Reason Enough

February threw a seventy-five-degree day at me and I took the bait.  I’m ready for hibernation to be over.  I got out of the apartment by not letting myself fix my coffee, chasing the caffeine to Carytown.  Still, I didn’t get out before ten-thirty.  There was no stress in my legs, but neither was I taking my time.  Going east is energizing.

I started up Patterson, climbing to Parham.  Sometimes that stretch seems like an electric brae.  Its ease of ascent has surprised me in each of my hundreds of ascents.  The downhill on the other side is no illusion.  I topped out my gears not halfway down.  Cars were only dawdling past me, so I had to have topped thirty.  I nearly topped the next rise on momentum alone.

I finished Why We Love last week, returned it this week.  Before I had it, a staff member at another branch had had it.  Quite a handsome woman, too.  And even more attractive for having read the book.  I wonder what she got out of it and if it was what she was looking for.  I got what I needed.  I hadn’t known what I was looking for.  I got confirmation:  I had been physically, mentally, and emotionally in love.  It’s good to know that.  It’s nice to know that there were good reasons–not excuses–for my behavior over Julie.  The book didn’t tell me if I’m still in love, but I’m not rushing to the stacks to find the book that will.  It wouldn’t be there, anyway.

Besides more postcards, all I wanted out of Carytown was to be among strangers in a place I liked.  Desperation stayed home.  Despite the weather, it’s not spring yet.  The rutting season is a few weeks away, and if I can be so blunt as to call it that, I’ll probably retain an understanding of what I really need and what, if anything, I can do about the signals my body is sending me.  Before I returned the book, I had to remove a half-dozen or so sticky arrows.  One of them pointed to a quote from Blaise Pascal:  “All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.”  I’ve known that all along, but have resisted surrender or decried it when I had to succumb.  But now this is something I can believe:  The fight between the Fool and Wise Man is actually a process.  The effort of reasoning is to arrive at the Fool, not annihilate him, and with luck, to better understand and empathize with him.  Perhaps that’s the key to loving myself, or just to loving. 

I made little contact in Carytown, but didn’t leave there reluctantly (or eagerly).  I enjoyed my time there, though the coffee, despite a larger helping than usual, was drunk too late to head off the headache.  My legs could have used the rest, but the rest of me was restless.  I’ll take a spring day whenever I can get one, and I’ve needed one for quite a long time.  The winter in Richmond has not been bitter, and February has been more like March the past couple of weeks.  I suppose hibernating creatures all over the area are rolling a little in their sleep.  I’m eager to stretch my legs in a fresh, green season in society.  I wonder how last year’s growth will serve me this year.  If this year ends as another without a love to call my own, I hope at least to have been given the understanding as to why.  It’s the only way I could accept it.  I hope the new season finds me more open and patient, less desperate but quietly hopeful.  I don’t want to treat hope as an enemy, cruel pusher of unreality, but I don’t know what will change that attitude but the preclusion of desperation, and how that is effected I don’t know.  Maybe that will be the season’s lesson.

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.

Week One, P.J.

My life is slowly seeping back into my veins–I’m a junky fresh from detox.  Reintegration into society, however, might take a while.  The relative orbit of my thoughts has been around Julie for so long that now it will be as if they’ve been cut loose, hurtling through space without the gravity of meaning or importance.  It seems that everything I’d done for so long was for Julie’s benefit–and my torture.  I lost myself in hopes of her approval.  For what?  Of what?  I don’t know.  Did I ever?  But now that she’s gone,  I can wipe her from the mirror that was always before me.  I do it consciously, smiling, as if it was, and had been, patently absurd to have cared to have her care about me.  I haven’t a care at work but for work.  I am not the malcontent I might have been judged to be, and if Julie’s absence proves nothing else, then it will have served that purpose with distinction.  I can’t say I don’t care what people there think of me, but it was only ever Julie’s opinion that mattered; everyone else can just go on heaving their rocks from their transparent homes.  Though I might always wonder how I “harassed” Julie, I don’t have to care about it.  Every day without her will render her less meaningful.

Not that I feel any more kindly toward her.  I am glad I wasn’t the one to leave.  That would have made me the pariah, and I would have had to start from scratch getting to know a whole new crew.  It’s taken me seven years to feel even tenuously a part of a unit at Twin Hickory, so I’d be damned if anyone were to take that from me, though when I got hauled up that last time I was hoping I’d be summarily transferred to Tuckahoe.  Glad I didn’t wish too hard.  I’m not big enough yet to wish her well at Glen Allen or to feel very bad about her leaving friends behind at Twin Hickory–or at least I’m not ready to admit it.  Call me petty if you like (you’ve called me worse), but I can’t admit wanting her transition to be without anxiety.  When I found out what position she’d gotten–essentially a liaison betwen the people who do the work and the people who delegate it–I was meanly gleeful, knowing that it is an all but thankless job with a responsibility load for which compensation is relatively meager.  I know it’s a mean little revenge, but the smaller the better, the sooner it will fade to indifference.

Outside of work, I’ve just about forgotten what I was up to.  I probably haven’t been out to a movie in two months, and have hardly done anything outside the routine.  Now that I’ve been freed of an emotional tyranny at work, I can work a bit harder there at my personal development and take it on the road for my free time.  I feel less desperate to find a mate, probably because I don’t need it as a psychological wedge between me and my feelings for Julie.  Now, it can happen for the right reasons and in good time, though I can’t guarantee that my patience will support that philosophy.  Still, it would be nice.  I dreamt the other night of a casual acquaintance (so my dream told me; I didn’t recognize her) kissing me, playfully wrapping her arms around me from my right side and planting peck after peck on my cheek, giggling and murmuring silliness in my ear.  I loved it, of course, but we were in public, and I voiced mild concern, as it seemed we worked together.  If it’s only in dreams that I can get that for now, at least I will sleep well.  A Friday off looms only a day away, and Carytown is already in my sights.  I’ll flirt a bit here with the moms and housewives and the rare single and try to get a running start away from my shyness and toward something happening.

To, From, or Nowhere at All?

The week has been passing slowly, but I’ve made little headway back into the outside world, and the purging of the workplace poison seems in no better hurry. The dreams have returned indoors, though I have been able to send them outside with stern lucid commands. Wednesday I finally talked myself outside, down to James’, where across a table over a bottle of merlot before a perfect soundtrack of handpicked music we talked until the wine was exhausted and the daylight nearly so. Despite his diminishing funds, James does not in the least regret his decision to quit the library to pursue a writing career. He feels called to it and wouldn’t trade the lifestyle for any other, except, maybe, that of a “successful” writer. He asked me how I might get out of the library now that it has become toxic, and I confessed to being trapped in a shrinking box, resentful of the attempts by displaced retailers (Greta and Julie) counting out their days to force me from a a job I love. “I’m just…I’m just…I’m just so…”–my voice disappeared in a whisper and a tear trickled over my cheek before I was able to finish–”disappointed. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt of not being that way.” My rubbery legs somehow got me–very slowly home, uphill all the way, but I was sober, if exhausted, when I got there and fell asleep around nine.

