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, 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?

Not Crash-Test, Anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Norse God of Escape

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

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

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

More Than a Kewpie Doll at Stake

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

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

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

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

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.

A Bright New Purgatory

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

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

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

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

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

Is There a Toolkit for This Job?

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

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

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

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

Unless Maybe a Bed of Razor Blades Cushions My Fall

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

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?

Lead Me Not Into Distraction

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

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

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

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

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

Food, Shelter, Love

At work I see plenty of physically attractive women, but I’m not ready to fall in love with any of them.  Physical attraction in only that.  Love is more.  To be physically attracted is to have sized up a potential sex partner, a biological imperative justifying a recreational pursuit.  Where is love?  Of course I want sex, but it isn’t the first thing I want.  It might not even be the second or third, depending on the scope of love.  Is it realistic to want love above all else? to eschew the baser needs in favor of a need that has never been satisfied?  Why not?  Let the baser needs take care of themselves.  What, then, has happened to letting love come to me?  Well, I’d leave well-enough alone if it were well enough left.  But regardless of my inability to bring love to me, my overwhelming need for it crowds out the faith that it is on its way.  So I distract myself with the shapes of women, and I don’t kid myself that it’s anything else.  I know better than to look for love in a vulgar aesthetic.  Though sex, for me, has never been a simple vulgarity or casual one-off, I have never fallen in love with an object of sex, and when I have fallen in love (if I actually ever have), physical attraction was not the reason.  If I have ever fallen in love, it was with Julie, and in all of the time I mooned over her I never considered sex with her (though, eventually, that would have been nice).  If I had not otherwise been attracted to her, there might have been no attraction at all.

So, here we have new expressions for both the inutility of vanity towards the “acquisition” of love and the futility of seeking or even preparing oneself for love.  If physical attraction cannot recognize love–and as a biological (animal) mechanism it must be singularly ignorant of any spiritual imperative–then what role of the least significance can vanity have in the attraction of anything but sex?  If that is all vanity can do, then its role is to distract one from seeking love.  But I don’t want to be distracted–from anytything.  These shapes are all nice to look at and to imagine having fun with, but as much fun as they might be, they aren’t enough.  Feeling that way, I can’t enjoy the game.  Yet there is nothing else but distraction when there’s nothing else I can do.  Nothing else is more important to me than this thing I can’t do anything about.  But as I have neither the patience to not-wait for love or the faith in not-waiting that would facilitate the patience, what’s left but to play the game? to appreciate the shapes?  Perhaps that’s all that keeps obsession at bay.

Cupid with a B-17

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

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

Faith Once More?

If love is to come to me, there is nothing I can do consciously to facilitate it.  There is no scheme or strategy that will draw it to me.  I have to accept these “mysterious ways” love works in.  Faith–that’s all it takes, right?  But what have I ever really had faith in?  Even in the glaring spotlight of the collective ironic failure of all of my strategems, what have I learned?  I have steeled myself against faith, my only faith being in the certainty of failure.  Certainly, this should have engendered at least a throwing-up of hands, a fatalistic determination of resignation.  I could have at least backed into this faith.  Instead, I let my ego determine that I was a victim, that I was not dealing with a universal force but with a force that waited solely on my actions and intentions in order to thwart them.  Even now, though, having said that, I have difficulty believing that this force targets everyone.  The evidence isn’t strong enough.  If I were to believe that this was a circumstantial force, that it was activated by certain factors, then I would be jumping onto that hamster-wheel of strategy chasing that magic combination of actions and behaviours that would bring love to my door.  But I might just as well pray for it.