My Plastic One Can Do the Same Job, Just More Slowly and Painfully

(To the tune of “Foot Shooter” by Frightened Rabbit.)

Thomas said he had news.  I said, “Oh, yeah?”  My mind was already out the starting gate, chasing the possibilities; my gut already girding for the blow.

“But I can’t tell you.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“Yeah, but see, I didn’t know you were gonna take it so hard.”

I was surprised that he found that more important than the amusement it afforded him,  but maybe I’ve been selling him short in the compassion department.  Of course, I wanted to hear this “news,” and, of course, I didn’t, but my imagination had probably already topped the reality:  The immediate thought was that she had a boyfriend.  Not that I could believe it, but my imagination took off after the worst news I could have heard.  I didn’t push Thomas.  I knew that despite my own worse-case scenarios, ignorance was the path to bliss in this matter:  Don’t give me the knife, and I can’t fall on it.  Naturally, I’d be jealous of any man whose romantic attentions she accepted, but after that. . . ?  Well, I’d feel plenty of pity for my lonely ol’ self, sure, but I don’t think the dreaded inpiration-loss would happen.  See, I’ve been learning to channel the bitterness of the irresoluble reality that was Julie and me into a resolute fiction–Twickory. I am creating the resolution, putting two characters in motion against each other and trying to interpret the consequences and steer the course to an actual destination.  Thomas can go ahead and tell me Julie has hooked up with the man of her dreams, and I’ll feel all the things I usually feel towards her and myself, but if it comes down to asking the same unanswerable questions with which I’ve burdened myself in Satellite Dance and A Bright, Ironic Hell, then I will put them to Twickory and see how those people deal with it.

Very recently I discovered the answer to one very old question, and have found in that answer yet more motivation to fictionalize my account of the affair.  It might have been one of the first questions I asked after Julie was told about BIH:  How was my writing about how I felt about her an “invasion of [her] privacy”?  The simple answer is, it wasn’t, and in my defensive, naive idealism that was the end of the matter.  What I’ve finally come to realize is that though it was not an invasion of privacy, it was lack of discretion:  Had I had more respect for how my writing might affect Julie, perhaps I wouldn’t have written what I wrote in the way I wrote it.  Not that I regret doing so, because at the time and in that forum it was the only way to express myself; but I do regret the pain that it caused, though I will yet not take the blame for the readers’ inference and its effect upon them.  That said, however, there is an entire page of this entry slashed with a red X that, though a true account, would serve only to hurt Julie.  There was a time when that would have been a weak argument for exclusion–on the contrary, might have been the best reason for inclusion–but the argument has strengthened mightily under a regimen of maturity and humility.  At the time, especially since The Tribunal, the motivation for discretion has been mostly self-preservation.  I’m not concerned with Julie taking further action against me–she won’t and can’t–but I am concerned with bruising the ego of a more “important” person than Julie.  I cannot trust someone who says, “I remember every word I say,” so I can’t feel safe in telling you what he said to me when I reopened Satellite Dance and after Julie had left his library, what he gave me explicit (though unsolicited) permission to do at Glen Allen; only that I would never do it and that I took silent umbrage to his use of  the word “harass.”

I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (though that hasn’t always been the case) but I do want to tell the truth as I know it as candidly as needs be, and sometimes discretion gets in the way of candor and is shunted by emotion.  Thomas is the more valorous of us two, but he didn’t have pride to contend with.  He had better keep his news.  I’d be a fool to solicit it (the same fool that’s dying to hear it), and who knows how valorous I could be with the information.  I would be a fool to want to find out.

Echo in a Packed House

I’m close to not writing, or farther from writing.  Satellite Dance has been a much lonelier endeavor than A Bright, Ironic Hell.  I thought I was writing a forum, but I’ve just been shouting down a manhole. I thought I’d connect with people who felt what I was feeling, but those people won’t come out, even incognito–I know they’re out there.  I get calls from well-meaning family worried about my emotional health and called into Ahmed’s office to be told I misrepresented him, but I am not after advice or trouble.  Spare me the pity, too; I’m not after that, either.  I express how I feel and hope to be understood, but, like Kerouac, all I’ve had to express is my own confusion; so if I’ve done a good job of that who can possibly understand?  Goddamned irony.

