Things have been pretty tough between M and me lately. The silences and subtley harsh words have been taking their toll on my wellbeing and our friendship. M has a tendency to ask loaded questions, which makes me stumble in conversation as I search for the exact neutral phrases that I think are appropriate. You see, I am determined not to satisfy her with the answer she is looking for, but I am also desperately trying not to upset her unnecessarily. It’s tightrope walk. Over the past two nights we’ve had late-night heart-to-heart chats about our relationship and these things always end with her being upset because I let the truth slip out: that she has acted apallingly. Last night’s chat was about the chat we had the night before. She had said that the way she had been acting lately had been a strategy, a staged drama, if you like, to help me fall out of love with her. That all the silences and criticism, all the nastiness and personnality assassination had been a deliberate act of wall-building to help me get over her. She had done it on purpose. She had shown me her worst side. So I said that was fine, but it had backfired and she had been in danger of losing me as a friend. And that, quite frankly, I couldn’t see myself in a relationship with someone who would act in that way. I didn’t want to be with someone like that. We slept on it and the next night she said that she didn’t like what I had said about me not...
I awoke this morning with eggs after a dream of eggs last night and I wonder today what my therapist will say about such things – these eggs, or those, in that dream, or the pigeon eggs, broken, just shells that fell from the rafters beneath the train tracks as I was on my way to the stairs and to this chair to write about...
One of the biggest things that holidays are for me is a time to measure out change; to see where you have come, how much your life has changed since the last time that holiday rolled around. Thanksgiving also gives us the chance to take a look at what we are thankful for, perhaps through the lens of that time measurement. I decided not to go to Durham for Thanksgiving this year. It was not easy to just take the offer of that safety, security and support, but I felt like I needed to stay in Atlanta to prove something to myself. New friends had invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, and I felt that being able to decide to stay here for the holiday showed a substantial amount of progress in my recovery from the break up, and the formulation of a new life that I have been attempting lately. Obviously my life has changed quite a bit since last Thanksgiving. I am still in the same house, but probably not for much longer. I still have mostly the same friends, and a few new ones, but some of my friends I am not allowed to see or communicate with in the same way that I used to. Things have become much more complicated in some ways, while at the same time more simple in other ways. Much hardship and pain has occurred. Much thought, revelation and clarity has resulted as well. Last year I spent the one day I had off for Thanksgiving in Spartanburg with G, having dinner, playing music, and eventually deciding to stay the night...
Okay, here’s how it goes, we are sitting at this pizza joint, and at most it is 3 to 4 months into it all. We are just sitting there and talking about love and our love for one another, and how great the other one is, and how we should get married before we hate each other, and she is saying she has never felt this way before, and I am saying I have never felt this way before, and there is a way she eats the salad, discarding the pepperoncini, that I could see a demise, that she didn’t like blue cheese, and that orange salad dressings were distasteful, I could feel death coming. I am sitting here trying to convince myself that it was all over from the start, that these pathologies were already eating us up, that we fulfilled some fucked up psychological void that we each had… but no it was love, it really was, as sure as pepperroncinis don’t matter, nor a distaste for blue cheese, it was love. At least there was that, and there’s nothing wrong with it, and it was...
I will awake in the morning with a yawn and smile and the dream will be over.
I always hate when I get to the final chapter of the novel especially the last few pages when I have to start considering what I will read next and I start to wonder about how it will end even though I already know. I know the writer puts emphasis on this ending, it will be the last thing he leaves you with, and there are novels with such beautiful endings, even or especially the sad ones. I am up late again and out tonight the late autumn crickets are singing just as they did in the beginning, and the cars are coming up and down the road, people are moving, falling in love, and out, making love, kissing, arguing, drinking, and fighting loneliness and their own demons. I have been up with too much on my mind, trying to remember the first words of the book so I might write the last ones. I forgot to save the pages, or they were washed away in the flood. I will have to recreate them, but for now I am attempting an ending. John Irving doesn’t write the first line of a book until he has written the last. If this one ends this way, then that end is also a beginning. Maybe there was death at the beginning, or the thought of, or the fear of, or was it love, a smile, comfort after many long days, was a corpulent arm throwing change to the beggars below, or did it begin or end with him coming home after a long day, and her waking in a monologue, ‘yes I...
