To Have Known Then….

My girls will be fifteen in a few months, and I will still be thirty-seven-and-a-half years older.  I fear losing touch, as my parents lost touch with me.  But my parents had never quite been in touch.  I lived with three fifteen-year-old girls once before, but I was too busy being a fourteen-, sixteen-, and eighteen-year-old boy to take notes for the future.  At least my daughters know they are loved.  Love, though, is what pulls kids from their parents, isn’t it? a different kind of love than their parents can provide–the kind I have been pursuing for so long that it seems that all I’m chasing is the chase, a knight after a grail he barely believes exists.

What has this chase cost me?  What future cost will my children bear because of it? because I brought home anger and frustration that I couldn’t put aside to interact with them kindly?  What, ultimately, will it have been worth to have fallen in love?  Probably nothing until I fall in love again.  Or until my kids do, when I might have something to teach them, if I’ve not become too bitter by then to accept the wisdom offered by the experience.  I want them to be prepared for love younger and better than I was.  I guess there’s time.  I want them to know what I’ve been through, what a hard-headed ass I was most of that time, how little control I had over love, and how much I hurt someone in the name of it.  I want them to know what at least one man is like in love.  Maybe I’m not a good role model for that, but by the time I understand it myself they’ll be too old to tell anything to.  What does a daughter need to know? and when?  What does a dad need to know?

In love, I’ve been single-minded, neglectful of nearly everything else.  What did my daughters not get from me?  Being in love again would be tempered by more than a little guilt, as if it were a betrayal.  Emma probably still harbors resentment toward her mother for both the divorce and eventual remarriage, and I know she adores me.  Would I be betraying her?  Would I seem (to her) to be cutting her out?  I need her adoration.  I would probably feel abandoned, too, if she or her sisters fell in love.  I might retreat from them to give their love space, though I would hope that they would still seek my approval and advice.  These two loves–the one I have from my daughters and the one I seek–how do they coexist?  Who is the father and who is the lover?

All of these questions are probably the kind I should not try too hard to answer, as having asked them is awareness enough, a bridge I’ve yet reached:  Knowing there is a bridge is all I need to know, even as I cross it.  How much more prepared can I or need I be?  I hope my daughters fall in love, as I hope I do again; and I hope they recognize it and accept it without the struggle I put up against it.  Perhaps in one kind of love is bound the other, and each makes the other stronger.  It can be like that, can’t it?

Whenever, I Hope

Lieneke’s Law, Relationship Rule #1:  Getting over the separation lasts half the time the relationship did.  (The Vanishing, 1988, The Netherlands)

From the time I declared (to myself, in writing) my crush  on Julie to the days she left Twin Hickory was twenty-six months.  I’ve gotten more than three of the thirteen months allotted me out of the way, so it seems I can anticipate my Christmas (or birthday) present.  If the formula is true and my calculations correct…well, I’m not sure.  I’m ambivalent.  It seems soon, but isn’t it what I want?  It’ll be the biggest non-event of my life, but it will still be a non-event.  Seeing her set me back a month, maybe, but I did nothing about it but write, so I might very nearly be on track.  If I shut up altogether it might happen sooner.  No–later:  I can’t fool myself into not thinking about her; that’s just an explosion down the road.  I don’t do distraction well; I want to face my problems–resolve them, not ignore them away.  If that prolongs the battle, then it will have been well and truly won in the end.  To resolve it I have to live with it, give it a place in my life where it will do the most good, and that’s right here, and in Twickory, in Book Monkey Says, in “the novel.”  I write, I tell stories.  I have a story to tell, and, somehow–I don’t know how yet–I’ll tell it.  I am afraid of getting over Julie, afraid of losing her.  I want to capture her on paper, at least.  Can I do that when I’m over her?  Will she still mean enough to me to finish the story?  Will she remain an inspiration?  The writing will decide that, will create the Us without Julie (and without me at times), imperfectly recreate the woman I couldn’t get to know otherwise and let me know her surrogate, instead.  Resolution is finishing telling the story as I know it; and though I know barely half of it, I can eventually fill out the rest with my fascination for the other half.  I’m most afraid of losing the fascination.  I expect none of these fears to be realized, though, now that I’m that I’m aware of them.  The aggregate fear is that I might stop feeling love for her, but I’m now almost sure that I can be over Julie and still love her.  And why not?  It’s a good feeling to love without obligating someone else to return it (and I come closer everyday to actually believing that).