I talked to my dad last week.  He asked, as he always does, “Are you writing.” but added, “Not journal writing–real writing.”  I bristled but only said yes and changed the subject to my guitar-playing, which he could better relate to.  He is embarrassed for me and my writing.  This, coming from a former professional actor who once said, “You have to bare your ass for your art.”  Well, my ass has been hanging out there for a long time, but it’s winter and it’s damned cold.  Anyway, the people who’ve seen it are either embarrassed or offended by it.  Maybe it’s their own ass I’ve been showing them.  I haven’t connected.  I’ve exposed my self–my flaws, my fears, my hopes, my joys–but I have no clue that anyone actually knows me any better.

I’m sure many people don’t want to know me quite that well.  I began announcing new blog posts on Facebook (and Twitter), and, at first, readership rose; but now a new post is met mostly with indifference.  I’ve equated readership with friendship, because writing has been the easiest way to reach out, so if no one is reading . . . well, you do the math.  Writing has become a lonely job with little return on my efforts.  Lately, I have felt better not doing it, but that doesn’t end the need to be understood and to understand and connect with others or make it easier to do so in some other way than writing.  That bared ass has taken many a bite because of the blogs, and I suppose if I’d considered those possible consequences I’d never have started them.  But then I’d never have written, never have asked Julie out, and all those other bite-precluding nevers that would have followed.  I’d have been miserable.  Instead, I was confused and frustrated, but I was alive.  I moved forward, took action, suffered the consequences, and grew.  There may yet be more:  Jackie has friended me on Facebook, so she might find out about the blog(s) and maybe read enough to find herself mentioned.  This writing just keeps on giving.

But it doesn’t give enough.  I don’t want to write so much as the writing yearns to be written, and I try to oblige it with a few hours a week.  It demands more, but some things are more necessary to do, and some things more rewarding.  The reward of having written a post often is having gotten it out of the way, marked it off the list:  It’s a burden lifted, if not exactly a chore.  I’m never satisfied that I’ve said what I intended, and all of it, only that I’ve made some sense, and that doesn’t seem enough relative to the effort.  Neither does the audience seem worthy of the effort.

I am not leading up to saying this is my last post, though at the start I thought I was.  I’m trying to navigate a transition, yet I’m not sure where I’ve come from, and I certainly don’t know where I’m going.  Julie’s gone, and the cold and snow and the refusal of deference to desperation keep me from the social rounds I’d established over the summer; so, busy as my head is, I wonder if any of the chatter is worth relaying or if it is within the scope of the blog.  I’ve said I don’t like to write about writing, but writing is lonely and writing about it is as much about loneliness as writing about Julie is/was about me.  I still believe that I write simply to get a word in where my meager confidence in conversation won’t let me.  In writing is a place where I can’t be interrupted, where I can be confident, even in my confusion, that I’ll finish saying something.  In that way it’s a friend, but it’s a crutch when I ask too much of it, and that’s when I consider abandoning it as a weakness.  Then I consider other lonely, socially awkward people who may not even have a compensatory creative outlet, and I feel grateful that I can at least write.  Until I wonder if anyone’s reading.

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.

Cacophony on All Fronts

The war rages on two fronts–work and elsewhere–against separate enemies–Julie and my shyness–but my arms and armor against either in either venue are meager.  My heart certainly has little place at work, and it would be more beneficial outside of it if it had any degree of subtlety short of desperation.  At work Julie is, indeed, the enemy, but it’s a cold war we fight.  There is no aggression but a passive hostility.  Love is irrelevant there, as there is no hope of gaining anything I’d once naively hope for.  What’s left is only a tolerance of the current conditions, and only the mind can effect that, if only by reasoning an ever-thickening wall against the heart’s blind insistence.  It’s brainwashing, plain and simple.  When I tried to give the fight over to my emotions it was because I thought my mind was unequipped to do the job of the heart, when it might more accurately have been the heart’s intrusion into the head’s business that kept the job from being done properly:  My mind offered reality; my heart offered hope to the contrary.  My mind knows the truth, but it would rather believe the lies.  I have been trotting out the old evidence and arguments against Julie’s domination of my heart and recognize my heart’s defense as pride grasping at straws for dignity.  But what dignity is there in groping for love where there is none?  These things I tell myself, and must keep telling myself, to get through even a short day with Julie.