Early to bed became early to rise: I was up by seven and took a now-rare morning shower, though I put off shaving for about the eighth straight day. As I towelled off I drifted into revery: A woman was in the shower with me and I was towelling her off when I dropped the towel to the floor and snatched her around the waist and brushed my bristly chin briskly between her shoulder blades. She squealed and laughed as she struggled reflexively to escape the tickling…. I came back to myself, and I was smiling and clutching the towel to my chest. “Ah,” I thought, “such a simple thing to want.” The woman was not Julie, but taller, slimmer, and dark-haired. I never saw her face. Maybe she was the woman I dreamt of so long ago, the woman I was convinced (in the dream) was the one I looking for. If only I had retained that conviction against the pursuit of Julie.

My legs felt okay, and the temperature was the kind I couldn’t break a sweat in and didn’t need to warm up to. Megan had recommended another cafe, Urban Farmhouse. She said she thought it was on Cary around 1st. She was right about Cary, but eleven blocks short, in Shockoe Bottom. I was nearly at James’, but I wouldn’t be dropping in, because today was to be my day. Besides, he wouldn’t be up; his usual day barely begins before noon, and he still had his mother and sister to entertain after I left him. Urban Farmhouse was better than Megan’s previous recommendation, Cafe Caturra–more casual, less snooty, and comfortable enough to keep me an hour with just a coffee (good) and a slice of banana-nut bread (average)–but lunch would have been expensive, so I moved on before I got too hungry to pedal myself to more affordable food.

I barely made it. I detoured to get a card at the Library of Virginia (they told me I had registered in ’92) then stopped at the Harlem Cafe on my way back uptown, but they’d changed their hours and weren’t open yet. I trolled a couple blocks of Broad, passing trendy places with specials like leg-of-lamb and blackened something-or-other, disappointing myself a little along the way by not asking one of several passersby to recommend a cheap place to me, before finding Nick’s deli/market at Henry St. It was just the place–honest and unpretentious. Ahead of me was a line of customers the jolly counter guy knew by name and served swiftly without taking down an order. I stepped up and said, “I have no idea,” and he laughed and yelled to the kitchen, “No idea! That’s lettuce and tomato on nothing!” I settled on corned beef on rye and got the best I’d ever had, though I didn’t find it out till I’d pedalled a half-dozen blocks and plopped down under a tree in VCU-ville, in the triangle park at Grove and Harrison, where a few months before I’d eaten alone. This time I watched a sidewalk parade of young men and women whose attempts to distinguish themselves stylistically came from the same imagination. I did see a tattoo I liked, on a calf–a fully armored knight slumped on his armored horse, three arrows in his back. I told the guy, “Nice art,” and without looking at me, he said quietly, “Thanks, dude.” The women (there seemed to be ten to a guy) were pretty, I suppose, but at that age that’s about all there is for me to see in them.

Of course, I ended up in Carytown, but I didn’t wander or linger, just bought a couple CD’s (Puffy AmiYumi, Proclaimers) in Plan-9 and rolled around the corner to the Belmont library to refill my water bottle and check my email. In a sunny window facing the street I found a small table with two chairs designated for jigsaw puzzle construction. On it was a small puzzle with large pieces, about two-thirds finished, of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Though the sun warmed me uncomfortably, I finished the puzzle, despite, too, being reminded of the lunchtimes Julie and I sat close at the breakroom coffee table working on puzzles. That stopped after The Trainwreck, and the puzzles sit stacked on the refrigerator. I want to throw them away.

It’s easy to tell when it’s time to go home: I begin half-heartedly searching my meager imagination for someplace else I might find stimulation, all the while reviewing my day for positive reinforcement of my efforts. I’ve learned to lower my standards in order to lower the resistance to returning home. At least I got out, I tell myself. I talked to a few people, though I could have talked to more. As much as trying to find the positive, I’m trying to subdue the regret. Precluding it altogether is a bit much to ask of myself yet. It’s the desperation I must keep at bay right now, but even a week away from work I can still taste its acrid atmosphere and see the other shoe dangling over the landmine. I can preach patience to myself from this distance and pretend that I believe my heart will speak clearly to me in its guidance, but I fear that when I step into work Monday morning the pretense will be stripped to raw bitterness and my heart’s voice choked in bile. Whatever personal progress I will have made over this week off is difficult enough now to discern. How can it defend me against a force that has surely not been enlightened in my absence when it could barely dilute the poison injected into me last week?

The Fifty-One-Year Locust

Sunset is before eight o’clock now.  The  cicadas are thrumming themselves to death.  If it really were possible to gauge the temperature by the cicada’s mating call, tires would be melting to the street and trees desiccating to dust.  But it’s getting cooler, too, and wetter.  I didn’t get into town over the weekend.  I feel like latching onto a tree and thrumming to beat the band.  I see darkness coming; cold wet excuses keeping me off my bike on weekends; and a long, dark winter without a warm companion. 

I’m missing  valuable practice time.  I’m nowhere near the point where socializing comes naturally.  A couple months of painstaking diligence is no match for a lifetime of easy ignorance.  If I don’t get out on the weekend not only do I risk losing what little touch I have, but I am not diverted enough from the negativity of my work environment to make positive progress.  Backsliding is vey easy when going uphill.  Even baby steps make progress, but as steep as the way is, even stopping is dangerous.  And by this Monday, I won’t have gotten out again.  When I work both Friday and Saturday, as I did last week, my only opportunity to get the weekend’s groceries is Friday night, because Saturday night I have the kids. I am losing touch with my progress.  Habits are hard to recognize–old ones because they’ve been taken for granted; new ones because they haven’t fully established their identies and embedded themselves in the unconscious through diligent application.  A week of opportunities at the library can’t replace–in quality or quantity–what I can rack up in a day in the city.  I need to be practically inundated with opportunitiy to practice the new habits if I’m to get them to take hold, to push the old ones out.  But the conscious wearies, slacks in its diligence, and the unconscious flows into the gap.  I forget my strategy, lose my confidence.  When I don’t get out on the weekend, I want to spend every working hour on the desk and hoping that the flow of patrons to it doesn’t stop.  I’ve given myself a second chance, made myself a new life, but will I soon need a third chance and newer life?  (See what I said about the confidence?)

It’s fair enough that I should feel desperate, but it doesn’t make anything easier.  Yeah, the days are getting shorter, and cicadas are dropping from the trees, but I’m not dying, not even going into hibernation.  I’ll find my way to human contact despite the less than optimum conditions, find my way back into my new life, regain patience and confidence, maybe even remember what the hell I’m trying to do.   Maybe the winter won’t be that cold, either.

Magnum Hopus

Thursday I couldn’t be pulled from my writing to shave and shower for work, but I didn’t get on my bike ungroomed for my day off Friday.  I believe my priorities are straight:  Compared to my social life, work is little more than a paycheck, and as long as both Julie and I are there the paycheck is way too small.  I have work to do outside of the library that’s worth much more.

I got back down to Carytown, but my first stop was well past it–Quirk–an art gallery on Broad past VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University). 

