Gurugrrl wanted to call me. Everything seemed okay, or at least normal, if not okay, if that makes any sense. I was trying to upload some stuff to my iDrive for Poet, but I told her it'd have to be later because Gurugrrl wanted to call me to talk for about a half hour.

So I let her call.

She started to talk about just stuff, like normal, but she kept exhaling into the phone. She was smoking. She always smokes when she's stressed out about something, so finally, I just asked, "are you smoking?"

And of course, she was. This is bad news.

"This is never going to work, is it?" she asked me, deadpan. It was almost practiced in its delivery.

"You know, I said that once and you really freaked out on me." I felt like I was going to freak out.

Whereupon she starts to give me a long harangue about how I'd been trying to say this for months (although I was hoping, in saying that, that she would make some changes or moves and not be so distant), that we're too different, that we want different things, foremost in her examples, her privacy issues, that I consider almost pathological.

I made a few motions to object here and there, but I didn't give it a wholehearted attempt. I just wondered why she even came back, after we'd said our goodbyes. If this is how it was going to end up, and out of the blue like this... then why did she bother? So she could be the one who got to decide how to end it? To twist the knife a couple more times?

Finally, I asked her what would be all-telling, for me, anyway. "You don't love me anymore, do you?"

She was really quiet for a while. A long, pregnant silence.

"I've just taken one too many hits..."

I interrupted her. "Okay, look, just take me off your ICQ list and everything, okay?"

She proceeds to tell me that I don't have to make life like this, that we can try being friends, and we don't have to repeat the past, shutting people out of our lives. She just doesn't get it. Absence means I don't have to obsess on how things were, or could have been, or what happened. I don't have to feel like maybe they can be that way again. I don't have to get to a point where I realize I've been just friends longer than anything else, and get that sad, empty feeling.

I get to keep the picture I have now, even with all its flaws. Because I love her, even with all the flaws, and problems, and arguments.

restlessmind