I’m aware that this strategy is analogous to the self-help books that I eschew in that it is, essentially, a trick, a treatment of symptoms, but at least it’s one of my own devising–a better-fitting suit that off the rack.  I’m finally allowing Julie to help, too, not fighting her indifference (and, sometimes, obvious hostility) but allowing its brick to go on my side of the wall.  Why push against the wall she never stops building?  What fight is there against the eyes that stare straight ahead as we pass in the narrow hallway though I am looking right into them?

I will remove the l.s., the cute magnet, at my earliest convenience.  My guess is that it’s still there.  I hope that she hasn’t found it, because she would likely assume it came from me and, so, couldn’t possibly appreciate the sentiment.  I’d hate to have wasted that on her.  I also hate to waste concern for her presence in a room, and I fight hard to not look for her and just go about my business.  I can’t afford to care about her more than she does about me.  Forget the morality of this strategy; forget its cowardice.  It’s all I can do.  I am not spiteful and cruel.  I am doing the best I can with what little I have to do it with.  I can’t look at Julie without hope, and I can’t hope without feeling angry and bitter.  So why look?

I take my heart out to movies, dinner, etc., and come home with it no more content than to be able to say, “At least I got out.”  Though I don’t know what I’m doing, I have to try.  I’ll go to a gallery show tomorrow in town.  I’ll be hopeful, of course, but I’ll hope first that I can enjoy the exhibit and not just be glad to be getting out.  Once I’ve gotten out for a day or an evening I don’t want to return home, where I’m left with just the reflection of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, but that is always stark and pale like the living apparition of terminal hunger.  What is the trick to this endeavor that would pull away the curtain of hope I can’t see through to the life on the other side?  I wake up alone in a double bed and think even my bed is a lie for being so big, with its depression in the center instead of on each side.  What a waste.  I had just dreamt of waking up with another’s hand in mine and feeling it was everything I needed.  I hate that I awoke to the same loneliness as ever, that imagining a soft body beside me to hold and protect is not real enough and seems to become less real each morning, that I cry as I try to finish this and, therefore, can’t to my satisfaction.  I take this all with me, and it all shows, and I hate that, too.  This war–why is it?

Tunnel?

(There are actually four paragraphs in this post, but WordPress seems to have lost the ability to separate them.  I hope it’s temporary.)

 

For a moment, I saw an infinite meaning.  The redbud bent away from me in the wind of a lowering sky.  Somehow, I could hear a robin through closed windows and over traffic; and there was the life beyond the words and the world beyond the life.  And then it blew away.  I took a half-day off Wednesday, the first half of the evening shift, so I had an entire day to myself before going in at five.  Monday was when I asked for it.  It has become impossible to write in the evenings, and by the time I get a morning to myself, there’s too much to write before I have to be at work in the afternoon.  This life is becoming increasingly more important than the library.  Even now, I sit, shirtless, wet hair dangling just above the page, scribbling, half an hour before I have to be out the door, lunch not eaten, dinner not made, clothes not chosen and packed.  I too easily now accept being late for work.[Paragraph]

I had work to do Wednesday, work more important than the work I’m paid for, work that more nearly defines me.  Writing looms large, but be it a wraith or just a shadow, it has no power to lift me out of this concrete world of responsibility and plant me in what is yet an abstraction of the life I should be living.  Those things I’ve collectively called a distraction–movies, music, books–have resumed the role they’ve always had, of the dig site of my soul.  What evidence do I have that I’m digging in the right place?  Would I know the evidence when I saw it?  Those questions show me my futility and stop me reading, watching movies, and listening to music.  They don’t stop me writing, digging…a well or a grave?  And the way it presses on me, I don’t know if I’m digging my way in  or out.  I only know that by the time I’d stepped into work at five Wednesday the load was off–I’d finished and published the previous post and missed a day of working with Julie.[Paragraph]