Quirk

The exhibit of handcrafted painted bikes and bike accessories was quite a bit less impressive than I’d hoped, but it had at least brought me back to a part of town I hadn’t hung about since I was selling blood to supplement my paper route money.  (If Id’ known where to sell spunk, I’d be living off the interest of that fortune today.  Hmm….)  It is no longer the seedy neighborhood I knew, but chock-a-block  with art galleries, cafes, and eclectic shops.  I popped into a couple other galleries and ate alone in the

Harlem Cafe

Harlem Cafe.  I could have eaten across the street at Comfort, which just got a big writeup in a Richmond glossy, but that’s the kind of thing that brings in the outsiders and squeezes out the locals, and I didn’t want to be one of those or be among them.  My Caribbean jerk chicken sandwich was excellent and cheap.  I asked the waitress about the place, prefacing with, “I always worry about a place when I’m the only person in it,” but she said they’d been open several years, but that most of their business was at night, with parties, music, and open-mic events.

I was disappointed to find the Richmond Book Shop closed.  Even in my college days a textbook’s toss away and in my woozy, blood-deprived meanderings I never managed to stumble in there despite the decadent allure of the faded posters and hand-written signs leaving only slits to peer through into a murky treasure trove stacked to the high ceilings.  At least that’s what I imagine is inside:  The sun and dirt on the storefront fill in the cracks between the postings, the latest of which, taped under “Closed,” read “Sorry.  It’s just too hot.”  In one of my rare silver-lining discoveries, I just sighed and thought, “Well, there’s incentive to get back down here.”  It’s at least another  mile past Carytown that I wouldn’t otherwise justify if I weren’t already headed to see James on Tobacco Row.

In a triangle park behind Shafer Court, on my way back west, toward Carytown, I stopped to call James.  He didn’t answer, and I moved on.  It would have been nice to see him, but I would have spent the rest of the day and probably quite a bit of the evening with him, stimulated enough with conversation but diverted from my agenda–simply, to talk to people I don’t know. See, in light of my desperation I have to parse my hopes, bring the future closer to the present, live not for love but for what becomes love.  I can’t pull love from another’s eyes, though I might see it there; it isn’t mine.  It might be some day, that love, but not from the eyes I hope or expect to see it in.  I’ll never know it until I’ve met it, smiled to it, said hello to it.  And that’s what I do now.  It might not yet be love I’m meeting on the sidewalks and in the shops, but aren’t the chances a lot better out there than in here?

It was yet another very hot day in Richmond, so that was motivation enough to duck into this shop and that.  Plan 9‘s CD collection has shrunken yet smaller in reaction to the new inventory tax.  I thought I’d augment my Belle and Sebastian collection, but their bin had been wiped out in the two weeks since I’d bought Dear Catastrophe Waitress.  I left with only a card announcing their appearance in D.C. in October, to which I probably can’t go.  (When I got home I slipped the card into a book, All Quiet on the Western Front, to flatten it back out, but forgot to remove it when I returned the book.)  I’ll give the missing CD’s a few weeks to show up in the used bin.

I crossed the street to the toy store, World of Mirth, where I’d gotten the l.s., to buy it’s companion magnet.  I’d retrieved the l.s. from Julie’s cabinet the day before.  It was more than half-exposed.  She had to have seen it. 

"Little something," retrieved.

Good:  Now she’ll know I’ve taken it back.  I decided to give it to Kevyn with its companion; she would appreciate it.  Thunder heralded the rain just before I stepped out into it.  I stood on the sidewalk and sighed, relieved, the soaking cooling my baked skin as the sidewalks cleared of shoppers scurrying for the shelter of recessed storefronts.  The light in the western sky told me it would be over soon.  I walked the away.  I didn’t get a block before it stopped.

Carytown has a psychic now, just past the 7-Eleven.  I don’t often walk up that far.  A sign hanging from the shingle announced half-off palm readings, now $10.  Without hesitation, I started to the door, but it said Closed, without apology, for the heat or otherewise.  I was more disappointed than at the bookstore.  I am a skeptic, but a hopeful one, and at the prospect of finding out (or being told, anyway) something positive about myself and being given some direction, I was willing to leave the skeptic outside and enter with hope.  (This from someone who can’t accept a god.)  This disappointment, as with the bookstore’s, will bring me back ever more hopeful of finding treasure.

I felt like buying myself a ring, so I went up another block to Alter Natives, because they’re local, non-profit and have interesting and inexpensive handcrafts.  The first thing the shopgirl said to me was, “Are you from Richmond?”  “Yep,” I answered, “born and–well, raised,” and I fessed up to my birth and six-month residencey in Hopewell.  I didn’t need to ask the same of her–not that I could tell through my particular atptitude for accent recognition or that her vitals were tattooed on her forehead–she told me:  She was from Chesterfield, came to the city to study world religions at VCU, and still lived down there in the Fan.  She appreciated the irony of my living carless in bike-anathemic Henrico County and having to pedal into town for all my fun.  It was just the two of us in there for half an hour before I left, but by the time I did we knew a lot about each other.  She even knows I’m open to love, because I had to ask her about the traditional way to wear the claddagh I’d just bought, and she looked it up on Wikipedia.  It’s on my right hand with the crown facing away from my heart. 

This wasn’t love, or even attraction–I didn’t give her The Eye–but a friendly, open conversation–all I can ask for right now, according to my adjusted standard.  Applicable, also, to this standard is the perceived need to always be doing what I can to be seen or make contact.  There’s still the reluctance to go home unsatisfied, but the satisfaction gets easier to find each week.

Leaving Alter Natives and heading back toward my bike, I wondered if I was heading home.  I stopped at the T where Belmont Street stopped at Cary to ponder the question.  Live music, unadulterated, undegraded, undiluted by the trip from studio to stereo, blasted crisp and clear.  My ears directed my eyes south down Belmont where they caught figures moving in a square of dark.  Without the warning thunder, it began to rain again.  I followed the sound to the sight.  The guitar and drum seemed slightly out of sync, but the closer I came to the music, the closer came the instruments to each other, as if I were uniting them with my approach.  They were a drummer and a guitarist in a one-car garage on the corner of an alley.  I sat down across the alley on a low wall that kept a tiny, sloping front yard from spilling on to the sidewalk and into the alley, but I hardly just sat.  The drum shoved me this way and that and pounded my foot into the grit, and the guitar, issuing with improbable volume and clarity from a ten-inch box that looked like a fifties radio, smoothed and rounded the rhythm in a wash of reverb.  All this and rain, too.

 ”Hey, man.  Mind if I join you?”

I turned.  “No, not at all.”

He introduced himself as Tyler.  I had a hell of a time getting my name through to him over the music and was tempted to let it go at Leon.  He’d just gotten off work at Weezy’s, a diner on Cary, and had been drawn as I had.  I was surprised there weren’t more behind him, in an unbroken line back to Cary.  Tyler’s glasses were held together at the temples with black electrical tape and tipped from the top toward his cheeks, as if looking down at his feet.  Sandy hair peeked from a dirty baseball cap.

“Man!” he said, “this is just the kind of music I’ve been looking to play!  The Band is my all-time favorite band, and these guys sound so much like them.”  I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so.

Tyler’s been in Richmond, via Harrisonburg, for five years.  He was in a bluegrass band up there, but hasn’t found a scene here to play in. 

The jam came to a consensual close after about twenty minutes.  I didn’t want to disturb the guys, but Tyler yelled, “Great stuff, man!”

