for doing nothing about them.

A girlfriend doesn’t need to be in the middle of this.  How could I lover her?  And though nothing I feel for Julie is but a projection of my pride, it’s a slick enough barrier to love trying to get a foothold.  I’m not deluded there.

The Included Crowbar Doubles as a Bookmark

When I broke up with a particular girlfriend, I began reading about love.  I was not heartbroken–I was relieved–but I still had that hole to fill.  Don’t ask for titles–I don’t remember them, but they all probably had the word “heart” in them somewhere.  Besides, I wouldn’t recommend them.  All they did was infuse me with the warm and fuzzy delusion that I deserved and was ready for love.  Right and wrong, but I swallowed it all, opened my starry eyes wide and got myself married.  Twenty years later–seven years post-divorce–I’m putting it down to a weakness akin to religious conversion.  Hallelujah! I’m married!

It was not a match made in heaven, a blessed union, or anything else remotely beatific.  There was no love.  A component of the delusion that got me married was the belief that with marriage came love.  She gave, I didn’t.  She didn’t give as much as I wanted, and I gave nothing.  She gave up.  (Don’t mistake the concision for glibness.  It’s still painful, and that is as much as I want to consider it right now.)

I have not since sought out those books, or any of the hundreds more written since then.  Divorce was an even bigger relief than the breakup that laid the groundwork for the divorce, and so a more lasting lesson was learned, or I was finally old enough to grasp its wisdom.  Bottom line:  I’m in no hurry to marry again.  A girlfriend would be nice, with love and all that.  Well, maybe not the “all that.”  We all have our “all that.”  I have mine and you have yours, and, frankly, most of mine I’d like to keep.  I live like a batchelor, with the poorly kept apartment and things where I like them.  I could use a cook and a housekeeper, and sex would be nice, but if I could afford the first two I’d go that way.  (I don’t pay for sex, thank you.)  Living with someone is out of the question.  I’m not moving, and no one’s moving in.  Let’s get together for love, dinner out, yard sales, movies from the sofa–but let’s leave “all that” at home.

Of course, that’s too conditional.  Love won’t stand for that.  If that means I’m not ready for it, then, well. …  No, I won’t read those books!  What I have is not enough, or too much of what I don’t need.  When I can no longer pretend that it’s an adequate substitute for what I need I’ll discard it and make room.  I’m the only book I need to open.

I Think That Tree Has Already Been Cut Down

I pedal through flurries of leaves on my commute, and never does one touch me–glance off my helmet or wind-glue to my chest for a moment.  On the evenings I work attractive women my age criss-cross my vision.  Rarely do they come to my half of the circ desk.  What would I do, anyway?  I’ve forgotten, or lost my drive, on which I had only a tenuous hold at best.  Flirting is fun, but, ultimately, it seems simply another manifestation of vanity.  I’m not flirting so much to attract women as to make myself feel good, to assure myself I still have it.  Whatever “it” may be worth intrinsically, I can’t right now discern it value to me.  It has all but evaporated in the distillation of necessity.  Why this process doesn’t also rid me of pride and self-hatred, I don’t know.  It seems all I’m left with–the two of them dancing maypole around me, keeping the women away.  But they are not just a barrier; they are a force, as strong a repellent of others as an attractant to me.  Awareness is often deterrent enough of creeping evil, but I have not yet convinced myself of pride’s malevolence.  Yes, the words.  Talk, talk.  No one can convince me of anything with just words.  I can’t even convince myself, even if I make the most sense.  This eradication requires more than awareness.  It requires a sacrifice of pride  itself, surely, but what does pride walk on?  What do I pull out from under it to upset it? and then how do I keep it from getting back up?  I’ve tried to imagine a life without pride and no picture forms, only a vague emptiness in my gut.  Pride is my only connection to Julie–my only reason to keep it and the best reason to get rid of it.  I can’t let her forget me, even it she only remembers me as odious.  Shouldn’t pride demand a better impression upon others?  It does, upon others. I want Julie to hate me as much as I hate myself.  I’ll take any emotion she’ll give me as long as it’s strong. 

Why should a leaf cling to me, even for a moment?  I work with good people–people who greet one another, talk to each other, help each other out.  That alienates me.  The other person is never the first person I think of, though I manage somettimes to do the right thing.  It’s the people who always do the right thing that I allow to make me feel small and less than human.  Yet Mike, James, and Julie are all lonely people, too.  If anyone is more deserving of love than anyone else, they are more deserving than I.  I see them give every day.  I’ll bet they don’t even have to think about it.  Why is no one clinging to them?  Love is not fair.  Why isn’t it ours to just pluck from the tree?  Why must we have to try to catch it when it falls from the sky?  Is it getting swept to the curb, washed down the gutter, when it eludes our tense grasp?  Does it dry up to be crushed underfoot?  Was there a harvest that we missed?