This isn’t a sustainable life.  I can’t take that half-day off every week, and I have to work with Julie.  I write for a way out, but the way out doesn’t seem to be in the direction in which I’m writing.  (The incessant soundtrack to this post is “Things” by Frightened Rabbit, an anthem to a desperate rebirth.)  But it’s not so much the way out of the library I’m trying to find as a a way away from Julie, and I already know writing won’t do that.  Writing won’t find that life I saw swish through the redbud; another metaphor won’t bring it back into my view.  How can I hope to find it in someone else’s creative output?[paragraph]

In a place transcendent of all those things is my life.  Yours, too?  We are the satellites dancing round our orbits, never meeting, never changging course to make it happen, always looking for each other, always missing each other around a just-turned corner.  I’ve been thinking I’d find you at the Westhampton some Friday night.  I’ve been to two movies the past three weeks, twice as often as the past two years combined.  I thought that was you behind me in City Island, the only person laughing with me in several places in the movie, but you left before the credits finished, so it couldn’t have been you.  I knew at a glance you weren’t with me at The Story of Kells–only four couples and me in the whole theater.  Too bad.  I thought of you.  I thought of Julie, too, but I’m sure youd have appreciated it more.  Maybe next week–there’s always something new there.  In the meantime, I have this life of words, words, and more words; the library; and Julie.  Please come to the library.  Don’t be afraid of Julie; she doesn’t care.  It gets lonely there–especially when she’s there.  Help me find that meaning again, that meaning beyond the distractions, outside of Julie, and within you and me.  Because here I am, late for work again, and I’m caring just a little bit less than yesterday.

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?

Pedalling to Distraction and Back

There was a moment Friday, alone in the workroom on a third straight Julie-less day, that I thought, Maybe her way is the only way to do this.  It seemed, all of a sudden, that my asking for resolution from her is like asking for justice for blowing the cover off A Bright, Ironic Hell:  No one wants it but me.  Even my believing that it would be the right and best thing for everyone doesn’t make it so.  Who has any stake in resolution or justice but me? and are they victories worth winning?  What damage have I done, not letting go?  But I’m getting myself down.  Pretty soon I’ll have to be asking justice of myself.

On a rare Sunday without the kids, I thought I’d try to think as little of Julie as I could , not work myself up into the usual frenzied dread of the next day.  I headed to Carytown after lunch with a Zone Perfect bar and a navel orange.  Of all the places I wanted to go, only Plan 9 was open.  I bought six cd’s–Stranglers, Simple Minds, Sparks(2), Spoon, and Elvis Costello.  Three hours in Carytown, still bustling despite most of the shops closed, and I hadn’t spoken to anyone besides a guy asking for spare change.  Lonely and disappointed, I headed further east, to a headshop, Katra Gala, that Judy told me her son had some glass pieces in.  I thought I’d get Colin something as I hadn’t for her birthday just passed.  We were alone, the clerk and I, and finally I had someone to talk to, if not of anything consequential–the proliferation of such shops in Richmond, the legal euphemization of “reefer” into “tobacco,” “bong” into “water pipe,” etc.  I wasn’t attracted to her, though she was cute in a way and very friendly.  I probably had twenty years on her, what I consider to be an unbridgeable cultural gap for the purposes of romance.  It was enough for me, though, to have made her laugh.  I love to make a woman laugh.  (I got one genuine laugh out of Julie, long ago, pre-blogs, when someone mentioned the coming time change, and I said, “Finally, my clocks will be right!”  But I’m supposed to be forgetting about Julie.)  After about twenty minutes, and not having bought anything, I got a fillup of my water bottle from her and left for points yet further from home.  I ate my orange in my alma mater’s Shaeffer Court.  VCU has changed in seventeen years, but I probably blend in better now than then, with the long hair and bike.  I made no connections with my fellow students back then, being too old but not too old enough, I guess, and looking every bit the married man part.  In the time I ate my orange I made no connections, either.  Then, a few more miles east, maybe twelve miles from home, to James’ doorstep on Tobacco Row.  He lives in a secured building so I had to call his cell.  I had to leave a message:  “Hey, I’m outside your door.  I guess I’ll hang around a bit doing…I don’t know what.  Hope to talk to you soon.”