“Thanks,” said the guitarist.

So I asked, “You guys gig anywhere?” hoping the verb didn’t betray my ignorance of the culture.

“No, but if you know of anyplace, let us know.”

I nodded.  Me?  Know of anyplace?  Do I look like I ‘d have connections?  I guess I must have at least sounded like it.

Tyler strolled across the alley to them.  I followed, reluctantly, feeling creepy not to.  Chris and Robert, guitarist and drummer, shared this cube with a washer and dryer lined on the wall near the opening, and a tv on top of them facing the wall.  Thin sheets of blue foam rubber suspended from the ceiling flapped lightly against the cinderblock walls in the breeze of a small box fan on the floor.

The rest of the band was in Georgia.  “They don’t get up here too often,” said Chris.  “What’s you band’s name?” said Tyler.

Chris looked at Robert, who shrugged but finally said, “Uh, the Chris Wickham Experience?”

Chris chuckled, said, “Yeah.”

Tyler offered his musicianship, and Chris took his email address.  Tyler’s effusing over The Band seemed to back Chris off a bit.

I watched Tyler shuffle up the alley, then asked Chris, “You think you’ll contact him?”

“I don’t know.  We need somebody, but….”

“Seems a bit sketchy,” said Robert, lifting his forehead from a cymbal he’d been tapping.

“Yeah,” said Chris, ” a little.”

“Well, you never know,” I said.

The rain had stopped.  I left them to their thing, hoping they weren’t rueing the intrusion.  Instead of going back to Cary, though, I trod up the alley the way Tyler’d gone. He’d disappeared pretty quickly, so I figured he lived along here somewhere.  Four doors up I was hailed from the bottom back porch of a duplex.  Tyler sat in a plastic chair at a plastic table.  I followed a buckled sidewalk under the shade of an elm, through a dusty yard the rain hadn’t reached through the tree.  Two concrete steps nearly met the wood porch that canted toward them.  On the table in a plastic glass painted with hibiscus floated sharp ice cubes in tea.  A glass ashtray behind it betrayed a roach.  Tyler’s eye’s betrayed he’d been smoking it.

“Want some?”

I did, but I knew I’d feel paranoid in public.  I told him that.

“That’s cool.”

The guys started up again.  It didn’t carry so well in this direction.

“They’re not going to get back to me,” Tyler said.

In the time it took me to get back to my bike I’d decided to see Winter’s Bone at the Westhampton.  All day I was sure I wasn’t going, that it would be a downer, but then, deciding that it wasn’t about the mood but the movie, and that the movie would probably be good, I headed that way, a couple miles closer to home.

I caught the seven o’clock show.  Of course, it was dark when I got out, and I knew the batteries in my headlight were as good as dead.  A man and a woman stood in front of my bike, talking.  I heard, from him, “structure” and “Catholic Church.”  He was talking about himself.  I crossed the street to take a picture of the theater, but the light was too low.  I continued to the 7-Eleven around the corner on Libbie and bought batteries.

They were–he was–still talking in front of my bike when I got back to it, and they were close enough to it that I had to step to the curb side of it to access the light.

“We were thinking of stealing your bike,”  the woman said to me.  Her hair was cleanly blond–no “dirty” to it–and thick and short.  Black-rimmed glasses hovered over sharp cheekbones aligned with a strong square jaw.

I looked into her brown eyes and said, “Couldn’t figure out the combination, huh?” 

“Nope.”  I’d expected something a bit more clever.

I opened the lock but didn’t leave.  My dinner, half a sub, was already spent, so I sat nearby and ate a nutrition bar from my satchel.  Still he talked about religion and himself.  She was listening, asking cogent questions, making intelligent comments, but she seemed engaged more on a professional level than a personal one.  I hadn’t seen them in the theater.  Perhaps they’d been in Phillip’s next door.  He began to seem much younger than she.  I began to think this was a first date, after an online correspondence.

As I approached my bike she said to me, “Really, we were going to steal your bike.”

“Well, I gave you a shot at it.  It’s been unlocked for five minutes.”

 ”Ah, but you were too close.”

I didn’t want to, but I glanced at the now-young man.  He was looking at her with a creeping dread of losing her attention, and maybe a little guilt for talking so much and precipating the loss.

“Better luck next time,” I said, and winked.  This was satisfaction.  I pedalled home behind a bright headlight.

There’s a long way to go yet.  The transfer isn’t happening.  I got sick of waiting to hear something, so I called the woman who’d sent out the solicitation.  She explained, apologetically, that this was just a flyer for interest, and that they do it every year (though not last year or the year before, believe me!) and put the responses on file in case of emergency openings.  So now Fridays can’t come soon enough and are more deserved each week as I pass through the yet-tighter gauntlet of Monday-through-Thursday of Julie.  Staving off the desperate aspect of my pursuit is contingent upon stockpiling these little satisfactions, making progress as much toward what I want as away from what I don’t.  This also means entirely ignoring Julie–not even looking at her from behind.  So I’m a creep or a jerk–or both–to her, but not caring what she thinks of me is as important as getting into town on the weekend.  I can’t afford to waste guilt on it.  How or if it will ever get better at work, I don’t know, but my efforts at making my true life better are what matter first.  I can’t even afford to care what you think of me.  Where I’m going I’ll get to following my own path.  I have a paycheck coming to me that’s much larger than Henrico County will ever give me.

Not Crash-Test, Anyway

Shelving, I caught myself looking in Dating for Dummies.  I say caught myself for I felt so stupid reading it that I even embarrassed myself.  I might say, also, that it was a near thing to getting sucked into it, but what I randomly opened the book up to was a section on exchanging phone numbers, and even that seems a stage far advanced from my position.  Dating–I have very little experience in it and none since the eighties, when I got married, even since the divorce eight years ago.  But books only offer tricks–pharm-rep samples pawned off by the doctor to a patient with an undiagnosed disease:  They don’t know me or my problems.  It’s not as if I even believe in dating as a means to my end, believing as I do that what I need will somehow find me in the natural course of my living my life, but who am I to say that that’s not an avenue to take on that course?

I may have renounced online dating, but I picked up a Style Weekly this week to look at the personals.  They didn’t have any.  I’m guessing they’re online now.  Before my Box 049 project, I’d answered a few ads.  I targeted the quirky ones, and because I’m a persuasive writer I often attracted response–even got a few dates–though no second ones.  “Girl with glasses,” had to see my place and paw through the magazines fanned on my coffee table–stopping at the Playboy and saying, “I guess that’s alright”–before we went out.  We saw a movie (at the Westhampton) that I’d already seen.  It seemed to bore her.  On the way back, she told me that her ex-boyfriend had had sex with a prostitute and that she had since had sex with him.  I suppose that was her way of precluding my sexual advances, but she needn’t have flattered herself that I’d ever been attracted to her.

I met a Christian girl for a drink at a hotel bar, where she like to go on Friday nights to meet friends and dance.  She agreed to the date even after a phone chat in which, responding to “What do you thnk of the Bible?” i said I thought it was “good science fiction.”  In the bar outside the dance floor we had a pleasant conversation–even made each other laugh–but decided as pleasantly that it just wasn’t happening between us.  She was eager to get to the dance floor and friends, and I let her go, only a little regretful, but pleased at least that we’d understood each other.

