1. Exercise your body
2. Eat sanely
3. Create!
4. Contribute
5. Socialize
6. Read
7. Learn
8. Tend the nest
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i'm in love with this woman nancy. she says she loves me but she's not in love. so this guy shows up online and they chat and he's more revealing of himself. so she's taking the train to new haven to meet him.
wednesday, june 15th
i wake up fragile and i cry a lot before noon. mostly short bursts, wails and sobs. i want to tell nancy because i want her to know me. and. i have a problem with the ethics of it. i don't want her feeling pain for my pain. i especially don't want any trace of 'poor lynn' in her thinking-i want her to come from her truth-whether she chooses me or not.
so the paradox is that i don't feel like i can be completely honest without being a bit false.
she's known me intimately for almost ten intense weeks. i feel like i've opened my heart and she says that i haven't. there's this fellow who lets himself be known in his emails to her in a way that i don't.
i wonder if this is real or if it's a trick of language: is there some way i say my heart that makes it sound like my head? maybe i should ask this man for writing lessons.
--
she tells me that the man from maine makes himself known. i want to know how he does that so i ask her 'could you give me an example of someone writing in a way that you like?' and she says 'i printed out some of his letters...do you want to see them?'
now it wasn't as direct as all that, there was some taking it back and saying she didn't know why she did it-a display of modesty, an attempt to tune her ear i guess. but still. i'll get to see what touches her.
i suspect that seeing it will feel shitty and i want to see it.
---
i decide against going on a dating site right after i open one. it's the eleventeenth time i've thought about it and said 'no'. i know i should protect myself, my heart. but i could hurt someone by starting things that i'm unable to finish.
so in the words of my gmail utility:
Your Social tab is empty.
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grief. that's the word. it's not related to 'grave' but it should be. grief is what i'm feeling and it's about loss and heaviness (gravity). so i'm wondering: are there doctors of grief? if not doctors, nurses or emt's. maybe there's first aid-not to make it go away but to keep grief from getting grave.
it's possible that grief work isn't for specialists. maybe you have to have a deep and wide knowledge to do any good, but i have a hunch that there may be some wisdom out there about grief itself. i guess the sanest thing to do would be to ask nancy. 'who should i see?'
thinking about it, working with grief would be a really blessed thing to do. i wonder if a lay person can assist the grieving. grief first aid. what a great way to pay back all the healing kindnesses i've received. more research is called for.
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thursday june 16th
i send this to nancy:
it's raining and i have my fancy shirt on and my almost new book (To Be A Man) that i got from my sweetheart. and i'm scared for my book. i want to protect it so i wrap it in the shirt and run.
and i remembered hebrew school where they taught us that the books (especially those with the Word in them) were so special that if you dropped one, you kissed it when you picked it up. and then new york public schools-which were partial synagogues then-where you turned your books in at the end of the year and the teacher would inspect them to see if you had violated their sanctity. there was no kissing required however.
it was years later in college that i saw someone taking marginal notes in a bible (!) in western civ class. i became reluctantly liberated. first underlining (with a ruler of course) then highlighting and finally wild marks and comments.
my copy of TBAM was undampened. the book is fine, thank you.
i told you once that my favorite toy when i was little was a book? still in my top three.
so this rainy morning i'm walking through the woods. they are at their best, shiny, cool, shadowless light, birdful, smelly. and what i'm thinking about is how i want to tell nancy the little riff that the rain brought back to me this morning. i'm imagining the email and i'm ignoring the woods. i stopped and brought my attention back for a bit to the present landscape but then returned almost immediately to my heart.
neurotic? a coin-toss, i say. in order to be here now, you have to be really clear where 'here' is. sometimes 'here' is there.
oh. and there's this. the man she's involved with is a very good writer. she showed me some stuff he sent her. if i were writing to seduce, i'd take lessons from him. so i'm judging myself a little as one-down and trying not to let that get in the way of actually telling her what i felt.
too many mirrors in this barbershop.
