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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.