What would I do with that leaf pressed against my chest, held only by the force of my forward movement?  Pedal harder to prevent it peeling away?  Snatch it off and cram it into my pocket?  I doubt I could simply welcome it for as long as it stayed and say goobye with a smile.  It would not be easy-come-easy-go.  It would not have come easily, its trip having been so long as to have at least been ponderous, if not also circuitous and arduous.  I would not let it leave.  In my pocket it would go.  Occasionally, I could remove it briefly, to admire it but not to appreeciate it.  I hope I get the chance to do otherwise.  Fall is not over yet.  There are plenty of leaves yet to pedal through.

It’s Either Love or Another Kid Selling Magazines

Tell me:  Given that I deserve love, am I already receptive to it?  Has it come to me and, being unrecognized, been rejected?  How many himes has it come to me only to be rebuffed?  Just once, I think–with Ann.  She could have loved me if I could have loved her.  I wanted her to love me like I couldn’t love myself or anyone else.  It was too much to ask.  Is giving love receiving love?  If so, I can stop wasting my efforts at attaining it.  I don’t feel capable of giving love.  I have, perhaps, never given it.  I could say that the first gift should be to myself, but I’d rather believe in Stacey’s magic.  It’s easier, and it’s as closely aligned to my wishful non-intervention theory of love-reception as I’m likely to get with rationale.  What I want to believe is that despite how badly I might think of myself, there is still someone who can see through my self-hatred to the me I was meant to be and love that.  That’s some serious magic.  I can’t expect that to ever happen.  How could I expect anyone to come more than halfway?  or respect myself for letting them?  No, I have work to do.  And no clue where to start.

That’s a lie.  Pride is the starting point; the biggest, bitterest pill I have to swallow.  Pride is all a guy with low self-esteem has.  Well, that and vanity.  Their intrinsic values are equal–zero–so I have nothing.  I could be a bigger man.  I could give Julie the time of day, say “excuse me” when I nearly run her over.  I could let myself fade into her background.  That I can’t do those things makes me the kind of person that wants love to knock on his door.

Would the knock come?  Would I ignore it?  Would I let love in?  Would it come in?  I would not be a good host.  I’m a horrible housekeeper, I sleep in the middle of the bed, and I leave the toilet seat up.  I’m a selfish jerk.  And I deserve love.

It Doesn’t Matter How Many Times You Click Your Heels Together–You Never Left Kansas in the First Place

Stacey is letting Eric go.  (Most magic is an illusion.)  Not only does she not want to be involved with a married man, but he can’t see her “past the physical.”  She believed him when he told her she was beautiful, and she was flattered.  When he had to get home Saturday night from her place, he had a tear in his eye.  He said he was very happy.  Stacey did not feel the same way, having already decided she wasn’t all that attracted to him after all and feeling that his attraction to her wasn’t deeper than her skin, but she didn’t denigrate his tears.

Now she’s going to break it off, and she’s asking my advice.  I’ve missed that.  When she sided with Chris when he blew open A Bright Ironic Hell, I had difficulty forgiving her, and for a while she was just a twice-a-week ride to work.  Now she’s asking my advice on how to let Eric go, and I see an opportunity to redeem Julie’s pat blow-off of me and to ensure not only that this guy is treated respectfully and without condescension, but that any subsequent guy in her life who needs to be let go gets the same consideration.  I told her to be honest, don’t apologize for anything, don’t try to buck him up.  Tell him it won’t work out because he’s married.

Sounds easy.  Men have been let down with a lot less honesty, and they’ve accepted it.  It’s just been the way of those men.  That is, some men have too much pride to see resolution in being let down softly.  But an emotional and passionate life beyond rooting for a favorite sports team.  Last year I displayed my passion and was told both implicity and explicitly to cover it up again.  I think the reason that most men will accept the pat let-down is that they know what I had to be told, that emotion and passion are weaknesses in men.  Eric might cry again when Stacey lets him down.  I hope he does.  Stacey should be allowed to know how he feels, and he shouldn’t pretend he feels other than how he does.  It’s the best thing for both of them–and for me and you.

