To Bridge a Gap or Leap Into an Abyss?

It was to be a four-friend weekend, and I was excited to have had so much on my social calendar.  I felt almost normal, to be in the society of acquaintances instead of strangers, to whom I’d have to reach out and from whom I would have to expect and accept rejection.  The people I would be with would, to varying extents, at least know me.  I aimed for a full weekend of healthy preoccupation without desperation.  It didn’t work out quite the way I’d hoped.  James was sick.  Though that saved my legs twenty-two miles and my wallet at least that many bucks for lunch, it also made me restless.  I stayed home and tried to write, but did everything but–washed clothes and dishes, cleaned the apartment, played the guitar.  The words wouldn’t come, so I let them be.  Dinner with Diane happened–subs and on-demand Netflix on her giant screen.  I couldn’t get Matt out for scooterball the next morning, but I did catch the matinee of  The King’s Speech with Susan (sort of), with cookies and talk in Carytown afterward.  Matt and I got around to scooterball the next evening.

So the weekend was done, and you’d think three-out-of-four was adequate, but quantity far outstripped quality.  Like The King’s Speech, it was good but not engaging.  Missing James was not a good start.  We would have spent most of the day together, walking the canal, talking, listening to music.  James and I connect as well emotionally as we do intellectually.  Idea and feeling are conjoined passions.  James has fallen in love at least twice since I’ve known him (three-plus years) and he’s passionate about many things.  He quit Twin Hickory to pursue writing two years ago.  He’s yet to make a cent, but he’s yet to give up, and I daresay he won’t soon.  James doesn’t drive or pedal, and I don’t own a car.  It’s nearly an hour on the bike east to Tobacco Row.  Even for James, I’m not willing to do that but on a Friday of a long weekend, which comes up every fourth week, so it will be another four weeks, at least, before I see him again.  I haven’t seen him since my birthday more than two months ago.

Diane and I had a little fun, I guess, watching old tv shows, but who really engages that way but loving couples? for whom it’s not about what you’re watching but who’s keeping you warm on the sofa, whose hair you stick your nose in, whose ribs you tickle with the hand around the waist.  Diane and I were never that cozy, even as a couple.  Susan was supposed to meet me at the box office of the Westhampton.  I got there just before showtime aned waited outside, cussing a little more vigorously the longer I waited, for fifteen minutes, finally going in and plopping into the nearest seat.  I didn’t know how much I’d missed until Susan found me during the end credits.  I was ready to pick a fight.

“Where were you?” i said, probably already a little shrill.

“Oh, I got here about five minutes early and just bought my ticket and came inside to wait in the lobby.  I peeked out every once in a while to see if your there.”

“I though we’d agreed to meet at the box office.”

She said, “Oh, silly boy.”

I bristled a bit but shook it off, though I was still disappointed we hadn’t seen the movie together.  She hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but a more respectful acknowledgement of our agreement would have been nice.  I didn’t tell her that.

Every weekend that weather and time permit us, Matt and I take our Xootrs and a soccer ball to Pinchbeck Elementary, my first alma mater, and push ourselves around the blacktop (the venue of most of my dodgeball glory) while trying to keep the ball on the court, sometimes passing the ball, sometimes attacking each other with it.  We’ve been doing it for more than eight years.  Usually apres scooter we have a coffee and sit and chat.  This time he had to get home to Mary and dinner by six-thirty.  By the time we’d done on the blacktop that’s all he had time to do.

Minus James, and without Matt to talk to at length, the weekend was a bit of a disappointment.  I realized, afterwards, that what I’d wanted was someone to really care about me.  Diane asked about the kids, which is what everyone asks who doesn’t really know me; it’s what they know.  Susan and I know very little about each other, but we have a good rapport and can make each other laugh.  We haven’t shared much backstory.  Usually, our conversations take place with the circ desk between us.  She once asked me something to the effect of what did I do with my spare time, and I answered, “Oh, I’m just always looking for love.”  I didn’t mean hers, and she had to have known that, but she blushed and turned slightly away.  There is not that kind of attraction between us, and she got about a fifteen-year headstart on life.

I can’t say Diane and I really connect; there’s just that dense four-year history we share from way back when that counts as a bond, and we don’t talk about that.  I find it difficult to relate otherwise.  She makes so much money that she paid in taxes last year what I grossed in income.  At the same time, she doesn’t seem to relate to my comparatively meager lifestyle, often suggesting I do something that is outrageously implausible for me to even consider, like buy a townhouse.

