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Monday, April 20, 2015

My Road-the strange end of the relationship



There was a strange sound from outside, like what you’d hear walking barefoot over broken glass; the sound to the rain dripping onto the deep snow outside.  “You said there were twelve nights you spent together.  I was listening and I counted 11.  What happened on the twelfth night?” Sally asked.
The regular looked at her.  He had never really noticed her before.  Like him, she was young, a regular in the neighborhood, but not so much at the bar.  He racked his brain, but realized he had made no effort to count the love scenes.  He wondered at her ability to grasp that item and keep track of it. He’d never looked closely at her before.  She had black hair that had been dyed blond, he judged from the roots.  She had classical good looks her clothes were tight but stylish.  Before he could pay more attention, the stranger drank the second of the last 4 glasses and began to speak.
“The twelfth night was the last night I would spend with her.  In many ways it was the most important to me, because at that point in time I had committed to myself to make this bizarre relationship with her work.  I had not told her, but did not think I needed to, because she welcomed me into her house and into her bed.
Before we had sex, we had an extended domestic scene.  We made cookies together for a friend of hers or perhaps a party.  I forget which.  While I worked on this, she made dinner, which was good, but which fades in light of subsequent events.
Don’t condemn me for this, but it is important to the story.  It was not the first time we had oral sex, for that was something she was particularly good at, but it was the first time I had oral sex with her.  It was not for any aversion, for everything about her attracted me and nothing about her offended me.

Instead, it seemed to be related to a spontaneous act.  We were taking a bath and I went down on her, nearly drowning in the process.  She seemed surprised and I asked her why.  She said I’d never done it before.  Somewhat spontaneously I added that it was something that I associated with a couple in an exclusive relationship.
She had pulled back and at the first I mistakenly thought it was just the pleasure of it was too great.  Her words were not descriptive, “I thought you didn’t like it was what she said. I told her that whatever aversions I had to anything else, with her it was particularly pleasurable to me. 
In the narrowness of the bath it was a difficult feat that I didn’t fight over, but I experienced something similar in bed, although otherwise the lovemaking was as intense and for me, at least, as pleasurable.  It did not last as long for us, a couple of hours perhaps, but we were both exhausted.  The streets of the city were in shambles and the pressure on her must have been tremendous.  For my part, everything continued towards the inevitable showdowns in court, my position getting stronger with my sense of true value, but the ultimate outcome remaining as uncertain as ever. 
I cannot tell her how much I want to make her happy, but I am thinking as I lay beside her that when I told her, joking I believed, that to me this is something that should be  between a couple in an exclusive relationship, her expression seemed to change.  Even then it might have been too late, even if I’d realized that her change in expression was pulling back.  I did think to myself that for someone so good at giving oral sex, she seemed quite surprised.  I mistook the look of surprise for perhaps a excess of pleasure, perhaps even discomfort, but I now know it was a reaction to the words that accompanied it.
The action barely changes, but change is coming.  Change is inevitable. There is so much content for each moment it is difficult to go to a new idea without spending time completing the last.
A candle burns.  A glass of red wine, the sweet bitterness.  It tastes faintly of my lover who is far away; separated by distance and by time.  I can no longer taste those lips on mine, but I can taste them in the wine.  Paine allegedly did his best work tipsy, if not intoxicated.  Hemingway was either a drunkard in fact or at least he believed himself to drink heavily through his characters who were rarely far from a bottle.  Is it necessary for all great writers to suffer an addition, of alcohol, drugs, perhaps madness or love is enough.
Rum as well as brandy were the drinks of the American Revolution.  The sugar tax was one of many causes of the revolution.  Perhaps the major cause was less about freedom and more about fortune.  The desire to buy cheaply for the common man, the desire to avoid financial obligations to the empire by the more prosperous, the desire to avoid unnecessary regulation and taxation for the merchant.  Well, in the end they all lost their war against tyranny.  Taxation without representation is a given in the long freed colonies, at least responsible, answerable representation.  We are all effectively enslaved by our government as all rulers eventually corrupt and enslave those unwilling or unable to bear the high price of freedom, sacrificing self and child to the insatiable appetite of true freedom.
I am too big a coward for such, even though I realize that cowardice is a false emotion.  I am less than nothing.  Nothing would be boring and irrelevant, but I am dangerous.  A menace to those who love me and those who are ambivalent to me but are in proximity to me.  I am knowledgeable of what is around me and am, unconsciously, unconscious to anything but my own comfort and safety.  The worst people in the world are unable to see their own evil and thereby attain a certain grace of innocence.  Not I.  I know of the evil that lurks within me.  The inability to sacrifice myself for others.  I was, once, in a state of grace and having lost everything as a result of avarice in a position to live for others and to become something greater than myself and for a short time, a very brief time lived in that state.   A state of virtue.  But this is my road to virtue and back.  I started black heart that I am and there I have arrived.
The black heart of selfishness is a coward.
I know that existence is about change.  I know that decisions can be made with impunity because they've all been made before.  "Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy."   I know this, and yet I am too much a coward, despite my knowledge that I can act however I chose, to act if it makes someone unhappy.  I cannot even make myself happy.  I know how to make things right at least for myself, and I cannot even do that, much less make things right for anyone else even if I desire it.  It is little enough that I can write about it.
And I have been called this very night an arrogant ass.  It was suggested that this was a genetic defect which I passed on to my son who I would say is more guileless than arrogant, but then I was also both arrogant and ignorant.
It is important to know that part of my personality is shrewd and clever, but the other part is unable to hold a grudge, no matter how willing I might be otherwise.
As a result of that arrogance, I barely lived being so unaware of death that it statistically amounts to a miracle which brought me to the point where I had sufficient wealth, by the cleverness and credit and frugality to take part in the real estate speculation that would lead, as a result of my lack of suspicion inevitably but most indirectly to despair, then virtue.
But we were talking about wine.  It deadens the pain enough for me to talk about the vacations we failed to take together, the things that we would never see together in the world, the beds to sleep in together, the hot springs to share as the snow falls and melts in our hair, the idea of getting far enough away from everyone else that we can be naked together until we are too tired to go on and have no choice but to go back to the world of other people.  Even there when we are together we would have been alone, protected by our love which acts like a shield keeping everyone out.  My lover and the pain of loss are never far now.  Despair was no longer in the future, it was becoming my constant companion.

When we separated this time, her finality unmistakable, I stopped carrying my cell phone. Before it was my constant companion, hoping to get word from her, but now it only represented the emptiness inside of me.  Its messages were empty things that had no meaning for me as if it were written thousands of years before in a dead language.

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