“What this,” she asked holding up the box I’d given her.
“It’s a geegaw”
“A what?”
“It’s a silver bracelet,” [a token of my love for you, you idiot]. I think telling a story where you give all
the [extraneous information] that is held back would make for a good
novel. It’s comic irony. You see? Perhaps, one day I might try writing it, but
no I will not write again. “Our 25th anniversary.”
“If you want to show me you love me, give me what I want.”
“In time, maybe” [You have no idea of the conflict inside of me,
the dragons I am battling with].
“In time! How fucking long
do you expect me to wait.”
“You made me wait 20 years, the best years of my life.”
“I’ve given you all the time I’m going to give you. Take this back.”
“If you don’t want it give it to someone else. It doesn’t matter, I just wanted you to have
something.” [you have no idea how much I love you].
“Why should I have to do it.
Here, you take it and give it to someone else. I’m tired of your excuses
and I’m tired of waiting for you.”
“I haven’t ever asked you to wait for me.” [And as near as I can
tell you haven’t. If nothing better came
along, you might have looked at what we
had together and given it some value. I
wanted to sleep with you, but you didn’t have to. We could have just been
friends. Now I’m lying to myself in the
hold back, damn it.]
“Why would you even want me when I’m not going to be faithful to
you.”
“I’m not asking you to be faithful. I’m just asking you to understand that I am
your friend and that I want to be more and that I’m willing to suffer whatever
fate that holds for me unless I straighten out my life.” [I want you to wait, I
want to tell you to wait, however fruitless ‘that’ would be. But I cannot.
How can I ask you to wait when I don’t fully understand what I’m asking
you to wait for. If you can, accept me
for what I can give you now. If you
cannot, there is probably no comfort in knowing I suffer as much as you. That I suffered alone for much longer than
you have.]
“Straighten out your life?
What the fuck does that mean.
Does that mean while you ‘try to sort you problems out’ which just means
going home to your wife and going on family vacations and basically treating me
like I’m some sort of whore?”
“Yes, something like that, but without the whore part. We don’t have to have sex, I can love you,
you can love me. This isn’t entirely my
fault if you think about it.”
“But it’s your fault it isn’t fixed. Don’t think you can throw the
past at me. I’m not as stupid as you
think I am.”
“I don’t think you’re supid.” [I know you’re not stupid. So why did you keep sleeping with me for so
long. Was I fooling you? Fooling myself? Maybe we are in love, maybe that’s the
reason. That, perhaps, makes us both
stupid under the circumstances.]
“I’ll burn it along with all the poems you gave me.“
“That’s fine, they were yours to burn.“ [They’re
irreplaceable. They represented the
entire emotional content of my life for the last 20 years.]
“You’re exasperating.”
“You look good in silver.” [I wish I was going to be the one who
could see you wearing that and nothing else.
I am envious of the one who will see it, who won’t appreciate it as I
would.]
What was she thinking, I wondered?
I was now at a time when I was more in touch with virtue and I
thought to myself that if she could love me then I could give myself to
her. But if she couldn’t then I would
have to do something else. I thought of
a pilgrimage. A trip to Mexico or the
desert, to get away from the trials I was constantly facing, even if it meant
defaulting on some of my obligations.
The obligations would still be there when I got back and I had a little
more breathing room than I had before, although the same deadlines loomed
before me. 60 days, 90 at the most
before everything came to a head.
It seemed as if the girl and I had not survived the doubts, but we
were talking and our conversations were as rich and rewarding as ever, but they
were peppered with warnings, some subtle, some not, that we no longer had a
relationship. That we could not even be
friends.
I thought to myself, I let you love whoever you wanted after I had
professed my love for you. What kind of
person are you that you cannot extend me the same courtesy?
For all of my self-justification,
I had been given ample time to get my shit together and from her point
of view I had made no progress. I’m not
sure what I thought from my point of view, but economically things were coming
to a head. One way or another there
would be progress in the coming months.
I desperately wanted the moral support, I needed her as a sexual
partner, but I had asked of her all I could.
Now it was up to her.
She had repeatedly warned me that we had to solve the problems I
had which meant abandoning whoever I had to abandon in whatever state they were
abandoned. When I say this, it sounds
like I may disagree, but I do not. I
agreed with her that I could meet such obligations as I had one way or another,
but she did not know how tenuous things were for me. I was ‘burning the seed corn’ to pay just the
bills that I had. How does a rich person
explain that they are making a fortune every months but spending two?
I had to take the steps
that were approaching my grasp and coincidently, the family ties that had bound
me so tightly, had begun to unwind themselves; or so I thought.
It was Machiavelli who laid out the
conflict of virtue and fortune. It was Paine who gave away his world wide
best selling royalties to spread his thoughts as one of the first
abolitionists, meritocracy or mediocracy, and the forswearing of wealth even to
the point of poverty in support of public service laying the groundwork for a
moral imperative account from which subsequent generations would draw for 200
years before finally bankrupting it. Of
course, the French had proven how empty the promises of Paine were when they
took to beheading each other in the name of his philosophies. Alas, poor Thomas, I feel your pain.
Even while I was experiencing the freedom of virtue in some
respects, I was controlled by the words of fortune. Financial security,
college tuition, family vacations, societal expectations, anniversary gifts, Christmas
presents, savings accounts, investment capital, business acquaintance, cars,
planes, ski-trips, gambling money, toys of every description, faster computers,
bigger houses, swimming pools. The list of words tying me to fortune and denying
me virtue unending, seeming impossible to corral. There were those who
said that virtue allowed a certain comfort to support ones immediate family,
that provided only the gentleman would be sufficiently well off to pay
attention to virtue, logic enslaving virtue in favor of fortune. I think that is not true, for once you start
down that road, it never ends.
The words of virtue are eels in a pitch-dark pool. Love,
companionship, writing, morality, mankind, climate change, the joys of the self
verse the good of mankind, compassion verse avarice. I realized the need
in my desperation to abandon greed and pursue virtue, but my heart was full of
avarice, shackled by the words of fortune without any more knowledge of the
chains than of the future that was waiting for me.
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