In Shockoe, nine blocks closer to home, at the end of 13th Street, I sat at the foot of a former monument, its plaque pried off, its statue cut from the steel beam that now protruded, jagged and rusted, from a crudely cemented pyramid of large, smooth stones, and ate my nutrition bar.  My phone rang as I finished.  James was on the canal on one of his writing walks.  He didn’t know his phone had rung until he opened his backpack to stuff in his notebook and it alerted him to my message.  I invited him up.  He was only a block away.

James had been writing poetry, a new medium for him, he confessed, but one he felt to be the best to express his latest Kristen inspiration.  Kristen is a waitress at Bottom’s Up, a pizza restaurant and watering hole, and James is in love with her.  He told her so, too, drunkenly, at a Super Bowl gathering at the eatery.  Guess what?  She didn’t run screaming to management to have him shut up!  (What? me bitter?)  He’s had that luck twice since he left the library, and though neither girl felt the same way toward him, they were (and are, in Kristen’s case) still friendly with him.  Kristen actually appreciates his company.  Simply the extrovert’s advantage, methinks, though James is quite bashful around women to whom he’s attracted.  However, his bashful is probably equivalent to my brashful.  (His cute would be my creepy.)  But Kristen is a lesbian, something James knew long before his declaration.  Hope for romance is suppressed by rationale and his concentration at making a friend of her, which he seems to have pretty well in hand.

James and I sat under the budding oak at the base of this monument to political correctness for a couple hours.  Of course, Julie came up but I diverted the conversation to the state of the libary–our attrition, the continued militaristic culling of our not-even three-year-old collection, and the bookstorification of the public library due to its unfounded fear of competition–until both the sun and my blood sugar fell to warning levels, and I had to go.  Knowing I couldn’t get home for The Simpsons, I got Chinese takeout in Carytown and ate on the sidewalk.

I’m never in a hurry to get home from the city, where on my bike I’m an actual vehicle and people are not only allowed to walk but are given places to walk on and to.  Would you be eager to come back to a place where you are considered an obstruction–even by police–if you aren’t driving? where cars honk at you every day (yes, every day) and people yell at you, “Get the fuck off the road!” and “Pedal on, you faggotty ass sonofabitch!”?  It was nine-fifteen when I got home.  I didn’t read or write or watch tv, or even listen to any of my new music, but soaked in a warm bath and went to bed.

The Sunday outing worked to a small but significant degree, though I could not, in my deepest dread have imagined a worse Monday than the last.  It was a Monday better than most.  Our first encounter was sudden and gave neither of us time to throw up but the most meager guard.  I even almost said, “Good morning,” but it just wouldn’t come out.  Instead, we settled for brief, honest eye contact and shy, tight-lipped smiles.  Thomas made her blush later that day–I could see it sixty feet away–and I was jealous and sad, wishing I could do that again, but the next hour, when I was on the desk and Julie was again shelving dvd’s in front of me, I again stared at her as she worked, but, this time, could not work up a passion:   She was there, and little more, though, still, I could not stop staring.

At the store that evening I seemed to be attracting looks and smiles, and at checkout was transfixed for a moment in the clerk’s hazel eyes as she handed me my bags.  If only I knew how this state was induced, I’d climb into that bottle and close it up behind me.  Is it a glimpse of who I really am? of what I could be for someone else? a preview of my reclaimed life?  Sometimes I can almost visualize–literally see–the distance between Julie and my own life.  I can almost take a deep, calming breath and say, “I can do this,” and choose to have my life back, to let Julie go.  Spring is well and truly here, and I don’t want to miss it as I did the last two.

All of those ideas and strategems and conclusions my brain wrought in A Bright, Ironic Hell have turned out to be true, according, now, to my heart.  Before Julie even knew about that blog, before I even admitted I was in love with her, I screamed for separation from her.  It’s been nearly two years since I started writing about this (though it seems like ten).  What would I have to say without her? What would I need to say?  Feeling her departure imminent, I have my last words to her ready.  I will not speak them to her or even write them here (now).  A card will go ’round, and I will write them there, for her and everyone else after me to read–one last embarrassment, one last public announcement that, this time, she can’t drag me out to a coffee shop to avoid.  Her leaving would be a good riddance for me, though, of course, I would miss her; but the void would be filled, I suspect, and hope, by deep calming breaths, a life of my own, a heart that beats more like a man’s instead of a hummingbird’s, and a heart I can give to someone who wants it.  I can do this.