If I ‘d wanted more from Diane and Susan, I could have given more myself. I didn’t make an effort, not so much as asking “How have you been?”  I’m out of practice with the lesson “Giving Is Receiving.”  (Another victim of the winter layoff?)  But I’ve also expected–taken for granted–to connect better on an emotional level with women than with men.  I’m finally having to notice that it’s not necessarily true.  Women  seem to more readily relate to emotions, but are as wary of a man’s as they are accepting of a woman’s.  I don’t know if that’s true, and I hate to believe in such distinctions.  It could be that I’m simply more demanding of women, regardless of romantic intent, than I am of men.  Hm.

So it wasn’t the weekend I’d hoped for.  How can I complain?  I kept busy with people I know.  I was amused and entertained.  I was hopeful of more engagement, but not desperate for it.  (People give what they can give.)  Spring’s not even here yet, after all.  This weeekend was a pleasant run-up to that, a chance to hone the social skills with people with whom I could relax.  So far so good, lessons learned.  Expectations and hopes are for ideals.  If I can’t stop myself from having them (and it wouldn’t be wise to try), I can learn to accept falling short as just a smaller step forward than I’d wanted to take.  Forward is what matters (sounds like a mantra for the coming warm seasons) and I at least went that way.  Being so philosophical about it might be easy at this stage, but a running start can only help.

To Take Desperation Down There and Drop It In a Bum’s Cup

It was more than two weeks before I finally played the CD I’d bought at Plan-9 when I was last in Carytown.  I didn’t want to be reminded of the failure and disappointment and the limbo of transition I was lost in.  It’s called Write About Love, by Belle and Sebastian.  It only took me a day, though, to respond to the sticker on the wrapper:  “Write 300 words about love in any form.”  It was a contest solicitation, but the thought of a “song and a visit from Stuart Murdoch” was not my inspiration.  Being asked to write about love was enough. It was the kind of inspiration that got me started on A Bright, Ironic Hell after at least two years of not writing about anything.  This what I wrote:

Love is all I write about, because I don’t know what it is, and I want it so badly.  I think I have been in love.  I’m not sure.  It was a new feeling, and it was a good feeling, and it was torture.  It might as well have been love.  She didn’t love me, though she liked me once–just not enough.  Now, she doesn’t like me and won’t even let me talk to her.  So I write about her.  She doesn’t like that, either.  It doesn’t matter what I write–whether I’m angry that she rejected me or worshipping her qualities–she doesn’t like it, and has asked me to stop–a few times–and I have stopped, because I would do anything for her.  But I have always started again, because, I guess, there was always that one thing I couldn’t do for her as long as she inspired me.  And, though, if she told the truth and said she hated me, I would find inspiration still in the fascination for her that won’t die.

Was I in love with her?  Am I still?  Is it even love if it is rejected?  Is it just a seed without soil?  Her name is Julie, and she’s beautiful except when she looks at me, when her eyes darken and her face hardens, and I could cry because she feels that way about me.  I only wanted to love her.  That was my crime, and that face is my punishment, though hell is not being able to stop seeing it before me–and having to write about it.

Still, it was two weeks later, just after I’d published the previous post that I listened to the album, and now it cozily inhabits my head.  Friday had arrived and all the chatter I’d felt so excluded from had left with the half of the crew that didn’t work that weekend.  I am always more comfortable with the smaller crew, and the size of the group has much to do with that–the smaller the better for me–but the people in that group are individuals I’m comfortable with, people I can talk to and listen to.  That they’re all women plays no small part, either.  I feel the rooster in the hen house in some ways, but the brother among sisters, mostly.  Mike and Maddox have in turn shared this weekend with me, and I felt them to be interlopers.  Jennifer traded a weeekend with Bethany recently, and it simply seemed there was a hole in Bethany’s place.

This crew–Megan, Becky, Bethany, Angie, Sujatha, and Judy–gets a much more relaxed Dion than they’ve probably ever known.  Though I harbor bitterness still over the not-so-distant past, I feel no reason to air it at work; without its source and target, it has no (or little) context there:  She’s gone, I’m out of the box.  I can breathe deeply and not dread an emotional menace around every corner.  On my best days–and they are coming more consecutively all the time–I feel like a dancer–loose-limbed, swivelling from the hips and shoulders; turning on a toe; reaching from the waist standing on one leg, back and other leg parallel to the floor, eyes straight ahead–nearly every move a “step.”  I feel closer to real.  Amongst this group, I feel much more accepted; and individual but still connected to the group.  I’d like to think that I ask for less and give a little more now that the person I used to ask so much from with such futility is gone.  Before she left what I wanted out of this crew (and everyone else) was some acknowledgement that they understood me, that I wasn’t alone.  My paranoia needed to know that not everyone was on her side.  Then the peace lily came, and she left.