Then there was the woman, who after dinner and a long walk and talk around my neighborhood (then the Museum District), I never saw again, her therapist having advised her against it.  The next date I took to Joe’s.  She wouldn’t order any food, but picked at my plate.  When she returned from a bathroom visit and slid into the booth across the table, she fluffed her skirt, and I smelled pussy.  We looked at each other, her at me with a hint, me at her with a confused query.  What was I supposed to do? slip off a shoe and slide a foot in her crotch?  Maybe so; that I didn’t do anything but eat and try to have a conversation was my failure of a test, I suppose, but of a test I wasn’t interested in taking, anyway.

I know nothing about dating, or a little less than I know about any other social convention.  I righteously declare that I don’t play those games, but it’s a defiant ignorance of the rules that keeps me off the playing fields.  In staking my claim to individuality, I have virtually renounced my humanity.  Forget about connecting to women–I hardly connect to anyone but you, a faceless mute.  It’s not what I want, but that’s where “my own terms” have gotten me.  I spent all day in the apartment before finally getting out to spend two hours in front of a movie screen (Mic-Macs).  I didn’t go down to Carytown from there, but sat on a bench near the theater and considered my relative humanity, fading nearly into a quiessence I felt I didn’t deserve.  (Don’t ask me why.  I can’t tell you yet.)  In my consideration I didn’t include the positive eye contact and frank, friendly greetings I gave to two very attractive, albeit attached, women at the theater.  That I’d forgotten instead of congratulated myself is a sign that it’s becoming more natural.  I didn’t know either woman was attached until the first one, in line before me, bought two tickets and entered the theater with a gentleman.  The second, a compact, sinewy blonde a few years my junior, practically snatched the eyes from my head as she crossed my path at the intersection of the row and aisle after the movie.  “Hi!” i said, then saw her gentleman friend a step behind and, with no time to register my disappointment, I greeted him, too, but with hardly the same enthusiasm.  He clasped her bicep as they descended the stairs, and I wondered how much each of them appreciated my attraction to her. 

I have to believe that the eye contact and greeting will one day mean more than that to a woman, that we’ll find each other in the simple word and long look.  I have to believe that, because dating is so unnatural to me that it’s a lie to my entire character.  What little I know about it might be enough.  I’m no dummy, anyway.

GMAT, GRE, CLEP…?

I asked Greta again if she knew anything about the transfers, and this time she said that “they” were waiting for the end of the fiscal year before moving on the transfers.  Not much information, but more than I’d had.  I suspect she knows more, but between the bunker mentality borne of her retail experience and the executive privilege of witholding information in the name of professional discretion, what I got was the best I could have expected to get from her.  It’s a straw I will snatch.  No timetable, no process–that hasn’t stopped my hopes from packing my bags.  I even started a farewell letter to Julie, though I’ve already trashed it.  Forget advising myself against high hopes, because at this point they are a substantial boost of oxygen into the hermetic box called the Twin Hickory library.  I’m not blind to the chance of a negative outcome, I just don’t want to entertain it.  I’m even aware that raising hopes for the positive can give the negative devastating power, but I’ve chosen to take that as it comes and not modulate my reaction pre-emptively.  When I look ahead I can’t see Julie, so if I can maintain that focus my attitude will keep me in a job.  Job evaluations were conducted, despite no raises in sight (and Henrico County can see at least a couple more years ahead), and we were required to assess ourselves in writing, demonstrating how well we’ve performed over the last year, how well we reached the goals we had set, and what goals we intended to meet this year.  I was blunt:

I realize that a narrative will not make this part of your job easier for you, but I have to be honest, for whatever it costs me or is worth to you: My heart’s not in it. I do not know what goals I set last year, but I probably did not meet them all. I took no classes and am not interested in taking any. I would rather just do my job, which I like and feel I do well at. I have no further professional ambition as regards the library, except to not be here while a certain someone is, and, of course, I’d rather be closer to home, anyway. Given the impossibility of reaching that goal, I can only concentrate on my job and on strengthening relationships with the coworkers who aren’t afraid of me and will talk with me. I believe in our family despite the strain within it, and I really do want to get along with everyone. Emotionally, some days are better than others. You can probably tell which are which, and I hope I’m not affecting my “siblings” on the not-so-good ones.

I still try to challenge myself daily to make what we do more efficient. I’m glad to see some of my ideas, such as the re-orienting of the holds rubber bands and the sorting hour, were well received and doing the good I thought they would. I’ve weathered the attrition storm with, I hope, a level demeanor; and Java and STEP and whatever other new technological marvel they throw at us will only take some getting used to and is nothing I think will be difficult to master, as has nothing else I’ve had to get used to for my job.

Patrons are always my first concern as I work. Everything I do is with a consideration of their convenience and needs. I still consider myself a patron before an employee and feel it helps me empathize with them better and understand their needs in their words, which aren’t usually from the same vocabulary as ours as employees of the library.

I’m sure there’s much I didn’t cover, many competencies I missed, and I’m sorry. If you need me to do this more conventionally, let me know.

Perhaps that “impossibility” in April is not so much of one now, but my attitude has not much changed, and with summer, our busiest time, upon us, my diplomatic abilities will be strained, at least with coworkers, some of whom seem to be affronted by their duties.  One person in particular, whom Julie calls “Chuckles” but whom I refer to as “Slackles,” does little that lifts him off his ass.  Slackles, a few months ago, was a Head of Circulation at another branch in the Henrico system.  When he tried to take sexual liberties with someone in his office, he was demoted and shipped to us.  Nearly everything he says is full-stopped with a laugh, hence Julie’s nickname for him.  After he took a cell call in the stacks, I told him, “That was not cool.”  He answered, with a grin, “Thank you.”  A designated shelving hour to him means shelving the holds he’s just trapped, and the holds shelves are closer to the workroom than any other.  I could go on.  I have little enough patience with lazy coworkers, and I’ll have none at all at the end of the summer if they don’t step it up.  Even Julie has slackened, and I once admired her ethic.  She was designated to sort one hour, but took a look at the carts and said, “There’s nothing to sort” (a blind-wrong assessment), then proceeded to help the backup discharge books–that is, make work for the sorter.  Yet she wasn’t making the work for herself; she spent the entire hour discharging.  Halfway through the hour, when I realized she had no intention of sorting, I stepped into her job.

Readers of A Bright Ironic Hell readers might recall that it was just three weeks short of a year ago that I made similar disparaging statements about Julie (Steps Forward: Steps Back–especially the comments).  Back then, Julie lashed out, essentially forcing the closure of that blog.  That won’t happen this year, and its not my intention to provoke it.  It’s my intention to leave before I provoke anything, and I fear the summer stress–increased workload, the proportional slack to take up from some coworkers, and Julie–will have increasing influence over the better part of valor, and that as the summer wears on my self-control will wear out.  Of course, I hope I’m gone by then, and my hopes remain high, because it’s what I want–desperately.  But hope can’t be justified.  If all hope needed in order to be rewarded was a good reason, I’d have Julie and you wouldn’t be reading this.