Surrender, Desperation

Daughter Emma is reading Walden, my favorite book.  I thought of picking it up again, but then considered that its continuing relevance is indicative of its diligent necessity:  We haven’t learned from it; more that ever do more and more of us lead quietly desperate lives, afraid even to grab the bars of our cages, much less rattle them, even just for attention.  My desperation is louder every day.  It might never again be so quiet as that of Thoreau’s majority of men, but it might always be as desperate.

Mondays are the most desperate–the first workday and eight hours with Julie–and this was the worst Monday ever.  She just gets colder and colder towards me, until I think she must any day now freeze in her tracks and crumble into ice cubes right in front of me.  Julie now refuses, pointedly, to even meet my eye.  Am I being punished for something?  I never wanted to not talk to her or not look at her.  I’m not acting out of spite in avoiding her–she knows that.  I just cannot talk to someone who has made it abundantly clear that they don’t want to talk to me.  What can I do about that?  I can try to get along with them, but that takes two, as well.  Julie’s resentment seems fueled by willfullness.  At least three times I left her presence because my heart was beating out of control and my shoulder turned to stone with stress.  Once, I stepped out back and stared into breaking clouds for ten minutes.  My heart had not calmed, but I had to suck it up and get some work done.  That same hour, I left again, to the public bathroom, where I suddenly interrupted the drying of my hands to pound the dryer.  I felt the lonelier all day for all the chatter weaving haphazardly about the workroom as I quietly trapped holds and repaired books.  I didn’t get an hour out front, so I didn’t even get to talk to someone who wasn’t afraid to talk to me for sensing my torment.

If this were a war, I’d be surrendering unconditionally, but I can’t give in to that attitude.  What would winning or losing even mean?  To consider this warfare is to have already lost.  I don’t want to fight.  During the last hour of the day, I’d resolved to confront her with, “So, what will it take to get you to talk to me again?” but I knew it to be coming from anger.  It was not the confrontation we need to have, so I left before I could encounter her again.

Once I was on the road and out of sight of the library (not that I would look back), I was comparatively euphoric, out of prison.  But I took the bars with me, and I will rattle them loudly wherever I go, especially from this rooftop called the internet, because I will not let my desperation live quietly but will drag it kicking and screaming to its exhaustion and surrender.

Better the Julie I Don’t Know

The library at which I work is open till nine the first four days of the week.  Each of us works two of the evenings, our day starting at twelve-thirty.  Friday and Saturday the library closes at six.  Half of us work alternating weekends.  Before Julie was on my radar, we worked the same schedule–Wednesday and Thursday nights, same weekend.  Before I asked her out, she switched her Wednesday evening to Tuesday.  A couple weeks ago, she switched weekends with Becky.  I now have two whole days and two half days with Julie.  This is Friday.  Julie was at a training class yesterday.  Monday is a full day together.  I may need more time to write this.  Without Julie I have much more room.  She fills the library when she’s there, like smoke.  I take small breaths so I don’t choke.  Emotional survival is my only goal.  Her absence does not stop me thinking of her but stretches and thins the emotional wall to an  opaque veil, until I can almost think of her irrelative to my desire for her.  I need to be in that state from now till I finish this.

What is Julie to me now?  Julie is not May.  May would, of course, would not exist but for Julie, but Julie is just the framework for the character.  The rest I make up from what I know, filling the gap of my ignorance with imagination, extrapolating the girl I want from the girl I know.  But May would not exist if I knew Julie.  I would not be projecting my hopes onto May, because they would have been realized in Julie.  What Julie is to me is a fascination, a toy I can’t put down, a puzzle half of which I don’t have–the half in the box with the picture on it.  She is a regret:  I chose ego preservation over compassion.  I had the chance to get to know all about her.  I attacked her, instead, already digging out my pound of flesh for the perceived wrong of rejecting me, never considering how hard it was for her.  What I heard as patronizing–”If I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know”–was a nervous attempt at appeasement, appeasement I was too proud to accept.  She had considered my feelings, something I hadn’t done for either of us.  At last, I’m grateful for that.