The desperation stayed, of course; it’s mine, a part of me for the time being.  I can diminish its role as motivator, but it has to tag along to work with me.  It wants me out on the circ desk, to see and talk to people (by which I mean women).  I’m anxious to get out there, too, but when I do, I leave desperation in the workroom.  On most days, with a full crew in force, any of us is lucky to get more than an hour out there in a day.  Monday and Tuesday, day shifts for me, are busts:  Any women I see on those days are most likely to be either young mothers or retirees.  Give me my hours in the evening on Wednesday and Thursday, when the working women come in.  Fridays and Saturdays, with the half-crew, I might get on the desk three times, and as busy as those days are, my opportunities for contact can reach tantalizing proportions.  I have no “line,” just a smile, a greeting, and lots of eye contact.  If her eyebrows go up, the pitch of my voice goes down and its edges melt away.  That’s my invitation to a flirt, but sometimes the invite comes from the other side of the counter.  I never turn those down, though not leading the dance can momentarily tangle my feet before the flattery rights me.  With Megan as witness at the terminal next to me, one woman virtually turned a fine payment into a come-on, leaning across the counter to within inches of my face to joke huskily about being “bad” just before casually dropping the husband bomb.  I felt teased but didn’t let on, didn’t even pull awayto regain my personal space from what could’ve been a kiss if we’d both puckered up, we were so close.  If this had been a game, I’d have conceded her the victory but not without letting her know with a one-sided smile of a wink that I was merely extending her a gentlemanly courtesy and that next time I’d be a bit more competitive now that I had her measured.  I asked Megan what she though of this woman dropping the husband bomb in the middle of a flirt.  What was the point?  Megan theorized that the woman wanted to prove to herself that she still “had it.”  If that were true, then she went away satisfied.  I felt the same way:  It had been nearly as good as good sex–a mutual challenge willingly met to pleasure in each other’s pleasure.

I’m not sure what I’ve been getting at here, except, maybe, that I don’t have to just write about love, that I can talk about it, too, at work, where there is no longer someone with whom I’m in love and who resented and feared it.  What I have now (for the most part, and the rest doesn’t matter) is a peace lily and people who understand that I am a passionate man and am not ashamed of it; can confide with it and joke about; and is who he is not because of one person, but despite her.  Every day is less of her and more of me, and much more fun–and I’m getting paid for it.  What’s the rush to Carytown?

Mad Scientist’s Lament

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

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

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

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

That Was Now, This Ain’t Zen

Life is a crapshoot of self-advice:  When it works it’s luck, but the odds always win.  When it works, I’m a genius; when it goes wrong, I’m a victim of a conspiracy of circumstances.  But we won’t talk about irony; this is no more than intelligence working against the natural order of things.  I’d call it an unfair fight if it were anything other than a refusal to admit that there’s no fight to be had.  I give myself plenty of good reasons to do or not do plenty of things, but all that needs doing is the doing.

The bike took me down to Carytown with no more of a plan than to buy Ugly Dolls for the girls’ birthday.  After that I didn’t allow myself a reason to do anything.  I bought Julie a little something,* bought myself a little something; shopped in shops in which I had no intention of buying anything and bought something.  I might have been grinning most of the time, because most people had a smile for me.  I tried out The Eye on a few folks (even a few guys–what the hell) got no significant responses, didn’t feel a failure.  For once, leaving for home was not regretful.  Actually, once I realized what I had done, I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.

Last week I noticed that someone had read an older post, “Hope Springs Infernal,” and I had to see what would bring someone back to that post and went back to it myself.  I’m not sure of the reader’s attraction to it, but my revisit could not have been better timed.  Sometimes I have to be reminded that I can write.   Reading my own writing can do that, but only if I’ve forgotten it.  I googled myself a couple years ago and among the hits was a post to a copyeditors’ listserv (or whatever they were called back then).  I was confused that it had come up, very impressed with the writing, then shocked that it had my name at the bottom of it (but no longer confused).  Last week I was tangled in a confusion I couldn’t write my way out of.  Enter, “Hope.”  I must be a different person when I write, as I am when I’m on my bike–the person I’m closest to truly being:  I take no stock of that person, don’t question or analyze him, but trust him to be what he is; and I became that person again, on that same street corner in Carytown where life passed me by last week, but this time in broad daylight, with an unfolded sheet of copier paper in my hand.

