By Age 92, The List Will Grow to 2

On my birthday, this is what I've learned in 46 years on this flying ball of dirt. These Things I Know to be True for Sure:

1. There are only two real things: Love and fear.

That's it.

Everything else is conjecture, the extrapolations of a soft innocent child who, with limited knowledge of what lies beyond, invents fantasies to support the view of the world from his crib.

If I Had A Hammer, She Said, I'd Hammer Out A Coda

Joan's key still don't work (See the last post).. But her pen does, thankfully.
On March 24, I received an e-mail from her entitled "If I Had A Blog," which follows below unedited.
Me: "Would you be okay with me posting it on mine then?"
Her: "Fine by me."

~~~

Again. Even though she'd sworn it was gonna be just the once. The lesson stuck this time, more clear for the repetition. It wasn't commitment or monogamy, just the reciprocal nature of healthy relationships.

She was grateful he'd done it. Saved the months it would have taken her to get there. Still affected by leaving him, the one she'd spent a third of her life with, leavings… endings… came slowly to her. But reciprocity was something she couldn't live without.

He wasn't comfortable with her anymore. Her simple presence in his now hometown would make him ill at ease. Decrease his peace. But he was comfortable with the memory, the nostalgia of her. She was his fallback position. Only that.

She wasn't blaming him, she wasn't. She had. She knew the difference.

It took her 22-year-old nephew to remind her how unhappy she'd been with the way things were. The tragedy of the split wasn't the loss of what she'd had, it was the loss of what she'd hoped for. Again.

The benefit of doing it twice was that she felt clear on it now. None of the usual fear of repeating her mistake, thinking that a relationship that had become one-way would eventually become whole again.

Reciprocity. Two-way streets wouldn't always go where she wanted. But dead ends never would.

--Joan (3/24/07)

Joan's Key Didn't Work

Joan’s key didn’t work in the lock on my back door.

It shouldn’t surprise me, since she didn’t even have the apartment anymore. Even if she did, my back door was attached to my apartment that happened to be 2500 miles away from the apartment she didn’t have anymore. More than that, in a wrenching visit a month ago to her new place, I even told her about the new someone else in my life. The someone else I was trying to shoehorn into my idea of Someone Special, effectively putting the exclamation point to our story that had run through fits and starts and lengthy discussions on the nature of non-possession for the last year and a half.

That key just didn’t want me to take it off my keychain, though, I reasoned.

I even had other keys from other Formers, but they sat in my sock drawer, or were randomly tossed into that bedeviling pile of To-Be-Sorted papers, to be searched for frantically when needed.

Like those two keys on some sort of Disney keychain that went to Arianna’s place, where I walked her Australian sheepdog for her when she worked the late shift. Two keys that I let myself in with sometimes, when after her shift she was hungry to share a joint, and her bed. I’d find her there naked and wiggling with giggly desire, shotgunning me a hit she’d held in her mouth when she heard the key, waiting for me as I found her landing strip, slipping frictionless into our little sacred secret space together.

Or there was that single skeleton key that Daria gave me, hung on a big silver ring off what looked like a single handcuff. That one I kept in the garage, on a fat rusty nail just inside the door. I wanted it there to grab quickly, because when Daria called, my decision to go enable her latest trick-- or to tell her to fuck off-- had to be blink-of-the-eye. I never did coke with her, but always thought it would have suited us: The rush of her was harsh like lines in your nose and always put me in full flare. Assumptions made this moment contradicted the next, with the both of us arriving at the perfect clarity of the paradox at the same time, cosmic and cool and calculated in light years. Her unintended pregnancy by my friend Phillip turned out to be the only thing that kept us from a stumbling to nirvana. Now every time I chose not to tell her to fuck off, I knew my mission would be to enable her in some journey of both great import and great risk to her, with consequences that usually reached beyond, to Phillip, to her daughter. So I was containment, glad for my role as participant, voyeur, confessor, firewall, guru, father.

Still, though, in the haze of looking at me outside me, finding my way back into my burning house, Joan’s keys still didn’t work, even though they were the ones I automatically grabbed in the dark, on the back porch.

Someday, I thought, as I fumbled for the one that would let me in, someday I’ll get rid of those fucking keys.

The ones that don’t work, the ones that it took her eight months to give me.

The ones that always stuck in the lock, that you had to shimmy a little left-right to get them to work, leaving you standing in this place thick with warm whites and purples.

The ones that, if I were quiet, would gain me passage to her hallway that led to her bathroom that, if she were taking a shower, would permit me a view of her behind the opaque curtain, washing her hair, her bush, her tits, her legs, our unspoken compact to play out the titillating little show, all the better to fuck you with later my dear.

The keys that let me into the apartment with the deck that looked out onto the pond that held in still water the perfect reflection of the sunset, the mirror image of our dreams that we never talked about, never spoke of, because of the eventually realized fear that those dreams would lead us apart, wandering in our separate deserts, tilting at our own private windmills.

Yeah, someday. Someday I’ll get rid of those keys.

Just not today.

3:AM In Her Bed, Blissed Out

I watched the stars exploding behind my eyes
And set my life to music again
In that song I'll never finish

3 Hours and 2 Years

H E F O U N D himself eating dinner on Fridays at 3 o’clock Pacific, when he had the choice. 6 o’clock in the East when you add 3 hours. Just a coincidence, that. Six o’clock being when he and the woman would have their Friday dinner. Escaping early from work the both of them, giggling together at that same table at that same little vegetarian restaurant.

She would be eating about now, he thought. Probably by herself this time, or with her sister. He knew there was no boyfriend right now. He chuckled to himself there in the booth at the Thai restaurant, seeing her in his mind’s eye, the story of her breakup with the separated psychologist still fresh in his mind from her telling of it, her outrage so beautiful and comical they ended up laughing about it together on the phone, two thousand four hundred and seventy six miles apart.

Fridays used to be theirs though, big kids in adult clothes, their celebration. He considered his pint of beer, the lace on the glass halfway down. Was it nostalgia to remember how good it had felt? Memory is a scalpel, we cut to fit what we see now. Dragonfly wings, colored by what you put them up against.

Two years, he told himself, spontaneously donning his sunglasses, there in the booth by the window looking out into the steady Portland rain. Two years to get over her. Then there was still dinner on Friday.

He surmised that this is what it must be like to be in AA—Most of the time you went about your normal life, safe in routine. Then you saw people you used to drink with or drove past dive bars where you had some of your greatest moments and saddest failures, and the trap sprung, and you took that gutshot and drank again--- or wanted to. Wanted to very badly.

~~~

S O T O D A Y with his sunglasses and the rain and the dragonfly wings of memory, and the ghost image of her there across from him in the booth, crouched in conspiratorially, whispering an inside joke, forking up her salad, it hit him hard and dark, dark like it’s dark at 3:AM when you can't imagine the sun ever coming back, and he felt that pull in his stomach, the one he used to get as a teenager when he thought he was in love, the one he gets now when he realizes what’s been lost.

Then he realized he had a pen, and the old Italian guy at the newsstand stayed open until 5 on Fridays. He paid the waitress and walked out and bought a card from the newsstand and sat under the awning at the coffee shop even though it was closed, and put the card down on the cold stone table and wrote, guarding it from the rain in the failing light. He finished it, sealed it, addressed it to her, and then just sat. He watched through misty eyes as the last wisps of light slipped away and the sunset turned from burnt orange to stars, and a dragonfly beat its wings and flew away.