The Vanishing is only a movie, and Lienecke’s only a character in it.  There is no rule.  I’d be as well off making my own rules, arbitrary as such rules are.  Why We Love offers no formula, says only “weeks, months, or years.”  Whenever.  Whenever–it’s as good a time as any, considering my fascination with the journey.  Where am I now?  I still think of Julie for a large portion of my day, but every day less of the frustration and bitterness accompanies the thoughts.  Fading, too, but at a slower rate is the regret of missing so many opportunities to step up and get out of my pride.  But how could anything have been different between the two of us, given how we were each equipped to handle any of it?  We both did what we could do, in our own inadequate way.  For my part, hormones were doing the driving.  I dubbed them “The Fool.”  I don’t think they’ve gotten behind the wheel quite as often since Julie left, but they’re still not in the back seat, either.  Minus Julie’s agitation, The Fool can almost relax, detach a little more every day from the past, now that it’s not the present every, single work day.  Sometimes, I can take step back from that bright, ironic hell and see the satellite dance, and that excites me, because that’s what this writing was supposed to have been  all along:  A look back–not over my shoulder, but through time.  When that shoulder no longer knots up at the thought of her or at the sight of her handwriting, maybe that’s when I’ll have reached Whenever.  Or will it be when I no longer look for her wherever I go? or when she finishes becoming Phoebe?

I have honed a certain necessary ability to categorize my feelings for Julie by venue of expression:  The worst bitterness and frustration–e.g., when I saw her at the training center–goes into Twickory; there’s no longer room for that here; I’m trying to heal.  I still often feel the feelings that aren’t good for me, and, still needing to be expressed, they’ve been given a place of their own in Twickory.  It’s an important outlet, a place to answer the nagging questions and understand the Julie that wouldn’t let me know her.  Of course, it’s all still speculation, but in fiction everything is true, nothing can be disputed.  If you understand it, it’s true.  Without Julie’s help I’ll help myself.  That’s an important step away from her, as important as not needing her love to validate mine for her.

But I suppose that it will yet be a long while before I’m over her.  I still write this for her, to her, still hope to hear from her, to see her, to sit down and talk with her–not to air grievances, not to talk at her, begging for answers, but…to get to know her.  Having those hopes makes my recovery seem a lot farther away.  Perhaps Twickory is the place for hoping, too.  Hope–at least this hope–might as well be fiction, and Julie might as well be Phoebe, because the reality just isn’t good enough.  Whatever the reality is at Whenever, it may still pale to my hopes, and Twickory may in the end be little more than a story.  What will I be?  A little more complete, a little closer to loving myself, a little closer to falling in love again–a lot less Julie and a lot more me.

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!

Shoot Me–the Poison’s Not Working Fast Enough

Returning to work is a challenge I’m still not up to. I’m scared, and I’m hurt and angry, and I can’t spin my way out of any of those emotions. My heart is silent, and whatever my head says I’ve heard a million times. I know what happened last week, and I know my part in it, and I accept the blame for that. It’s Julie’s reaction I have trouble accepting, essentially for the inimical place it has made the library and the innecessity of doing so. I will not ask why she threatened me with harrassment charges or pretend to understand it, but if I can find some empathy for her fear of me I might find myself able to not take it personally. None of this will happen by Monday. It’s best I make no predictions on what will happen, for the spoken prophecy is too easily fulfilled. The best I can do–or try to do–is to find the lesson to be learned, the opportunity for growth. In the meantime, I must put my pride in my pocket and stay the hell away from Julie. (Now I’ve reached the end of my emotional restraint, so I will stop.)

The Price

I gave Julie both magnets, placed them on the door of her overhead storage compartment in plain sight on a day she didn’t work.  She saw them the next day, when I didn’t work.  She said nothing to me the next day but approached me the day after as I sat alone at lunch.  I was spooning yogurt when she asked, standing across the table from me in the breakroom, “What do you know about the magnets on my over head?”