For five minutes, in a voice I was hardly aware I had, I read from that paper I held taut against the breeze the post that had re-inspired me.  The words sparked flint against flint, and my voice took fire, barking the bitterness, shouting the futility, rumbling down the valleys of despair, clambering tenaciously to the mountain tops of clamant declaration.  Who I was then I don’t know; I was unconscious–perhaps more me than I’d ever been.  But when I was done the fire was doused in my sobs.  The paper crumpled in a fist.  The other hand clutched at the bike for support.  I didn’t dare look up, but kicked the stand from under the bike and rolled wobbley down the sidestreet.

Next week, given the chance, I’ll return to Carytown, with no plan, no paper, no smart idiot advising me against unseemly behavior.  Perhaps the doing will be done again.  I can only hope, though better not to.  A pair of dice should be sufficient.

*I’m still paranoid enough to not tell you what it is, what I’ll do with it, or when.

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?

Here–Hold My Breath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naydream

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

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

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

Common Ground

This is a re-posting.  The original disappeared from the site and even my dashboard list of posts sometime over the weekend.  I can only assume it had been flagged.   Only ten people looked at it.  Can ten people censor me?  Is that all it takes, a few prudes, to form a fascist coalition?  If you don’t like it, don’t read it, don’t pass it on–but don’t you dare decide for someone else what they shouldn’t read.  WordPress didn’t say a word, did not alert me in any way.  By the way, Pascal has given me full permission to quote his correspondence.

Pascal has cooled since our spat, and I miss it.  I suppose that beyond feeling flattered was that of being appreciated without judgment or stipulation, even being a source of inspiration.  But did I step off a pedestal when I protested his passion?  My insecurity couldn’t believe someone could feel such a way for me.  Did Julie feel any of this when I told her she “fascinated” me? or when she found out about being the object of a blog?

Pascal and I have been talking about Julie.  I sent him some snapshots of myself, and he asked for a picture of Julie, so I sent him The Picture that nudged the little snowball on its way down the mountain to where we are today, the picture I am terrified to have but will never relinquish.  Upon seeing it, he said, “Besides being pretty, she is a warm, open and generous person.  Her smile shows [it].”  I replied, with bitterness clouding the truth, “She has not been that to me in over a year.”

Pascal called me a “neurotic romantic,” and how could I disagree?  He understands me.  That’s what I want.  Not advice.  I haven’t gotten much of that that I haven’t given myself, and even from myself it’s just rationale.  Pascal listens without pitying me, without scrambling for words to make me “feel better.”  Even my family can’t listen the way Pascal does.  A Bright, Ironic Hell elicited embarrassment from my father, self-guilt from my mother, threats of intervention from older sister Kevyn, and advisement to seek therapy from psychologist younger sister Shawn.  I don’t know if youngest sister Colin read it.  I’ve let none of them know about Satellite Dance and would be reluctant to talk to them about it if they brought it up.  The writing is my therapy and the intervention.  What might I have done with these emotions had I not had this outlet?  What kind of fool would I have made, and still be making of myself if I had not picked up a pen, instead?  My father would say I’d made fool enough of myself this way, and the rest of the family might simply think it, but I’m no more fool than anyone else and probably less of one than anyone who cannot or will not take a good hard look at their pain and try to accept it and love it, listen to it and hold it.  I cry as I write this, and I’m not ashamed or afraid of it or pity myself for it.  It’s how I feel, and if you cry as you read this I guess you understand (but it’s not requisite).

I told Pascal I missed his passion.  He was amused and not at all surprised.  He said it is my “seduction assets”–”all of you from head to toe and inside.
Knowing how to please and be desired…hair on your chest. your
fore arms, your eyes, lips, fair, cock behind sexy trousers…” (I didn’t send him that kind of pictures)–that I am insecure of.  Though my imagination would describe Julie’s seduction assets with a bit more subtlety, they are no less powerful and maybe even less appreciated by her than I am of mine.  I want to enumerate them, but my pen falls.  I stare at The Picture and can see only the woman I miss.