My fascination with Julie I’ve never been able to quite trace to its source.  Perhaps I simply wanted to be fascinated by her.  Perhaps I really had no choice.  It has continued unabated and grows with each offhanded, overheard snippet of information she proffers to coworkers who aren’t me.  Those snippets plus what she told me of herself while she still trusted me add up to the Julie I know:  The fourth of four, the others boys; the third died in his early twenties after a very long illnes; the oldest predated her by sixteen years.  She “grew up in” northern Virginia, though her parents lived in a few different places before settling there.  She worked for Borders for thirteen years and is bitter about being let go.  She has a horticulture degree but would rather have (in hindsight) studied voice and/or “design.”  Her father died six years ago, her mother a month ago.  Add a few like/dislikes and personal observations and it’s only just enough to madden my curiosity.

The Julie I extrapolate from what I know and have observed was not born in northern Virginia but likely moved there before school age.  Her father I’ve narrowed to two professions–college teacher or military, leaning toward military, based on something else I know:  Julie was not on the academic track in high school but distributive education.  That is, she was preparing herself, it seems, for a commercial career, not a liberal arts education, which I can’t imagine would sit well with a teacher-parent.  Northern Virginia tells me “government job”  for retired/decommed dad.  It also tells me “very white upringing in a vast surburbia,” evidenced also by the fact that she had to ask who did “Ball of Confusion.”  Julie isn’t two years younger than I am.  If she didn’t hear that song on the radio, then she was a in a demographic that wouldn’t have been exposed to it that way.  Her brothers, I surmise, were not so much her protectors as whom she needed protection from (oldest brother excepted).  This I make out from her being so tough (outwardly), self-protective, and emotionally guarded.  As the youngest and a girl, she was likely daddy’s little girl and not real close to her mother.  I doubt she’s ever had many true, lasting friendships–plenty of acquaintances but no confidants.  She aches to be more outgoing.

Julie’s darkness attracts me perhaps more even than her beauty.  I want to know that darkness (though maybe I do already; my own might not be dissimilar), be with her in it, walk out of it with her–but I am not a knight, or a prince;  and if that isn’t what she needs, it’s at least what she wants, I would bet.  A bigger man than I would be happy to see her happy with the right man.  I want her to be happy, but I want the right man to be me.  When that man comes along–and I really do want him to–I don’t want to see it.  I don’t want to experience it in any way.  I would be happy for her, but I woud be devastated for me.  There is heartbreak in her darkness, and shame and regret.  I recognize it.

I accept all the attractants that tie me to Julie–her beauty, her darkness, all the common interests, her sexuality.  The pedestal on which I’d placed Julie has never been more than a shabby simulacrum of rotten wood and mis-hit nails.  She’s always been a whole woman to me:  It hasn’t been just her lips and neck I’ve wanted to press my lips against, not just the contours of her face I’ve wanted to trace, not just the hair I could see that I’ve wanted to comb my fingers through.  Why am I only now able to admit this?  (The more I consider the answer, the more rhetorical seems the question.)

This is Monday now, long after work, close to bedtime.  Julie has made no effort toward reconciliation; I have not made another.  I suppose for Julie it is just not worth the effort, or she just can’t make it; or she doesn’t trust me–or herself.  I want to get along, and I can’t believe she doesn’t at least want that, too.  This isn’t going to get better for either of us until she wants it to.  I may be asking her to be assertive beyond her usual capacity, but isn’t that what growth is?  We’re both stunted, rooted firmly in a barren clay of stubbornness, but I’m not content to wither in this rotten excuse for soil.  There’s better to be had.  Doesn’t knowing that obligate one to pursue it?

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.