Hokey Focus

Stacey believes in magic.  She met a guy in the grocery store, an employee, and she said it was a connection made immediately upon the meeting of the eyes.  I asked her if there were any physical signals of this connection, but she couldn’t identify any.  I asked her, “What was the balance of interest?  Was it perfectly mutual or did one of you make an effort beyond the halfway point to attract the other?”  She couldn’t answer that accurately, either. I was being too clinical, looking for that formula.  “I didn’t go in there looking to make something happen.  I mean, I just threw on some jeans, a camisole and a sweater–just running-to-the-store-for-a-few-things outfit.”  But she admitted to being receptive, if not actively so.  “I was just open and friendly, as I always try to be–just trying to be a happy me.”  Stacey was being herself, and that made her both more receptive and  more attractive–a theory practicalized.

But that’s Stacey–young, pretty, extroverted, female.  How much effort did this guy, Eric, have to make?  How many women have made Stacey’s kind of effort toward me?  Once, a few years ago, a woman left the desk after my helping her, and Gay Lynn came up and said to me, “She was so flirting with you.”  “She was?”  I doubt I’m any less clueless now.  Sure, the overt signals are easier to spot, but I’m sure I’m missing something in the conversation.  I don’t think I’ve tried flirting since Julie got back from vacation–concentrating very hard on ignoring her–so I haven’t had much positive eneregy or receptivity to put toward flirtation.

Eric has turned out to be married with children.  Stacey is very disappointed, though flattered that he seems “very into” her.  She is not as into him, but says she could easily be.  “There’s a fine line,” she says, “between a guy being into you and just being creepy.”  I suggested that that was probably relative to her receptivity.  (I definitely crossed onto the wrong side of that line with Julie, and  she was definitely not receptive.)  “Magic is the difference,” Stacey said.  “Nothing happens without it.”

Lead Me Not Into Distraction

To eschew distraction I need a damned good reason, and that in the form of the one thing to replace all distractions.  How can I be sure I have correctly chosen the One Thing?  That’s likely another decision /pursuit that cannot be actively made.  So having chosen not to be distracted from the One Thing, it must be the ease of distraction that choses the OT.  How does my innate capacity for distraction factor in?  How distracted from the thing am I allowed to be? or does any distraction disqualify it for OT?  I’m fishing for a formula, aren’t I?

Then there’s work, the distraction I get paid for, the distraction that’s anything but–not because it allows me to concentrate on the One Thing, but because, with Julie’s presence, it forces me to.  So maybe it’s not ease of distraction that rules out a candidate but the relative lack thereof that identifies it.

All this from the ink-mouth of someone who expects love to just come to him!  You know why?  Because I don’t believe it.  I want to believe it–it’s a great idea, and maybe it’s actually true–but it might as well be god for all my ability to give my soul to it.  But neither do I believe in trying to find love, and not simply because I’m tired of the pursuit (and I am profoundly tired of it).  The One Thing is probably not love–yet–but finding or becoming, myself.  But I already talked about that when I said love would come to me when I was ready.  I could call that irony, but I’d rather call it coming full-circle:  I’ll believe it when I make it believable.

Eschewing distraction–I don’t even believe in that.  It’s taken me a week to write this much, between watching movies and solving sudokus (and work).  I’m barely reading or watching tv, and the computer’s just taking up space, but I find my distractions, nonetheless.  Actually, I have to admit that I need distraction.  The One Thing, misidentified, can become an obsession, a victim of the all-work-no-play syndrome.  Distraction can be as much a means of expression as these ordered words insomuch as it is a search for a connection, something meaningful.  It’s when the distraction threatens to become the One Thing that it is detrimental.  That’s what I fear and why I thought it best to avoid distraction. altogether.  But it’s not distraction I need to avoid so much as mindlessness.  Habitual distraction, at best, sinks the mind into stupefaction.  At worst, it aggrandizes itself into the One Thing–in actuality, its doppelganger, Obsession.  I am safe from the former eventuality because I have little capacity for mindlessness.  Awareness born of very recent first-hand experience keeps the latter eventuality from blossoming.

So I think I’ll acknowledge and keep aware of my distraction, instead of trying to rationalize them away.  They have context, a value to my personal growth.  I won’t pursue distraction, but I will allow it.  If the One Thing is to come to me (and I”m to believe it works that way)  I must have my distractions from the pursuit.  I’ll take the scenic route and let it place itself in my way to stumble over.  It’s not a formula, but it’s a plan.