Stuck in the Middle with Me

Pascal has cooled since our spat, and I miss it.  I suppose that beyond feeling flattered was the knowledge of being appreciated without judgment or stipulation, even being a source of inspiration.  But did I step off a pedestal when I protested his passion?  My insecurity couldn’t believe someone could feel such a way for me.  Did Julie feel any of this when I told her she “fascinated” me? or when she found out about being the object of a blog?

Pascal and I have been talking about Julie.  I sent him some pictures of myself, and he asked for a picture of Julie, so I sent him The Picture that nudged the little snowball on its way down the mountain to where we are today, The Picture I am terrified to have but will never relinquish.  Upon seeing it, he said, “Besides being pretty, she is warm, generous, and open.  Her smile shows [it].”  I replied, bitterness clouding the truth, “She has not been that to me in over a year.” 

Pascal called me a “neurotic romantic,” and how could I disagree?  He understands me.  That’s what I want.  Not advice.  No one’s given me any of that I haven’t given myself, and even from me it’s just rationale.  Pascal listens without pitying me, without scrambling for words to make me “feel better.”  Even my family can’t listen the way Pascal does.  A Bright, Ironic Hell elicited embarrassment from my father, self-guilt from my mother, threats of intervention from older sister Kevyn, and advisement to seek therapy from psychologist, younger sister Shawn.  I don’t know if youngest sister Colin read it.  I’ve let none of them know about Satellite Dance, and I would refuse to talk to them about it if they brought it up.  The writing is my therapy and the intervention.  What might I have done with these emotions had I not had this outlet?  What kind of fool would I have made, and still be making, of myself if I had not picked up a pen, instead?  My father would say I’d made fool enough of myself this way, and the rest of the family would just think it, but I’m no more fool than anyone else and probably less of one than anyone who cannot or will not take a good hard look at heir pain and try to accept it and love it, listen to it and hold it.  I cry as I write this, and I’m not ashamed or afraid of it or pity myself for it.  It’s how I feel, and if you cry as you read this then I guess you understand.

I told Pascal I missed his passion.  He was amused and not at all surprised.  He said it is my “seduction assets”–”all of you from head to toe and inside.
Knowing how to please and be desired…hair on your chest. Your
fore arms, your eyes, lips, fair, cock behind sexy trousers…” –that I am insecure of.  Though my imagination is no less vivid, I would describe Julie’s seduction assets a bit more subtlely, but they are no less powerful.  I want to enumerate them now, as I stare at The Picture, but my pen falls.  I can see only the woman I miss.

Grownups, Better and Worse

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

It Doesn’t Matter How Many Times You Click Your Heels Together–You Never Left Kansas in the First Place

Stacey is letting Eric go.  (Most magic is an illusion.)  Not only does she not want to be involved with a married man, but he can’t see her “past the physical.”  She believed him when he told her she was beautiful, and she was flattered.  When he had to get home Saturday night from her place, he had a tear in his eye.  He said he was very happy.  Stacey did not feel the same way, having already decided she wasn’t all that attracted to him after all and feeling that his attraction to her wasn’t deeper than her skin, but she didn’t denigrate his tears.

Now she’s going to break it off, and she’s asking my advice.  I’ve missed that.  When she sided with Chris when he blew open A Bright Ironic Hell, I had difficulty forgiving her, and for a while she was just a twice-a-week ride to work.  Now she’s asking my advice on how to let Eric go, and I see an opportunity to redeem Julie’s pat blow-off of me and to ensure not only that this guy is treated respectfully and without condescension, but that any subsequent guy in her life who needs to be let go gets the same consideration.  I told her to be honest, don’t apologize for anything, don’t try to buck him up.  Tell him it won’t work out because he’s married.

Sounds easy.  Men have been let down with a lot less honesty, and they’ve accepted it.  It’s just been the way of those men.  That is, some men have too much pride to see resolution in being let down softly.  But an emotional and passionate life beyond rooting for a favorite sports team.  Last year I displayed my passion and was told both implicity and explicitly to cover it up again.  I think the reason that most men will accept the pat let-down is that they know what I had to be told, that emotion and passion are weaknesses in men.  Eric might cry again when Stacey lets him down.  I hope he does.  Stacey should be allowed to know how he feels, and he shouldn’t pretend he feels other than how he does.  It’s the best thing for both of them–and for me and you.