“I put them there.”

“Why did you put them there?”

“I don’t know.  I just did.  I didn’t expect anything from it, if that’s what you’re worrried about.”

“Well, you know I can’t accept them.”

“I don’t know why not.”

“I just can’t.  It doesn’t feel right.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want you to give me things.”

“I saw them and thought of you, thought you’d like them.”

“Well, I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t accept them.”

“Okay.”

She walked away.

I seethed the rest of the day and emailed her the next morning.

I’m angry and disappointed. I’d had those magnets for some time before I gave them to you. When I bought them I thought of you, but thought you would misunderstand my giving them to you. Then I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt, that you might accept them in the simple spirit in which they were given. I expected no reaction, wanted nothing from it. You thought otherwise, and that was disappointing. You didn’t, as you said, “appreciate the gesture,” or you would have accepted it without confrontation, as you would have from any other coworker. It was not a diamond ring.

I’m angry because there now seems nothing at all I can do that you won’t construe as a come-on. Which one of us is not over this? I’ve had to get over making the biggest mistake of my life–falling in love with you. What have you had to get over? If you can’t accept a peace offering, a housewarming gift, can you accept anything at all? Do you like things this way? Do you like being afraid of me? Do you like thinking I’m still carrying a torch for you? Do you like worrying about encountering me at work? Do you like that stress? It’s time to read another magnet of yours: What attitude does our conversation follow? The workplace is toxic with our attitudes toward each other. And please don’t pretend to believe that you’re only doing it because you thought I wanted it this way. Who would want it this way? I’m not dying to get away from Twin Hickory, but from you, because things won’t change as long as you believe I still hold affection for you, and whatever proof you need to believe otherwise is beyond my reckoning. I’m tired of being the one who cares that we get along. I’ve stepped up, I’ve tried, however awkwardly, to mend things, but it is not, as you once said, “all up to” me. How often is that your answer to conflict? How often do you just wait for bad things to just go away? Or, how often do you walk up to them with that facade of smug bravado you’ve been perfecting all weekend and accuse them of having feelings for you? Don’t you want things to be better than this? Is there nothing within you power to change it? Your power over me is not sufficient–and waning. If you want to get along, try. If I don’t at first seem to appreciate the effort, it will only be because I don’t recognize it for what it is, having lost hope of ever seeing it. Believe it or not, I want things to get better between us. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve just gotten weary of trying. If you care, please come halfway.

Immediately, I regretted sending it.  Not a word seemed true, only mean and accusatory.

I found the reply in my basket.  I put off reading it for several hours, afraid for my heart.  I made sure I was ready to get on my bike to leave work before I removed the staple and unfolded the single sheet of copier paper.

First let me say how upsetting I found you email.  I can’t understand why you would send me what I felt to be a bitter, mean-spirited email at work.  It seems I upset you by refusing your magnets.  You accuse me, among other things, of not being able to accept them in the “simple spirit in which they were given.”  How was I to know what you intentions were as you did not approach me personally.  Maybe, if you had handed them to me and explained youself, I might have accepted them.  Instead you chose to leave them anonymously on my overhead bin with no note, no anything.  And I was supposed to know your intentions, how?  You equate your gesture to that of any other co-worker but it wasn’t.  Would you have done the same thing for any other of our co-workers?

For the past two years I have had to live with a work situation that I have found uncomfortable at best.  After I initially told you I did not return your feelings, you proceeded to make your feelings a work issue: Telling people about your blog, informing others that you had a crush on me, taping my photo to your bicycle.  You wrote about me in your blog with no regard for me or my feelings.  You kept reminding me by your words and actions how you were ”in love with me.”  I did try to not let it interfere with our work environment and to maintain a cordial relationship with you but you didn’t seem to accept that, you seemed to only want what I couldn’t give you.  If I remember correctly I made it clear I didn’t want it to affect our working situation.  And the most distressing part was that you continued to write about me in your blog when you knew I did not appreciate it.  Now, all of a sudden, it’s my fault we don’t get along, that I’m the one who isn’t trying and I’m afraid of you or like thinking you still carry a torch for me.  If that’s what you think of me, then you know nothing about me at all and I wonder how you can even imagine you were ever in love with me if you believe that’s the way I think and act.  I have no desire to have power over you or anyone else.  Your past actions have made me uncomfortable with you and I do not and have not for many months felt comfortable conversing casually with you.  Now you expect me all at once to forget that and be friends.  Yes, maybe it’s a failing on my part that I can’t do that on demand, but how would you react if you were in my situation?  I certainly don’t claim to be perfect.  You betrayed my trust and that is something that has to be earned, not given for the asking.  And the tone of your email to me certainly hasn’t improved the situation.  Quite frankly, I don’t know now if things will ever, as you say, be better between us if this is the approach you continue to take.  And to answer your question about what did I have to get over?  Well, that would be the death of my mother.

