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.

When a Ten-Foot Pole Just Won’t Do

There is a lot to be said for the separation theory for getting over Julie.  By Monday, I will have worked with her for only four hours out of eight work days.  During that time without her, I became a silly, confident chatterbox at work.  The library has very nearly become the home I’d always hoped it would–a vast meeting house full of diverse ideas and open minds and hearts, and things that need to be said that are actually heard.

I talked with Valerie as I leisurely registered her for a card.  I have no doubt that everyone is Valerie’s friend.  She is intensely curious and entirely without social fear.  Valerie told me how years of military service on an island off the West Coast created her unusual accent, how she has had ten operations and has a terminal disease (she’s only forty-five), but she told me with neither self-pity nor a desperate grasp for mine.  She has died, she said, and she is not afraid of death.  “You know how love feels?  Well, what I felt was a billion times that.  But I came back.  My brother saw the sheet over my face going up and down.”  I tried to imagine that billion-fold love and could only stare with wet eyes into Valerie’s under the potato-chip brim of her cowboy hat.  She smiled, said, “Yeah,” and we both laughed, me with a tear running down a cheek.  “Don’t sweat the small stuff, Dion.  Those little details”–she pressed her thumb and finger together between us–”don’t mean a thing.”

Michelle is as mellow as Valerie is intense.  Michelle is Future Wife–only not.  The bike came back and I spent my lunch hour beside it with no return of the owner.  But I left a note this time, and while I was one the desk a woman stepped up and told me so.  I was disappointed at first sight–she was stout–but she was pretty and natural and in her low/mid-forties, near the low end of my age range.  Her son Michael, about ten or eleven, was with her (explaining the smaller bike near hers).  He was very patient (as was Brian, upon whom I’d sloughed my duties) as we talked for much of the hour.  She couldn’t tell me much about the bike (she got it at Goodwill), but she told me a bit about herself:  She’s from Santa Cruz, been in this area a few years, renting one of the few farms left in the area, keeps a community garden on land.  She cried for a three-hundred year-old oak that was taken down because it, supposedly, was in the way of a water line coming through.  When she found out I’d lived in Richmond my whole life she was surprised, by both my Mid-Atlantic (non-Southern Southern) accent and my liberal consciousness.  By the end of the conversation she’d become quite attractive, indeed, and she left me with an open invitation to drop by.  “We’ll throw something on the grill.  My husband’s laid-back–well, I’m laid-back and Michael’s laid-back.  My husband’s not laid-back.  But he’s cool.”  Ah, well. …

A younger woman (early thirties) flirted lightly with me as I helped her with the copier, but I was caught off-guard and put off my game.  I probably blushed.  I’m always shocked (and flattered) by younger women flirting with me.  Are they bolder than women my age or just enough less subtle about it that I’m actually able to recognize it?  I know it’s spring, and the human is no exception to the rutting instinct of the season, but if Julie were around how much chance would I give myself to find a mate?  I go to more trouble now to look my best on the days without Julie, and the weekend’s casual dress code gives me more leeway to be myself–out of the khakis and into the jeans and t-shirt.  I’m eager to get on the desk, where I can see (and be seen by) people and meet and talk to them.  The library is where I have to do that, because it’s where I like to be (most days), where I live much of my life, and where I’m most likely to meet minds and personalities meeting my needs and standards.  I’m saddened to think that I can have this only by closing myself off to Julie, but what else can I do?  I hate this game, where the rules tie my hands and stuff a sock in my mouth.  I’m leaving Julie those rules and playing by my own.

I had no intention of being bitter.  This was to be a celebration of a new direction, of territory reclaimed, but though I am off in a new direction, and I have reclaimed a little of what’s mine, the cost gives me pause, and Monday I will give back much that I gained over those eight work days, including a calm consience.  Or maybe I will talk to another Valerie or Michelle, or I’ll see the blushing woman again and get to say more than “Hi” to her.  Maybe I can actually do that with Julie in the library.  Have I gained that much distance?

Stewardship

What is this life I need to reclaim?  Scattered about the grown-tall grass, all the pieces can’t be retrieved.  Is it now simply a life to be claimed in the first palce? the other having lost any context, atrophied into oblivion?  I’ve nearly forgotten what I use to enjoy.  I’ve read only four books this year (and can’t recall any of the titles) and have abandoned three others.  My mind, never satisfied with diversion when there’s stimulation to be had, cannot seem to find either in a book.  The garden is green, but the weeding waits and waits to get done.  I don’t want another spring to get away unnoticed–they are so short here in Richmond, before the heat comes, that it’s hard to get one’s fill of it without total immersion in it–but it’s hard enough to let the fresh air and birdsong in, much less go out in it when I don’t have to.

