Dan is talking to me about a poem he just wrote, saying he normally doesn't bother committing the lines that pass through his head to paper, but today he felt compelled. I wrote an entire poem in my head earlier, but let it pass instantly. It seems lately, I can't write anything I'm feeling without risking something.

I had made the deal with myself, finally, to write in this more often. To hell with the caution, to hell with the shame. Let's just get back to who I used to be, when I was an open book, when I put it all out there, good and bad. Zack doesn't fucking read this, anyway.

I alternate between being annoyed by that and realizing, with shocking clarity, exactly why he doesn't, why he can't. It bothers me that, when I look too hard, I can never *really* blame him for anything. Sure, he lies, but I create an environment where he can't be truthful. Sure, he's distant and sad and won't talk to me, but I create an environment where he can't be happy. Sure, sometimes it feels like we have a bad marriage, but doesn't that just make me a bad wife?

You'd think with those kinds of feelings, I'd find it hard to justify the things I sometimes do, the things I'm all too eager to write about, if somewhat vaguely, in these less-than-hallowed pages. In reality, I feel like I've missed something when I don't do them, feel like I've lost someone when I don't write them. If a genius is someone who can hold two contradictory thoughts in their mind at the same time, does that make someone who can have two (or eight) contradictory feelings at the same time an emotional Einstein?

My guess is no.

---

I told him "I flit"; or rather, he told me he noticed it: my tendency to switch between intense passions almost weekly: passions for people, passions for ambitions, and, not uncommonly, for people as ambitions, as things I want to accomplish. ("He" is not Zack. "He" will go, for the moment, unnamed.) After he mentioned this tendency of mine without assigning the cute little word to describe it, I coined it much later, expressing my concern for our relationship to him. I sighed. "I do flit.", I said, and he agreed. I turned to him, accusing "Do you have any idea what I mean by that? 'Flit?'" He did-- how delicious is that? He described what I meant perfectly back to me, using a butterfly in the metaphor: I remind myself not to be too enamoured by the comparison, after all, how can one use the word "flit" and not think butterfly?

I know this about my emotional ADD, about the way I get so very deeply involved with something so quickly, and then allow it to pass me by. It's him, right now, it has no one to be with him. (I'm sure that sounds rather insulting, if you're out there. I don't mean it that way.) It gets so intense, so quickly. Good, ol' fashioned suburban infatuation, where you want to be in any public place (Wal-Mart, lately) because there's a better chance he'll be there than at your house. Where you can't help but notice, for the first time, exactly how many of that make and model of cars are on the road, or, equally as frustrating, how many cars sort of look, from a distance, just like that make and model? (Does anyone remember, from high school, how I hated Ford Taurus'? "Grrr, Taurus"? And motherfucking Mercury Sables, the little clone bastard car. It was all because of Jonathan Lawless's car, remember? I guess some things never change.)

It will end soon enough, it has nothing to do but end. (If you're out there, I'm not sure whether or not you find that insulting, but I suppose, unfortunately, that you can't find fault with it's verity. Can't say I didn't warn you. Can't say I haven't tried.) I told him, the other day, that I do; I go from passion to passion, from person to person, and I can't seem to help it: the feelings are real, in the moment, and I never mean to hurt anyone. Maybe it's even been a while since I have hurt anyone, with one, big red-headed exception...or, come to think of it, two exceptions that share a bed at night. But I flit, I'm a flitter by nature, and I told him this: I feel like I betray everything I touch.

Maybe, upon closer inspection, I'm less like the butterfly, and more like one of those destructive tent moths. The ones that land on something beautiful and leave it ugly, gray, and destroyed, through their solicitous, consuming attentions.


I hope I'm being harder on myself than I deserve. I hope I'm not the parasite I fear I am. I might go back to some public place tonight, compelled by instinct, ready to move my wings in their dainty fashion, and be what I am, whatever it is. Or I might have the comparative grace and poise to sit at home and watch some crappy romantic comedy I've seen a dozen times, or listen to some songs that remind me of my current, transient obsession.


The last line of Dan's poem is "OH how I wish you were here."

On with it.