---
the morning queests: we replayed our night at tango. i did better this time. i'm still not big enough to let go of nancy's tin ear for expressing concern. i still want to snap 'no, you didn't say that' as if that would heal the problem. but i did better.
and then i fucked it up again. i asked her a question about the rôle pleasure (wine, beer, food) played in my life. did she think it was a decoy for something else? was my amiable detente with life a way to sidestep some bigger question.
we never really got to the answer because i interrupted her in the first sentence.
i felt misrepresented.
and with that she went off to
first-the destructiveness of not listening as shown by interrupting her
then-my inability to simply stand where i am and wait
and yes, i've been struggling all my life just to be heard.
and the compromise i've arrived at is eternal vigilance which, it turns out, is the price of the sad liberty of being alone.
---
she's going to see him tomorrow. actually she's making a pilgrimage. all the signs are there, she won't see me today-ritual cleansing. there's a journey involved. she warns me that i won't hear from her for a while.
i am filled with catastrophe and anastrophe.
•this is the end. she'll come back and say that this is the man she wants to get real with
or
•this in a new beginning. she'll say that she saw that the goodness in me had more promise of the real than the reality in him had promise of the good.
the only evidence for the latter comes from my own intuition. frankly, not much to go on.
there's no meditation on friday. i desperately want a place to be that will extend my calm and my sense of keeping my self. i'm tempted by action: get a date, drink, smoke. no, i'm not. nancy has ruined that for me. i guess that i will just have to sit with this sick feeling. maybe i can find a mitzvah
and maybe i'll be able to avoid using that as a drug.
--
i saw my friend stuart shills-the painter- in the woods today. he asked the usual and i replied by telling him about how the love of my life was going off to have a date with another man and that she was thereby seeking some openness that i wasn't giving her and that this was nauseatingly painful and so far the growth was worth the hurt.
i could see him processing this and i knew that i should be ashamed. i was ashamed but just a little. and i think my voice, my calm in presenting such an unmanned reality took him back a bit. certainly was different for me.
...nancy said something about the ego. . . . . .. .
---
and then i went and did a beer tasting. small crowd, paul rollers' place. belgians, lots to talk about and i didn't care. my not caring isn't just the dulled-out hum of the heartsick, something's happened to me.
my gourmandism doesn't seem so attractive anymore.
i was still able to taste and pick out the roasted malts from the caramel sugars and spin connections between the hanseatic league and coriander in the beer, but it didn't mean anything because, well, it's so fucking trivial. and that's the alarming truth. i've spent my life being glib about the trivial.
okay, a couple of halfway decent novels and a few poems, but still.
i didn't drink more than what i needed to taste. somehow, although i wouldn't mind being in a coma right now, i don't want to be even slightly buzzed. i don't know why. i think i'll let the little bit of beer i did have wear off and then sit on the mat.
there's a great irony afoot here. the woman has swept over my life, restored an old old compass and now she's leaving me. hah hah. and the truth is that my aloneness is my own creation. laziness and fear and now i'm here.
and there's this email from nancy:
I think the oracles suggest that you should continue writing poetry...as I should continue doing therapy. And that both of us get clearer where our avocations/vocations/gifts become a substitute for inspired and enlivened relating.
and that's what happened at my tasting tonight. i heard myself doing this enlightened gourmet thing and all of a sudden (or maybe not) i saw it as a substitute for inspired living. i don't know how much the poetry is a mask-i suspect it is partially. but i'm pretty sure about the beer tastings.
so you want to know what alcohol has meant for me? i guess there's more than one way to use it to avoid being alive. what a waste.
and this is my good-bye email to her
on the night before your trip in a whirl of phone calls and emails and maybe texts. lynnandchrisandlynnandchris and so on.
i imagine you feeling agitated, frayed and torn (and maybe some other textile metaphors too)
and based on absolutely no chops in the personal growth world, i want to say this to you;
stay with nancy. she will know. breathe.
the instructions are the same as for meditation or wine tasting.
! shut up
2 sit down
3 take a long breath
4 pay attention
and be good to my nancy
i'm off to rollers in an hour.
l love you, lynn
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