Just as I don’t know whether to reclaim my old life or claim a new one, I don’t know if I have lost my way or found a new way.  I’ve been wondering, even, if I were still in NEW or had been kicked out with nothing to show for my journey but a new kind of confusion.  But I know I’m someplace new, whether I understand it or not, and I am more reluctant to try to understand it every day.  I’ve just about convinced myself now:  This is not so much about getting something back as about letting something go–turning the old into the soil to nourish the new.

And the new is…?  The three very different books I impetuously checked out Saturday?  The stacks of music I’m listening to and foreign movies I’m watching?  It’s enjoying what I enjoy regardless of anyone else’s opinion of it, connecting with people who matter to me, saying what has to be said and doing what has to be done wihtout waiting on approval; making friends of strangers.

At least several lives compose the life I seek, though I’m not sure what they are or even why I state that so assuredly.  Each place I go, I’m someone different, because I go there for different reasons, and being there sets me at different levels of poise and comfort, different levesl of ability to meet myself.  In town, in Carytown, especially, I have very nearly spotted me several times in any number of shops, just hanging out, an individual fitting into a crowd of individuals.  At home I’m still the individual but often difficult to relate to, hard to entertain–so little time, so many choices–so much necessity in the way.  And when the kids are over, who is this “Daddy”?  There’s this Eligible Bachelor guy, I sometimes see in women’s eyes.  I like him.  He seems to have some charm he’s not aware of.  I’ve seen him at the store many times, but he’s showing up at the library, too, now, getting the doubletakes and the hypnotic stares.  Just Friday he stopped himself twice in mid-conversation to watch the same woman come then go past the circ desk.  A small woman with sharp cheekbones and thick gray-brown hair barely contained.  He addressed her each time.  The first time, she smiled back; the second time, she blushed and smiled bashfully, flattered, to herself.  She glanced back over her shoulder to spy if he was still looking.  He was.  That guy’s got soemething.  I wish I knew what it was.  He and the guy on the bike would get along well.  That guy takes what’s his (but no more)  and has gone toe-to-toe with a county cop half-again his size to assert his right to take it.

Such lives:  How could they be one person?  The writer thinks he knows, but don’t ask him to explain; his head might explode.  I mean, c’mon–it took him a week to write this?

Yes, because I’m losing touch with my role in all this.  I thought I was a chronicler, but am I only an enabler?  Or is life the enabler of the writing?  I don’t seem to know anything anymore, or just not how to express it.  I’m looking for a logic outside the mind, a roadmap through NEW.  There are still no landmarks or mileposts.  There is no turning back, but only because I don’t know which way to turn to get there.  Is this particular life, the one as a writer, the one inspired, first, by hopeful heartache, and, then, by hopeless heartbreak, the life to be sacrificed to the others in order to effect my wholeness?  No–quite the opposite.  It’s the reconciler, the light-bringer, the rake combing the grown-tall grass, the gatherer, the assembler.  If there is a glue to be applied to these disparate lives, a thread to run through them, this must be the life that does the handiwork.  If there is a life more important, then I will find it this way, and I will have to allow it to supplant this one.  So, it isn’t, after all, a life to either claim or reclaim, but one to allow to come together–a facilitator, not an enabler; a letting-in, not a letting-go.  What the spring brings is for the summer to take care of.  I can only trust them to their jobs, and me to mine.  What more is there for me to understand?

Homecoming

Far from Julie, at Colin’s near the ocean, without internet, writing tools deliberately left behind, Julie’s power became only a dot on the western horizon.  Sunday and Monday nights, as I lay on the hideaway in the living room, nebulous thoughts of her eased me to sleep and woke me the following mornings.  My sisters and I hadn’t been together for more than part of a day for seven years.  I had difficulty connecting the way I wanted to, from my new place.  I conjured Julie a few times, wondering what she’d be doing then, but I didn’t let myself think of the library for long.  As I drove home with Kevyn Tuesday evening, my first time behind the wheel in more than a year (and my first with a stickshift in ten), Julie loomed larger the closer we came to Richmond.  Her image was a comfort.  My heart leapt a few times upon seeing a car like hers (a seafoam Corolla), but dropped again knowing she was still at work.  And this morning, I still feel good thinking about her, as if upon my arrival at work she would greet me with that joyful relief of not having to miss me anymore.  Yet, the fluttering of my heart now is not the anticipation of that moment but the nervous knowledge of the true moment awaiting me.  Distance from Julie did nothing but idealize her, turning her into someone to come home to, because, hard as it is to be with her, I missed her.  She did not miss me–I know that–but she was no doubt relieved to be without me for nearly a week, so I have done her a favor and can at least pretend to feel good about that.  I’ve come home to the old anxiety and will take it to work with me as usual.  It missed me, but I don’t welcome it with the same open arms it offers me.  No distance or time from it is long enough to mellow me to that homecoming.