It has been a very long night since then.  I have forced myself to read the letter a few times, forced myself to not react in angry denial of this perception of me.  I try not to react at all, but the weight of shame is crushing.  I sent Julie flowers last night.  She should get them at work before I come in in the afternoon.  The note with them will read, “Everything you said is right.  I’m sorry.  Please accept these flowers and my apology in the spirit of peace and goodwill.”  I realize, now, that she will be embarrassed and have some uncomfortable explaining to do to coworkers.  That was not my intention.  It’s simply what I thought to do.  I didn’t consider how it would make me feel, either, but that doesn’t seem important.

The magnets, which Julie tossed in my basket after reading my email, are on my overhead now.  I should probably remove them, remove them from any chance of seeing them again, which could make me bitter again, but that seems inevitable, anyway. I only hope that whatever I was meant to learn from this takes hold first. I only hope that Julie can forgive me and that I can forgive myself.

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.

Two Divided by Pride

My way of showing my love to Julie is cruel.  I searched for a better word, but I was searching for a word to ameliorate my guilt, to rationalize my actions, actions dictated by pride.  It’s deeper, even, than that, or perhaps just ingrained now.  There’s a layer I need to break through, chip away at to get to the compassionate human inside me.  I can’t keep hurting–myself or anyone else.  It is not a perverse indulgence of my vanity to believe that I have hurt and am still hurting Julie.  If she were not hurt, if she had laid all this aside, she would not be afraid of contact with me.  Of course, the same could be said of me, and that’s where we stand:  Two hurt, headstrong people unable to get past pride to reconciliation.  But, at this point, what is reconciliation?  One of the most truthful and meaningful (and last) personal things Julie said to me was that our relationship was “damaged.”  Our respective interpretations of that word are no doubt different.  The designation itself is open to interpretation; in fact, it’s still difficult for me to understand just how I did the “damage.”  I fell in love, and I expressed it.  I did not tell her such, and I did not express my frustrations, either–to her.  She was not meant to know them, but she found them out.  Thus, the damage:  I had cast bitter aspersions meant only to relieve my hurt, meant only to be read by the sympathetic, but, indiscreetly, I allowed them to circulate.  I had also recounted private conversations between us.  I don’t know which she found more unforgivable, but the grudge sits there between us, square-jawed and defiant.  My grudge sits opposite–the same prideful grudge, but with softer, supplicant eyes begging forgiveness, pleading for escape from this tyrannical standoff.  But nothing will be done.  Two people, fearful of each other’s–and their own–emotions will only step close enough to add another brick to the wall pride builds between them.  Wouldn’t one step more lightly without the brick? advancing to remove one, instead?

Cruelty abides in my love for Julie as a pain of unrequition, but that pain is no one’s fault; no one did that damage.  I must move that pain to a place of its own, where it can live out its days in seclusion.  There is no room in my heart for it.  I must make more room for compassion.

Father to the Man/Child

My girls are now closer to fourteen than thirteen, and boys are showing interest in them.  A boy asked Emma out.  She was surprised.  All she could say, after recovering from the shock, was, “I don’t think so?”  The boy said, “I failed, ” turned, and walked away.  A friend of hers thought he did it on a bet.  I told her I thought  it might have been more of a dare (if that), a push from his friend to do what he was afraid to do.  I was washing dishes when Emma told me this, and I looked down in the sink at my yellow-rubbered hands and saw an important opportunity to move this generation of young women in the right direction.

