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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Mirror, Julie, Dion, Hair

Ben Franklin said something of the usefulness of vanity, but I don’t remember it.  Its logic, tongue-in-cheek as it may have been, didn’t fly with me and, therefore, didn’t stick.  I suppose vanity is, at least, useful in keeping one’s hygiene on the healthy side, but what does it otherwise do for one?  I can’t think of any way it’s been of benefit to me.  I’ve been using it to pretend I’m somebody else, and that hasn’t gotten me anything but confused.  Few of the images I’ve presented have been of my self:  “Who was that short-haired, clean-shaven dweeb?”  And, somehow, it’s easier to fool a mob than to fool one person.  I am not that person.  I fooled myself for much longer than I fooled Julie.  I try not to fool anyone now.  Vanity’s place is to make me feel good about myself, judged by my own standards.  If I find an audience in the mirror as I preen, I stop.  I hate it when Julie’s face floats up in front of mine, judging my appearance.  On many days it stops me from shaving, because if I’m not doing it for myself, I won’t do it.  My hair is my most strident display of my vanity because I know no one likes it.  Sometimes I don’t even like it, and consecutive good-hair days are a miracle.  It hasn’t been cut in a year.  It’s bushy and curly, and that’s just the way it is.

The confidence vanity might give me is an attractant itself, and being passive, attracts only what it should, as a flower does the insect to pollinate it.  The confidence is a projection of my true self.  What does it eventually attract?  The insect/flower relationship is sex, but of course that’s a much baser objective than that for which humans strive.  Is love the logical eventuality?  Is genuineness the attractant for that most human of needs?  Being genuine releases one from striving, from trying to discern and conform to the perceived standards of others.  It’s a crystal honesty.  Does vanity get one there?

Turn Blue

Outside the practically scripted structure of the library, the rules of my game of attraction change.  There is no search of interest in widening eyes or a head-dip.  There is only one rule, really, and that is to look good, and that’s all about the hair.  Shaving happens when I feel like it, clothes cover me, and I’m in good shape.  Hair is my vanity, and I’ll pay for the extra hot water it takes to wash and condition it now that it’s grown out, and for the detangler and oil.  If I feel I look good I feel good, and I’m the opposite of self-conscious.  I don’t swagger; I just feel good.  If there’s interest, I don’t notice.

Now that Julie’s back, outside the library is where I’d rather be.  With a weekend between us, it was easy writing that first paragraph .  Now I consider shaving the evening before the new week begins, and her face floats up before mine as the reason to shave.  So I won’t.  It didn’t stop me from washing my hair, though.  My rebellion in that arena is not having it cut.  I know no one at work likes it.  The next time someone says my hair looks good will be when I cut it short.  They can hold their collective breath.  I’ve spent enough time trying to impress the unimpressable.  It’s time I impressed myself–and anyone else who can appreciate me as I am.

Comfort Zones

Since I’m not “looking” for love, I’ll entertain myself seeking interest. I helped a woman with the copier yesterday that attracted me strongly. Her sharply drawn face was softened by large brown eyes in which I could sound no depth. After I’d helped her I retreated to the desk and just stared at her. It was the hair, I think–salt-and-pepper, falling from an asymetrical part in two long, thick waves to just above her shoulders. I’ve been a sucker for lyart hair since falling for Julie. As I was staring she glanced at me. Unabashed, I smiled faintly. There was no interest on her part-I could tell that immediately–but she had no guard up, as some women do when confronted with someone they are not attraced to that appears attracted to them. The woman at the copier was not extending an invitation any more than she was extending the ten-foot pole between us. She was confident she was safe–probably married or otherwise committed (I couldn’t get sight of her ring finger), or just very comfortable with herself.

At work is where I’m most comfortable seeking and pursuing attraction. It is my job to be seen and helpful. I know my professional role. I know the likely situations and how to deal with them. Patrons respect the assistance I provide. I’m appreciated. Outside of work, what is my role? Where is my respect? Who will ask me for help? Would I be able to help them? Even the most likely situations out there are too numerous to be prepared for. My comfort level dips precipitously: Show’s over–nothin’ to see here folks!

Cupid with a B-17

There aren’t many places love can find me–home, the library, the store, and on my bike between those places–and I’m still cynical enough to think it won’t visit me in any of those places.  Could it have come and gone in the past year, unable to distract me from my pursuit of Julie?  I’m still cynical enough, too, to believe that that was the case.  Is that the way it really happens?  Is love all but bombarding us, looking for an opening in the emotional breastplate we each wear?  Some days I leave the breastplate at home, hoping to be more vulnerable to at least the shrapnel of love, but I must be either invisible or naked without it, or my open hopefulness is a gaping wound of desperation, because the resultant inattention or outright repulsion seems entirely disproportionate to my presence.  It’s a fashion statement I just can’t pull off.  Other days, I know that trying is the last thing I need to do.  Those are the days that women say “hi” to me, smile at me  and play with their hair.  Usually, though, my day is a clumsy halfway between the two, wherin trying is a running start into not-trying– not quite getting up to speed before flipping on the cruise control.  But I never know which day it’s going to be.  On which day will love find me?

You can see that I almost have faith.  I’m coming to understand faith as a force for freedom.  If I can depend on something else to attain for me my needs then I can apply the energy I used to expend in that direction toward letting me be myself.  That’s the most attractive I can be, the most vulnerable to love’s bombardment, wherever I am.