Am I the Prince or Cinderella?

Someone is in love with me.  He is a reader.  His passion is startling and unabashed.  He is thousands of miles away across an ocean.  To say I’m flattered would be to marginalize his ardor.  No, “flattered” is rebuffing a friendly advance from a member of my own sex.  I’m kind, letting them know I’m both flattered and heterosexual. I don’t think I’ve ever hurt anyone’s feelings that way.  Angie,  describing a gay friend’s troubles, said, “Well, he chose to be that way.  I guess he doesn’t mind.”  A choice?  Imagine, getting all the attention I could handle–only, I don’t want a man.  Though being the idol of a man’s masturbatory fantasies is a little uncomfortable, I’m still flattered.  Hey,  someone  thinks I’m “hot and sexy”!

But am I in Julie’s shoes now?  I try to convince myself of the absurdity of that question, but I’m not laughing.  Pascal’s passion is flattering but frightening, like something I might have to defend myself against yet not trusting my battlements to withhold the onslaught.  Is that Julie?  Is Pascal’s passion also mine for Julie?  This is a mirror I really don’t want to look into, knowing and fearing the naked image staring back, saying, “Look at me!  Stop pretending I don’t exist!”–my other half, my compassion, my connection to humanity, my understanding of Julie, my total immersion in New Emotional World.  Yes, I’m in that world, but the umbilical to the old is long and tough.  I’m sorry, but I just can’t look.

Yet I’m feeling more vulnerable than perhaps I ever have.  I was a quivering wreck at work yesterday from the moment of our first non-encounter in the hall:  I stared, she glanced till recognition, then pretended not to see me as we passed one another.  I stared at her every chance–goddammit! why can’t I not look at her?–and was not discreet about it.  God, I must seem such a creep!  She came within inches of me, politely asking permission to squeeze in a book on a cart in front of which I knelt.  I mumbled assent and stumbled frantically out of the way, though I would rather have fallen the other way, into her.  Oh, what I wouldn’t pay for just a touch!  And another half day with her today before I’m away from her for a long weekend.  There is a chance, I know, for today to be better than yesterday, but I know, too, that it would take a leap beyond quantum proportions to affect it.  I would have to be the man I wish I were–assertive, confident, extroverted. My resolve to greet her when we first meet dissolves instantly when I see her eyes hardened against it.  Is it a challenge?  What if I stood up to it, actually smiled and said, “Hello, Julie”?  That would be more than a baby step.  Then I think of all I’m not allowed to say to her, and I want to resolve to say nothing till she speaks to me.  I know she’s trying, though, and it can’t be easy breaking through to me, either.  Besides the awkward encounters, Julie has tried to be nice to me, but my inability to respond in kind has not encouraged her.  I have to be the man and step up.  I can’t live this quivering, anxious life.  I imagine that man and know I could be him for Julie, given the chance.  Is it a chance I have to make, or is it a chance Julie has to give me?  I can’t see–or just can’t look.

NEWhere Man

NEW is a horrible, raw place, but I can be nowhere else.  I could easily go back to the old place, but as comparatively safe and familiar as it is, it is not a good place to be; and as painful as NEW is, it’s pain I must go through.  Old pain for new:  Constant throbbing pain for intermittent, white-hot-dagger stabs to the heart.  NEW is still not a place for words beyond those most humble.  That’s why they come so slowly–little sentences between big, watery stares out the window at the waning winter.  Spring always comes–life from death, new hope. 

NEW seems not a place for a man, though it must welcome everyone.  The tears come closer every day–yesterday at work, this morning when Emma smiled at me at the breakfast table–but I’m a man.  A man’s tears are not consoled with sympathy but shunned with embarrassment.  That angers me and shames away any chance of catharsis, and that angers me more.  Where words fail is where tears come in.  Denied the words, denied the tears, what is left to express what I feel?

A Bright New Purgatory

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

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

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

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

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