It’s been a long weekend, in a good way, especially for the Monday off giving me an extra day without Julie and shortening the coming week with her to three days, but there’s not another holiday till Labor Day and the heat is picking up, too.  Hope, patience, heat, Julie–what other tests do I have to pass to get to Tuckahoe?  I have to know.

Think the Kid Could Do with a Little More Rope?

As I clutch at the thinnest straws for a differences between this blog and the last, I’m tempted to conclude that I have not moved forward in my emotional development.  That may be an exaggeration, but progress at glacial speed is only progress for a glacier.  It seems all I have learned is how to jerk Julie around without getting into trouble.  Yet it’s trouble I want.  I am as desperate as ever for her attention and as certain that I’ll get none of it.  I talk to her here, hoping she reads it, hoping I don’t fawn or go the other extreme and caustically derogate, as if it I could actually do any more damage or hurt her any further.  I want to address her now, but I resist the conceit; though I write closest to my heart when I address her, I am ashamed of what my heart still feels for her, and it crumbles into yet smaller pieces.  I cannot win her.  I am tired of saying that and tired of believing otherwise.  Does it ever end, this awful ride?  How can knowledge and belief be so far apart in one person?  How can certainty mean so little?  Is there any value in what I know? or am I at the mercy of my emotions?  Can I really have no say at all when it comes to what I feel?  Do I really want to feel this?  Do I really want to be this goddamned jerk?  No!  Do you really think I enjoy this game?  No! It hurts it hurts it hurts!  Julie absolutely wins.  I don’t know how much this hurts Julie, but she would be happy to know I’m cooking in my own stew, and would be more than willing to throw a few logs on the fire under the pot.  I scoff now at the l.s. and the petty arrogance that tries to justify it, and I come very close to labelling the act “pathetic,” but I try very hard not to judge my actions but to understand them.  Yet understanding this one is what makes me despair of my emotional growth.  I am, by my own doing, entirely unable to talk to Julie to the extent that I have to provoke her to talk to me.  Beyond the magnet, there is not plan, but I know that for all the non-planning I do I have already set off on a mission, because it’s the same mission as ever, and I recognize the signposts–the token and note, so far–despite being draped in the camouflage of rational justification.  No, I see this path before me quiet clearly:  The tokens will be rare, but the notes will continue, though only on repair slips, and not on every one.  I don’t know what the notes will say, but they will be carefully tuned to a pitch only Julie can hear.  Sounds a bit sociopathic, as if I were trying to settle a score, but my caution is less about not “getting caught” (whatever that would mean) than about not crossing the line into meanness.  That I’ve thought it out this far is both disturbing and comforting in complementary measure.  Maintaining their positive balance is the key , and the thumb on the comforting scale dish is sympathy for Julie.  If my aim is uncertain, I at least know I have no intention of hurting her, and I will do nothing that I think might.  This is not a vendetta.  It’s neither her anger or her tears that I want to invoke.  That I can’t honeslty state what I do want is the thumb on the other side of the scale.  Can one exert more pressure than the other?

It is likely to sanity’s advantage to consider this whole thing an experiment.  It is not without precedent in my life.  In 1988, when response to personal ads was still carried out through postal correspondence, I launched a sociological/literary project in a popular (and still popular) local free paper, The Style Weekly.  Each week I would ask a simple question, like, “What are you reading?” or, “What are you eating?”  Each ad in the personals was given a box number to respond to.  My first ad was given Box 049.  I asked for and was granted permission to keep that box for the duration of the project, which lasted twenty-six weeks–thirteen brief questions, then thirteen brief answers.  The overarching conceit was that I never so much as hinted upon my sex.  It was apparently an overpowering allure to men and women equally.  I had great but happy difficulty keeping up with the correspondence.  If they asked the burning question, I told them.  Of course, the women weren’t surprised and the men (most of them) were disappointed.  One man refused to believe me even after meeting me, convinced I was just a messenger sent in place of the “real” “Box 049.”  I overheard women in the grocery store talking about me.  The whole thing was simply an experiment, and one with no stated objective.  I’m still not sure what it accomplished.

So, here’s Satellite Dance, yet another experiment in public writing but with Julie as the guinea pig and not an objective in sight.  Having cut off direct communication with Julie reduces me to an observer, little more tha a clinician collecting data:  I plant a token or a note then sit back out of sight with my clipboard to record the subject’s reactions.  If only I could believe I were thus emotionally detached.  If I have grown emotionally over the course of Satellite Dance, it is most clearly manifested in a softening of moral judgement–imperfect, incomplete, and slow, of course, but alive and growing.  I understand that the dichotomous combatants, The Wise Man and The Fool, of A Bright, Ironic Hell are actually Father and Son.  The boy may listen attentively to the man and appreciate what the father is attempting to impart to him, but if he understands it at all, it is not in an applicable way.  The father has to be patient, not critical.  He has to allow his son to make mistakes, to sometimes act counter to wisdom.  After all, that’s how the father came to be so wise.  If I have this emotional child in me, it’s because I didn’t receive that wisdom as the physical child to grow into.  I am my own father now, as most of us, I suspect, are our own parents, and this “awful ride” is the frustration of a difficult interaction between the parent and child, with the child trying to claim its autonomy from the parent stressing responsibility.  I don’t judge the man as severely as I do the child.  I strive to judge neither at all and just let them talk, but the child will rebel with rash action, and the parent will react with harsh judgement.  The child of BIH has grown up a bit.  He understands much more of what he’s been told, though he’s also grown more cunningly aware of the limits of the father’s admonitions.  The father is aware of that, but begins to recognize himself in his son and knows his son will make the important mistakes.  Julie is the catalyst for this relationship, like it or not.  One day, the son will be grown and full of the wisdom his father imparted.  He will no longer need the father, and neither will either need the woman they fought over.  That’s what the father thinks, anyway.

Probably a Yorkstiff with No Tags

So, here I am, with the answers and the attitude, doing nothing about anything.  The mission is no less urgent, but the imagination is no more forthcoming.  Do what I like, I tell myself, but there are no movies in town I want to see, and I can’t convince myself that it’s less about the movie than getting out and finding love’s lost dog.

The last time out was unsatisfying.  I tried this newish cafe/wine bar, Cafe Caturra on Grove Avenue, just for an espresso.  The coffee was the only good taste I left with–snooty staff and a clientele dominated by wife-picked polo shirts tucked into belted madras shorts did not spell my kind of action.  What better could I have expected, though, of a place situated in a neighborhood anchored by two Catholic schools with a private university (of Richmond) between them?  That was three weeks ago, and I’ve since discouraged myself from going out the subsequent Friday nights.  What”s a guy to do in a town in which coffee shops are on the sun’s schedule? because that’s something else I like to do–hang out in a coffee shop and watch the people-traffic and listen and write.  Bars don’t work:  The noise is more loud music than conversation, which all too soon slips from barely interesting to moronic–and it gets expensive.  But I didn’t feel good about staying in; it wasn’t doing me any good; it wasn’t getting me anywhere near love.  I nearly spent another Friday at home, but though I couldn’t get myself to go see Sweetgrass, I could neither forget the weeks’ disappointments nor consider reading blogs an acceptable substitute for human contact.  I went back to Grove but around the corner to the sub shop.  I live in the suburbs–no sidewalks, no traffic not encased in steel and glass (except for the occasional fifty-one-year-old writer/idiot on a bicycle),  and no nightlife.  One has to head east into Richmond to do that.  I was that one.  Grove is the nearest Richmond (about four miles) with an approximation of after-dark activity.  After eating I walked back around the corner, but to Starbuck’s across the street from Cafe Caturra.  For once, Starbuck’s was a choice instead of a last resort.  Still, it closed at nine, and I closed it.  Only two other people came in, and they didn’t stay.  Then I began to think of Julie–all the questions that will never answered, all the regrets I can’t fix–and I knew I couldn’t go home.  Deeper into the city to Carytown.