I said, ” I hope you can appreciate how hard it must have been for him to ask you out.”

“I’m sure it was hard,” she said.

“I asked a girl out when I was thirteen.  It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.  She said yes, but the date was the second hardest thing to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t know what to do.  I didn’t know what to say.  I was so boring.  It was excruciating”:  Two hours watching The Paper Chase in a dark theatre, all the time wanting to just touch her, then standing outside waiting an eternity for my dad to come pick us up.  I’ve blocked out the agonizing details from my memory.

Emma doesn’t have feelings one way or another for this boy, Taylor.  She was neither flattered nor repulsed by his advance.  It’s just what boys at this age do, and what girls at this age prepare themselves for.  It’s not love or romance, and it’s certainly not sex–ironically, considering the whole ritual is put into motion by hormones.

A boy told Keely she was the prettiest of the Burn triplets.  She didn’t know what to say.  Her sisters weren’t envious.  Claire, as far as I know, has not been attended upon by boys, but Claire might not tell me if she had.

Every day with them–and I get fewer than two a week–I feel less a man than a father.  My problems mean nothing while I try not to lose touch with teenagers growing away from me.  Soon enough I won’t be “Daddy” anymore.  Next year they’ll be in high school.  Will it be then that I become an embarassment on Wednesday mornings waiting with them and their peers for the school bus?  They are all I have, but I am not all they have, and they will have ever more as they move deeper into adulthood, and I, it seems from this gloomy end of the tunnel, will have that much less.  I can’t see a woman taking their place (it wouldn’t be her place, anyway), though I can see my desperation for companionship increasing in proportion to the growing distance from my daughters.  Or will my desperation manifest in a pathetic clinging to my daughters?

It’s doubtful that I’ll allow any boy–or man–to be good enough for my daughters, but that could stretch the gulf between us to an unnavigable distance.  How can I be both a man and a father when I feel so inadequate as either?

Risking Life In Limbo

I followed through on my two vows.

I talked to Julie.  It was nearly as difficult as the time I asked her out, but I finally spit out, “Julie, how is your mom doing?”  “Not very well,” she answered, turning to me.  “She’s in hospice care.  All we can do is keep her comfortable.”  “How are you holding up?”  A patron interrupted before she answered.  I let it go, but when the patron left, Julie said, “I’m hanging in there.”  No more was said by either of us to the other while we were out on the desk.

I was right about how I would feel–relieved, a bit righteous, humble, hopeful.  I wanted this to be the end of things, the beginning of better things.  I had put the ball at her feet and wanted her to play.  Four days later, I still don’t know if anything has changed.  Until yesterday she still wouldn’t meet my gaze and when she finally did today it was with that defiant glare I’ve come to know all too well–chin tipped upward, jaw clenched square.  Yet yesterday she had opened and held a door for me and my cart of juvenile non-fiction.  I looked at her, thanked her.  She smile and replied, and I stared at her.  Still she smiled.  I’d missed that smile more than I realized.  I devoured it.  I missed the doorway and banged the frame.  But now?…

I wrote Melissa on Facebook two nights ago.  I have not heard back, and the worst assumptions grow in my mind:  My message didn’t go through; or she knows that Sandra doesn’t care for me and doesn’t know how to tell me.   I can’t imagine a best-case scenario, and it’s difficult to even consider the realistic, neutral possibilities.  The longer it takes to hear back from Melissa the less worthy I feel to be in a relationship.  I’m steeling myself for bad news.  But as I imagine, with apprehension, waking up with morning breath beside someone, I also think of those things I said I want–someone to talk to and be and do things with–and there’s that hope that the positives, if they become real, will melt the negatives.

I hope they would also melt my feelings for Julie.  Listening to Belle and Sebastian last week, I nearly convinced myself I was still in love with her.  I can’t quite trace the mental path that brought me so close to that conviction, but I think it began with the character May of my novel, who is modelled after Julie.  I’ve begun to feel very close to the character empathetically, and I think I began to wonder if I could feel that way without being in love with Julie.  Then came that defiant glare of hers yesterday, and I just became angry.  Whatever my feelings for Julie, I would expect a meaningful relationship with another woman to extinguish the most passionate of them and leave me with, at least, indifference.

