Ghost of Julie-Not-Quite-Past

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

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

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

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

Progress Stumbles On

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

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

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

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?

Dr. Weekend and Mr. Work

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

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

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

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

Mad Scientist’s Lament

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

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

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

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

Out of Orbit

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

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

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

20/20 Blindsight

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

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

Here–Hold My Breath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naydream

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

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

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

Grownups, Better and Worse

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

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

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

Sofa, So Good

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

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

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

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

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.