There’s life on Cary Street–restaurants, bars, and the Byrd Theater with second-run blockbusters for two dollars–and none of it touched me, despite having set myself down smack on the busiest corner for nearly two hours.

Carytown night

 A few looks, a few nods, and one three-beered guy hailing me with “Top of the evening to you!”  I nodded and replied, “And to you.”  Thinking of Julie or not (what do you think?), I pedalled home.

A good portion of my disappointment has come from the same lack of contact at work.  Nothing is happening–no attractive women, no repeats.  Ms. P (for “panties,” if you like, but also her last name) picked up a hold at the window fifteen minutes before I would have replaced Megan there.  I caught her eye incidentally–nothing sparked.  And on Thursday, Greta* puts me on the desk with Julie twice.  Minutes before the second time, I look at the schedule and notice it, and I mutter, “Very funny, Greta.  Very funny.”  Julie was passing behind me as I said it and looked at the schedule herself.  I felt like a jerk.  Maybe I am; I knew Julie was there.  A very, very long hour of leaden silence folowed.

I’m back to feeling there’s nothing else I can do to attract love, make love happen, or get whatever it is I think I want, but to feel that way is to give up to the prophecy.  Besides, I just don’t believe it.  Give me the patience to wait for that movie I really want to see, and, Julie, get the hell out of my head or talk to me.  I still love you, you know (damn me), but I want my life back, so I can give it to someone that wants it.

*Head of Circulation and, therefore, schedule-maker

Hope Springs Infernal

Goddamned hope.  Goddamned ridiculous, obfuscating hope.  What have I been hoping for but what I can’t have, what I don’t even really need?  Julie.  I’ve not been hoping for love, but for Julie.  Hope has kept me lying to myself.  All I say or do is still in effort to attract her to me–damn the impossibility, full-steam ahead!  Every word I write I hope (and fear) she will read and is meant to charm her (in my tenderest mood) or taunt her (in my bitterest), but never is it meant to alienate her, actually push her from me, as I doth protest so much I’m trying to do.  Friday night I pedalled east, into town, to do a little shopping, maybe make a connection–or so I unconvincingly told myself, all the time wondering as I pedalled if I would see Julie’s car.  Sometimes I’m glad for rationality:  I was kept from actually looking for her or her car by the sure knowledge that she would neither venture this far nor step foot in a Barnes & Noble if her life depended on it.  I had a good time–spent some money, spoke briefly with a few store clerks–but not a good enough time to obviate the usual reluctance to head home.

All weekend I didn’t write, pretending the hope wasn’t there, not wanting to write about Julie, ashamed that I wanted to, barren of other, more pressing ideas.  Then I awake Monday with this constipation of ink clogging my heart and choking my mind, and I feebly lash out at work by changing the desktop of the driveup monitor from a closeup of a purple flower to a blank blue.  It didn’t get better, and at the end of the day Mike, ever-caring Mike, asked if I was okay.  “You’ve looked…disgruntled.  Or are you just tired?”  “No, ” I said, and paused, reluctant to bring it up but grateful for the chance.  “It’s just the same old…stuff.”  “Work?  Or is it personal?”  “Yes.”  My vision began to swim, so I turned away from him and knelt to pack my bag.  The emotion took me by surprise.  I said, “Someone here.”  “It’s not Julie, is it?”  I laughed bitterly at the incredulity in his voice.  The tears receded and I was just angry and ashamed at myself for not being over all this.

When Julie stood before me the next day, smiling and courteously informing me I had a phone call, I stared, mesmerized into her (gray) eyes, and when she was done said, “Thank you,” and I was angry again, this time at her, for so easily pretending things were all right  between us; and I returned to that declaration she made at the Trainwreck, as unbelievable and incredible (in the most literal sense of each word) now as when she first spoke it, that people get to know each other best either at work or by living together. …  But this is where I turn bitter, and know I know that road goes nowhere–doesn’t deadend, just doesn’t reach a destination–so I’ll stop.

Truth is, all there is between Julie and me is my pride.  Nothing else.  Do I even love her in any greater sense than I love anyone else I care about?  Hope wants me to believe a lot of things, but it can no longer make me believe I am in love.  Whether or not I was ever in love with Julie is irrelevant; it felt like it, and that’s good enough.  I don’t feel anything for Julie.  When I look at her I feel only for myself–regret, shame, remorse, (yes) hope.  I no longer even see the woman I’d hoped she’d be for me; hope can no longer blind me to that reality.  I’m left with a sparkingly stunning woman, and, my pride aside, that’s enough to silence me in her presence.  It’s difficult to accept the things that remain unresolved, but they are things I cannot change and must, therefore, accept.  I’m a long way from acceptance, as far away as someone else’s control over it.  I can turn bitter again at this point and ask, Whose idea of resolution is more important? but I must stop again, before I throw my brain against the emotional wall.

I am standing still against hope, tacking against its push into a candyland of faith-full joy.  It’s a vacuum; it would kill me.  Instead?  Pride?  There must a be a hope that does not indulge delusion, a hope to believe in.  The hope for Julie’s love won’t die easily, no matter the sober words against it, no matter, even, the emotional detachment I have claimed.  Pride is the last and densest barrier, the insatiable monster at the gate of the treasure cave who can neither appreciate his riches nor allow the more deserving to have them.  I wait for emotional evolution to sate the beast, but patience is hardly a friend, either.

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.

What Is This Position Called? and Can I Ever Hope to Get Out of It Again?

After all, maybe there’s Jackie.

The weekend after Christmas, Matt invited me over for dinner.  He also invited Chris, who I hadn’t seen since his party Memorial Day, when I’d hoped to see Jackie.  In the second grade, when I was still an outgoing kid, Jackie was my “girlfriend.”  On the side of my house one day after school, Jackie asked, “May I hold your hand?”  “Okay,” no big deal.  I didn’t see her over the summer.  When the school posted the new rolls on the classroom windows in August, I couldn’t find her name.  Until I moved into the city five years later, I didn’t know where she’d gone.  Once again, we shared a neighborhood, but in the ten years I lived there, I never saw her, never went to the same school.

Chris had a Super Bowl part in 2006 (2007?–the last year Jerome Bettis was with them).  When Jackie walked in we were introduced.  She said, “Didn’t you used to be Kevyn’s brother?”  “I still am,” I answered, not a little peeved at the second-hand recognition, but amused by its wording.

