There Is Great Discontent, and All Is Right With The World...

“I am a romantic and a raconteur, not a great combination.”

So here we are, on the cusp of the Big Decision. Actually the B.D. has already been made. At least in my mind it has.

We get the keys Friday. To Our House. No longer Hers and Mine, two beds, two sets of keys, two washers and dryers, this was it. IS it. So being that it’s Monday, she’s started telling me about her nervousness, her discomfort. Not so much telling me as showing me, with hair-twisting unease. Funny, when this all went down I thought she was the one with the quite sureness, the smug unknown agenda. She was the Kate Hepburn, me the deliberately unaware Spencer Tracy.

I have found that her anxiety tends to come out in drunkenness. Mine manifests as extreme logic—I will pose to you a series of questions, the answers to which will be weighed, measured, added and subtracted, the cosine extracted, and a product redacted. What you feel, I will think. What you scream, I will Say. I am the diplomat who saws at his scrambled eggs with a butter knife while the Eastern Theater hangs in the balance. I am the measured phrase, the tented fingers, the prescription eyeglasses. You are the wild pronouncement, the unheeded gesticulation, the skirt that flies up in public.

And so we circle the ring, snarling and smiling. She gets me in that choke-hold, tightening, tightening on my neck until I laugh Uncle, to her assertion that she has these foibles that will never change. She allows me a breath, long enough to hear what she wants to hear, that I will pull her along into a new reality, where the monsters under the bed are in someone else's house..

I think we’re going to get along just fine. Just… fine.