Harry: What does this song mean? For my whole life I don't know what this song means. I mean, 'Should old acquaintance be forgot". Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them!?

Sally: Well may be it just means that we should remember that we forgot them, or something.

~Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, When Harry Met Sally

No, Meg Ryan. That's a bad idea. It's a horrible feeling. Remembering that you forgot.

"There's only one moment I need to write....I shouldn't write it at all. I should delete this e-mail once it's sent. I should forget, so I won't have the burden of remembering and knowing I said nothing. But what if I do forget?"

That one's me. The beginning and ending of an e-mail I sent to Emily on July 19th, 2009. I took at least part of my own advice, that night-- I had to search the trash folder of my gmail account to get that quote. And honestly, tonight, I'm glad that I wrote it all out. I'm glad I have the e-mail that I wrote with the sweat of that moment still fresh on my brow. I'm glad I have this black-and-white reminder that I am not black-and-white, that there are things and me that are blazing red. Right now, I am colorblind.

I won't say the old man was right, but he sounds distinctly less crazy when I get to that point where I'm just angry at the idea that I don't get to have what other people have. Angry when I think of the fact that sex is life-affirming, and angry when I get to that point where I can't even imagine how it could be. Angry when I see that episode of Scrubs where sex makes everything better in the end. Angry when people make suggestive jokes about what Zack and I must be doing tonight. Angry when I think of the entanglements that have built up, angry when I think of that one, thin gold necklace I owned that got into so many little knots that it was rendered useless, and I had to throw it out-- it was gold for christ's sake.

Angry when I think about how much I still love my husband, how attracted to him I still am on so many levels. Angry when I think that, maybe, they aren't the levels that matter.

Angry when I hear Mr. L's voice in my head, telling me that I "come alive" when I talk about my sexually charged encounters with other men. Angry when I think that he is the man that I feel has a chance to save my relationship, maybe the only person who can untangle the kinks in the chain, and he doesn't seem to respect marriage. I don't know that I ever realized before, but he's got to be...almost sixty if not, and he's single, and he's dating women much younger than him, always has been by the reports I've been getting. I know I mentioned this briefly in the last post, but I'll expound upon it here. I know he has kids, so he's probably divorced-- I have no idea why I've never just asked him this, I guess my fear is that, with the "daddy issues" he's eminantly aware of, he'd be concerned that I had those feelings for him. At any rate, I've been trying to justify the fact that he told me to sleep with someone else by the fact that he must want what's best for me. He says I'm co-dependent (I don't think he's wrong, but I've always been too scared to look up what that really means), and he thinks my relationship is doomed (we have been struggling since day one), and he wants to stop me before I go down with the ship, I guess. Surely, it's not that he doesn't respect marriage, it's just my marriage that he feels has run it's course.

Except the guy he told me to sleep with? He's married too.


I keep telling Zack just slightly too much truth about the things Mr. L says, making Zack incredibly angry at him. He has violent fantasies, and I can't, frankly, blame him. Problem, though: my only real shot at making this work, one thinks, is couples therapy, which is a service I frankly don't trust. But I know from one pseudo-session that Mr. L can get Zack to talk, and he already has -so much- of my backstory; this could work. Except I, being an idiot, (That would be a great new title for the blog, if I were looking to change it again. "I, being an idiot...") had to go and give Zack all the reason in the world to distrust and feel betrayed by this man. Super.

Linda: He asked which one of you I think would perform better cunnilingus.
Zack: What? Why??? What the hell kind of a question is that???

Yeah...what the hell kind of a question is that?


But, like I said, it's hard to blame him when I feel like I do today-- frigid, broken, useless. Someone who'd better find some satisfying cause in life, because she's never going to find any satisfaction anywhere else. Someone who, like so many retirees, might as well close up shop down south and come north for the summer--that comparison, howevever, would have worked so much better if retirees came north in the winter as opposed to be the summer, because my life is shaping up to be one long winter, as it were. What's that crocus poem by Jean Little in "Hey World, Here I Am?"

Surprise

I feel like the ground in winter,
Hard, cold, dark, dead, unyielding.

Then hope pokes through me
Like a crocus.

The crocus, that's what I remember that I forgot. The crocus that poked through me on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday. I know that it was there, I can visualize the-- jesus christ, I use metaphors too much-- beautiful petals, imagine the sweet scent. But I can't remember how it felt to have that crocus pierce through my frozen soil, a harbinger of new life to come, of the hopeful days of spring, of the sweltering heat of summer. A theoretical harbinger, at any rate, since the summer never came. Just more winter.

"In winter time, the roses died.
Her blood ran cold, and then she said
'I want to love, but it comes out wrong.'"
~The Smithereens, Blood and Roses

Also, I have no idea what a crocus even looks like, in real life. Time for a google image search.

Oooo, pretty.



On with it.