At dinner, Chris said to me, “Jackie was asking about you.  She was real sorry to miss my party, because she’d hoped to see you.”  “I had hoped to see her, too,” I said.  Wow.  Interest.  Mutual interest!

Chris dropped me off home that evening.  I told him as I left the car, “Would you tell Jackie I asked after her.”  “Sure.  I’ll see her Saturday.”  So it’s been how long?  Four weeks?

Back in the summer, I overheard Julie tell Tammy she’d brought her a brochure from a yoga studio.  “Yeah,” she said.  “I sometimes ride my bike in Bryan Park, and then I go to this coffee shop I like on MacArthur….”  Stir Crazy.  She was talking about Stir Crazy, the scene of that humiliating non-date of ours.  How could she go back there, much less claim it as a favorite of her own?

Monday was a holiday, for Martin Luther King.  Though Stir Crazy is nine miles away, I was determined to get there, despite Caffespresso being within walking distance.  I’d already had my coffee and it was already three when I was ready to go, but I’d finished my errands–dishes, clothes, groceries–and had the rest of the day free and clear.  This yoga studio is at the opposite end of the short retail strip from Stir Crazy.  Jackie, a massage therapist, works there.  I hadn’t really come for the coffee.

I wasn’t sure I’d recognize Jackie–I couldn’t form her face from memory–but I knew who I was looking at when two women stopped in front of the coffee shop between my bike and me inside:  The long chestnut hair curling lazily at the ends, the sharp nose, the spark shooting from the eyes nearly buried in the wrinkles of an open-mouthed smile.  They didn’t come in but continued on.  I leisurely finished the americano I hadn’t needed and followed.

The two women were at the counter.  I acknowledged the one I didn’t know, bashful at the possibility of recognition.  (Much as I wanted it, I was afraid of giving away the game.)  I asked for information, and Jackie moved away, down the hall.  Helen gave me a brochure and explained the various classes.  The only one that fit my schedule was Jackie’s.  Helen asked me what brought me in, and, stumbling in my mind over the urge to confide my pretense, I finally mumbled, “I can’t say.”  Whether Helen sensed an ulterior motive or just chalked up my havering to a muddy mind, she did not press me but immediately offered me a tour.  In each room of the converted post office I looked first for Jackie.  When we found her and were introduced, Jackie’s eyes flashed.  “Burns?”  I didn’t correct her.  “Um-hmm.”  I made no pretense at the “surprise” of finding her here.  We hugged.  Helen left the rest of the tour to Jackie.  I reminded Jackie of the Super Bowl remark and she laughed at herself.  She gave me her card and we hugged at parting.

I know this sounds dangerously like pursuit, and I won’t deny that it is, but I actually have been seeking yoga instruction for quite awhile.  Of course, I might still be seeking if I hadn’t found Jackie at it, but she’s as good a reason as any to end that particular pursuit.  Don’t think that I’m going to push the love agenda, either.  I’m not in love with Jackie and will not pretend to be so.  I don’t know Jackie yet.  Maybe I can’t fall in love with her, but maybe I can enjoy a friendship.  The hope is there, of course, but I’ll give awareness precedence over expectation and appreciate what’s given me.  Maybe.  I hedge my bets on the future against the lessons of the past and the realities of the immediate.

Unless Maybe a Bed of Razor Blades Cushions My Fall

Matt and Hinckley both have exhorted me to not let my attraction to Sandra lapse in inaction.  Coming from two men with no more romantic experience than myself, the advice was surprising–until I thought about it.  Matt and Hinckley (James from now on) were speaking from experience, but from an experience of regret of having n0t done what they now urge me to do.  As I have been reticent to attach importance to my attraction to Sandra, so was I reserved in telling my friends about my New Year’s Eve encounter.  But I told them, so my coolness did not fool them, because they know I don’t speak to fill a silence or hear my own voice (or to read my own words, in James’ case).  Matt and James support me as friends do–with the greatest, most honest empathy.  Their hopes for me are my own.  Matt has been married more than twenty years.  James, twenty years our junior, has not been married, but has been passionately but unrequitedly in love twice in the nearly fours years I’ve known him.  Matt doesn’t want me to play it so cool that it grows cold.  “If she is attracted to you,” he said, “the longer you wait to try to find that out, the more she’ll believe you aren’t interested in her.”  James told me, “If this is to happen, you will have to take at least one other step in the direction of making it happen.”  Faith isn’t going to do it.  Zen isn’t going to bring Sandra into my orbit.  I found Sandra on Melissa’s Facebook page, and I looked at her photo self-portrait on her page.  I lingered on it.  It was all I could see; her page was private.  I didn’t solicit her online “friendship.”  This was before my friends’ double-barrelled exhortation to action.  I’m still not prepared to contact Sandra.  What I am prepared to do is contact Melissa and ask her if Sandra has expressed any interest in me.  Not daring, but  a step forward and no chance of rejection–for the fear of rejection has been at the heart of my reticence:  I wasn’t sure I could handle it.  I’m not sure still, but the longer I wait to do anything, the higher hopes climb and the greater the difficulty in reaching them.  If I jump now, the fall can’t hurt me.

Food, Shelter, Love

At work I see plenty of physically attractive women, but I’m not ready to fall in love with any of them.  Physical attraction in only that.  Love is more.  To be physically attracted is to have sized up a potential sex partner, a biological imperative justifying a recreational pursuit.  Where is love?  Of course I want sex, but it isn’t the first thing I want.  It might not even be the second or third, depending on the scope of love.  Is it realistic to want love above all else? to eschew the baser needs in favor of a need that has never been satisfied?  Why not?  Let the baser needs take care of themselves.  What, then, has happened to letting love come to me?  Well, I’d leave well-enough alone if it were well enough left.  But regardless of my inability to bring love to me, my overwhelming need for it crowds out the faith that it is on its way.  So I distract myself with the shapes of women, and I don’t kid myself that it’s anything else.  I know better than to look for love in a vulgar aesthetic.  Though sex, for me, has never been a simple vulgarity or casual one-off, I have never fallen in love with an object of sex, and when I have fallen in love (if I actually ever have), physical attraction was not the reason.  If I have ever fallen in love, it was with Julie, and in all of the time I mooned over her I never considered sex with her (though, eventually, that would have been nice).  If I had not otherwise been attracted to her, there might have been no attraction at all.

So, here we have new expressions for both the inutility of vanity towards the “acquisition” of love and the futility of seeking or even preparing oneself for love.  If physical attraction cannot recognize love–and as a biological (animal) mechanism it must be singularly ignorant of any spiritual imperative–then what role of the least significance can vanity have in the attraction of anything but sex?  If that is all vanity can do, then its role is to distract one from seeking love.  But I don’t want to be distracted–from anytything.  These shapes are all nice to look at and to imagine having fun with, but as much fun as they might be, they aren’t enough.  Feeling that way, I can’t enjoy the game.  Yet there is nothing else but distraction when there’s nothing else I can do.  Nothing else is more important to me than this thing I can’t do anything about.  But as I have neither the patience to not-wait for love or the faith in not-waiting that would facilitate the patience, what’s left but to play the game? to appreciate the shapes?  Perhaps that’s all that keeps obsession at bay.