Definitions

 

May 16, 1980

 

Since she brought it up, I’ll talk about it.

As with any good essay, a definition follows the thesis sentence, and she has defined the problem in her own terms.

But a definition is not an answer.

She ponders why her parents object, hemming and hawing, about her spending time with me.

I suspect it has to do with her old boyfriend being with her one minute, and my being with her the next – while her old boyfriend remains in the background as “a friend,” while I wonder if he is more than just still a friend to her.

Is suspect this is all an emotion trap, for her and me. She says she loves me, but am I merely a reaction after a fall, a temporary resolution to heart ache she can not resolve in any other way.

I’m confused; I tend to over analyze everything, searching for motivations I am best left in the dark about.

And she is always trying to prove a point, trying to demonstrate that she can be as sexual as the women I knew with the band, and she is, but she switches from one aspect to another, from intellectual to emotional, without warning, sometimes while in the midst of one, she becomes the other.

The switch is always alarming, her gaze changing from something distant and cold to something warm and interested, or the other way. It’s like flipping a switch and she’s suddenly, a completely different person.

The clicks come often and in odd situations, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation, causing deliberate distance between us, as if something I may have objected to (or am obsessed about) do not matter to her, and are so unimportant that she can dismiss them with a blink, a glance or a wave of her hand.

Sometimes she talks passed me, her words like water in a river that continues over and around a tree that has fallen in their path, and my words lost, unimportant, maybe even uninformed, swallowed up in the volume (loudness and amount) so that I get lost, too, and I am made to feel stupid and ignorant, when I am not the first, but generally always the second, but need to grasp onto something solid so that I might learn.

I do think myself too important at times, but at other times, I have valid points to make and these wash away in the rippling waves of this river as if they do not exist, while I struggle, and perhaps foolishly indeed, try to build a dam to resist.

Having thus defined the problem, what is the solution?