Bag of Sugar to Plant to Human

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

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

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

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

Give or Take a Second Opinion

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

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

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

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

Isn’t That Why I Grew the Beard?

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

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

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

And Good Fucking Luck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Child Can Beat Up Her Child

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

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

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

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

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.

Here–Hold My Breath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope Springs Infernal

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

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

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

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

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

Grownups, Better and Worse

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

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

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

The Other Two Days I’m in Purgatory

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

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

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

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.

Nowhere Near “Postal,” Anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Included Crowbar Doubles as a Bookmark

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

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

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

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