Working on the first three pages of the great American novel, I hit my first writer’s block, and wanting air I walked onto the porch. I felt you were restless too, up and thinking when we both should be in bed (together?). I have written so many words tonight and none of them seem to answer any of the questions. My restlessness, and the Siren-call of yours, brought me to put on my wool sports coat and boots and to start walking toward that sweet music. I was blocked and it must have been 1:15 AM, and the black ant I had been studying had just stood up and walked out the door as well, said he was off to work. I walked down the street, restless and lonely and thinking that seeing the neighborhood like this, at this time of the day might help cure some of these blues. I walked down past the rotting Gingko fruit, and stepped on the concrete carving and felt magic shoot through me, straight up my spine. I became fooled by the pedestrian signs in the road and mistook them for tiny men, standing still. They cast long shadows and I tilted toward them. And in my mind the trees were swooping just like they are in that scene toward the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. I walked past the cross-eyed cat and thought about the day that JT got ornery at low blood sugar. The dog bowl was not out, nor the bucket of treats. There was no one around and for awhile I thought I found my country. This...
On the floor by my foot a large black ant crawls without direction, the same type insect I spent much time smashing after the fall. Then they seemed to be everywhere, a sign for the broken hearted, or maybe it was arid and they simply searched for an oasis in the carpeting. The oasis, alas, did not exist, and, alas, the black ants stopped coming, I was left alone for a while, a scientist without a subject. Tonight this one arrives and the experiment begins again. Should I run him out of town? Will he take me with him? Like last night when getting in bed and from beneath the pillow crawled a pale orange lady bug, and i couldn’t remember if that meant good luck or bad, was this the nature of the tooth fairy, I had always assumed Mom, but perhaps it is this. My studies don’t always go so well. I wonder about the other lady bug that flew in the truck window on Saturday, and what it scratching my cornea meant. Was it so I could better understand the nature of insects? Or when the black ant bites my foot late on Monday, and it takes me back to that time when you once danced sweaty to hip hop blasting from speakers on a hardwood floor creating a scene that I should be forgetting now if I know what is good for me. If I could be strong would I understand why these things happen why these things are here and in my bed and walking these floors and not leaving me alone, but reminding...
I must warn you all that this one will be boring. Today has been pretty awful on a lot of fronts. This will not be a piece where I will wax poetic very much. It will simply be me purging myself of the demons of this day. I awoke this morning with JT on the sofa. We had approximately an hour and a half left together after seeing each other regularly in two different cities for the last week. We would board the MARTA train and travel to 5 Points Station together, where I would get off and he would transfer to the southbound train, and eventually to a plane back home to Chicago. It was hard not to be sad. This past week has been a pretty good respite from the things that have been perplexing me lately. I was really scared of what coming home alone from work would bring today. I didn’t have to wait until work was over for things to get tough. I walked in this morning to all hell breaking loose on a couple of projects that I am closely tied to. One was a project that I spent the better part of my Saturday working on. It was like running up a slippery slope all day. By 5 o’clock I started tearing up at my desk and I still had another hour to work. Five o’clock seems like the hour that, if I am going to shed tears, I usually do. Usually it is after I am at home though. Today it was at work. R thinks that it is just habit....
Despite what you may think, it is Bibb County that this place is in, not Macon County, so the romance ends there. We are departing back to Atlanta now with car in tow behind pickup and I am $165 poorer, not to mention what it will cost to get the damn thing running again this week. Keep you fingers crossed for us, we have been known to screw things up many times...
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