The Ink/Voice Imbalance May Be Insurmountable

There was time–probably most of my conscious life–that I believed I liked being alone.  Last year I finally admitted otherwise.  Thanksgiving, when everyone I know, including my kids, are busy elsewhere.  I usually enjoy a quiet day of solitude.  This year I was restless.  There was no solace in the freedom to do as I pleased, because what I wanted was to talk to someone.  Not that I had anything pressing to talk about, but someone on the sofa next to me watching the football game would probably have been enough.  The only plans I had made for that day were to watch the game and eat at the Tiki-Tiki on the next block, but the restaurant wasn’t open, and as I had no other food, a sandwich from the convenience store was my meal.  I tried not to think of that as pathetic.  I had nothing to say to the clerk.  Sincere conversation is unrealistic  to expect from someone jaded and suspicious.  The day was nearly devoid of warmth.  And today is the coldest this season, and wet.  The wet won’t stop.  I don’t need half my fingers to count the sunny days of November, and December is playing right along while adding its own character.  I feel almost a malevolence in this weather that makes me want to lash out at it, to curse it for keeping me inside, alone, safe as that may be.  Sometimes I hate safety, too.  In defiance, and with the excuse of Christmas shopping, I may go out, anyway.

Yesterday  there was little sun, but at least no rain, and I spent most of it talking.  I visited Susan Hall (“Your hair is astounding!”) at Diversity Thrift, where she volunteers, and coaxed her out to lunch at Copolla’s.  We talked about books and writing and our previous lives.

Back in Carytown later Keith Mason and I discovered each other in the Capitol Coffee Shop.  We hadn’t met since a Buzzcocks show ten years ago.  He’s my age but not physically well.  He introduced me to Sterling and Jenny.  The three of them meet daily to work on the crosswords from the Washington Posts and New York Times‘ in the newspaper basket.  Keith and I remained for a couple hours after Sterling and Jenny left, doing a little catching up but mostly just conversing.  Our mutual friends are actually few, and we’d never been more than friends-of-friends to each other, but our conversations had always been stimulating, though I give him most of the credit.

It was eight-thirty before I got home.  I hadn’t written a word that day, but I’d spoken my share to an audience of two and felt more meanfully productive than I did in stringing these words together so prettily for an audience of . ..?  I have long thought that if I had any facility with conversation I wouldn’t need to write, that writing was just the lesser of two tortures.  I hone my writing skills in order to better avoid doing the same for my speaking skills.  When I got home I felt I should catch up on the work I didn’t do in the morning.  I dutifully sat down with pen and paper, but I didn’t write.  I didn’t try, or, rather, I didn’t force anything. I was content with what I’d already “produced” that day.  Then I felt alone–no one to talk to, no one to share with.  Except you.  And you don’t talk to me.  Writing is lonely.  Today, at least, I prefer talking.

Cancel My Engagements

If I were to say that my life was hollow and lonely I’d be only half right–that is, in a proportion of each adding up to about half. I get home from work, and here I am, on the sofa. I could watch tv or read, listen to music, get on the computer, write–the same things I could do every day. I don’t want to do any of them. I run through the list like channels on the clicker. Nothing engages. I don’t even want to sit here writing this, but it’s the only thing that expresses how I feel. The other things just cover it up. Nothing much means much with no one to share it with. There’s only so much I can share with the kids that they would understand, and why would I tell them I’m lonely? Thirteen is an awkward enough age without feeling that your love isn’t enough to keep your father happy. The girls are nearly the entire portion of my life that is not hollow and lonely–that’s all they need to know. (Funny, by the time they are old enough to understand, perhaps they won’t care.) So I write and pretend I’m talking to someone who’s listening and is neither judging nor pitying me. I won’t talk to myself. I’ve heard it all before, and I’m not sympathetic or forthcoming with good advice. I don’t want a therapist, a professional listener and sympathizer with advice from books that’s been doled out to countless others before me. I want someone to be with.

Since Julie came back to work it seems my opportunities to connect with female patrons has shrivelled up, but the stress of working with Julie has simply hardened my mood and put me off my little game. Tap me with a hammer and listen to the echo. Shake me and you might hear the faint rattling of my marble of a conscience. Or is that Jiminy Cricket’s dessicated carcass? I’ve been judged and pitied at work for falling in love with Julie, so I come home to seek understanding, and all I have is pen and paper. I’d better stop writing or they’ll start pitying me, too. Now, do I watch a movie or have a drink?