I am out of vows for now; until these two are reacted upon I don’t know what to do.  There are no contingencies.  I hope my life means more than waiting for women to talk to me.

Julie-Bitten, Twice Shy

I’m trying not to think of Sandra.

Big sister Kevyn took me to a party New Year’s Eve.  Eight people, she said.  I wouldn’t be able to hide (I said). She reeled off the names–nobody I knew.  On the way there I began to dread the event.  I felt out of place for awhile, but everyone was genuinely friendly, and I relaxed without having to tell myself to.  Everyone had known each other for some time, so points of reference in conversation were often implied and I found little footing.  Before I was drawn into talk I noticed there were only seven of us.  When Sandra showed up it was a while before she joined the group, possibly talking to Melissa in the kitchen.  She had not hailed greetings when she came in, so I assumed she was not the eighth but maybe Nadal and Melissa’s daughter, because at the first, brief, glimpse she appeared much younger than anyone else there, and I was the youngest.  When someone plunked down beside me on the narrow wicker loveseat, I did not expect to see a new face when I turned my head that way.

I really don’t (I think) want to think of Sandra.  We had a first-date kind of conversation–kids, jobs, etc.–and I felt a creeping suspicion that this was some kind of set-up.  I didn’t let that suspicion creep too deep.  I knew I couldn’t continue to have this conversation if I blew up the whole scene into a conspiracy.  It was tempting to jokingly bring attention to the suspicion, but I didn’t see a win in that effort.  But by the end of the evening it was too late.  Kevyn and I were the first to leave, and by then I felt as if I’d been adopted by a new family–hugs all around, until Sandra and I were face-to-face, and then it was muttered, polite farewells as we dug our toes into the schoolyard dirt and avoided eye contact.  On the way home I said to Kevyn, “Sandra’s a very attractive woman.”  Kevyn only said, “Yes, she is a beautiful woman.”  I ventured no further, either that night or the next day before Kevyn left for Staunton.

Melissa, our hostess, friended me on Facebook, and I thanked her, in turn, for the hospitality. I struggled to find a way to mention or ask about Sandra without seeming obvious, but I knew there was no way and so left off altogether.  It occurs to me now that if Sandra is on Facebook she’s on Melissa’s friends list, and I wish I’d remained clueless on that count.

I’m afraid of a lot of things right now.  They may all be one thing, but I can’t trace it to its roots, or even chase the branches to the trunk.  I don’t want to commit to what isn’t a sure thing.  I don’t want my desires whitewashing the realities, sending hope soaring without wings over a beautiful precipice and falling into love.  I’ve not quite fallen back behind rational ramparts–I know my emotions must be served–but I can’t help being cautious after Julie.  Though Sandra and I enjoyed a rapport that Julie and I never had, it was, still, just a conversation.  Perhaps that’s where love starts, but I’ll not presume that this is such a case.

I’m afraid of losing Julie, too, though in what way that I haven’t already, I’m not sure.  Dammit, she still fascinates me, but that might come down simply to the impossibility of ever satisfying my curiosity about her.  In Sandra’s light, Julie seems almost a child to me now, missing a certain maturity or wisdom that would prevent her from ever connecting with me beyond mutual points of interest.  That saddens me immensely.  I’ve tried many times to make eye contact with Julie this week, but she refuses.  I’ve already vowed to not let our next desk hour together be silent, regardless of the hopes of my heart.  I’m not eager to talk to her–there’s almost nothing to say–but this is a horrible way for two people to treat one another.  If she can’t rise above it, I have to.

Maybe I really would rather be thinking of Sandra regardless of where it takes me.  It can only be a better place.  What’s wrong with hope?  There’s always a better world ahead than behind, real or not.  And what does it hurt? except maybe my next encounter with Sandra, when I might not be able to get my teeth out of the way of my tongue.  So what–a chance I’ll take.  I’ll think of Sandra if my mind wanders there (and I will let it); I just won’t tell anyone about it.  That has not been hard to do with Stacey’s example before me.  No cry-wolf humiliation for me.  Thinking about Sandra won’t make me fall in love with her.  Knowing her might, but right now that’s a galaxy far, far away.