What the doctor should have meant: dishery.diaryland.com

I said this on the phone this morning to Karen, and I�ll say it here too. Yes, I am not entirely comfortable with the fact that this go-round of Time Between Dudes can be measured in hours that only reach into the double digits. I�m choosy � I use that particular word in homage to Isabelle Huppert in "Amateur," where her line reading that incorporates it is so wonderful � and usually after things blow apart with Marco X, it takes me a long time to chase down the disparate parts of myself that were either unraveling previously or got lost in the detonation and then to glom them back together into something resembling a satisfactorily adjusted adult-type person who can again consider herself emotionally capable of a romantic embroilment. It�s probably an average of a year between fellas I am serious about, and that is what I was thinking about when on the Cha Cha night I was telling Vanessa about the vast desert of loneliness. (Karen cracked up when I told her that part, and I have to confess that I do too, almost every time the phrase or the memory of my coining it crosses my mind.) In the past I�ve been pretty much immune to the rebound qua rebound. So as much as things are starting to feel regular and normal, especially in the way I wrote about yesterday, I remain aware of the abnormality that is inherent to them. There is nothing I can do about this and it is just a fact, that�s my story and I am sticking to it. Have you ever been exposed to a bad flu, though, say, maybe your girlfriend or boyfriend has it or everyone in your office, and even though you feel healthy and tough, every so often, maybe almost constantly, there is a part of yourself that is asking another part of yourself, So, so? How are we doing? We OK so far? Not impatiently, just solicitously and with care: testing, testing. That is what I am doing with respect to, you know, Steve in general and the uncharacteristic though statistical possibility of a rebound in boyfriend�s clothing. (Update: I still have not said the word out loud.) On the Wednesday night of the looming pedestalization, for instance, the part that asks was asking me did I think this was dealbreakingly bad, how bad was it, is this a warning sign, a yellow light, a red flag� and I offer this testimony partly to reassure you that I�m being good and unstupid, not just throwing myself into something headlong, but also partly to raise another question, which is at what point the ostensibly self-shoring-up interrogation becomes incapacitating and the testing-testing tenor of one�s engagement with the issue being tested necessarily induces a corresponding clinicality in one�s response to it? That is what I wonder. Carpe diem vs. the good old desinas ineptire. I don�t know.

What I do know: it looks bad. If I were one of Todd�s friends who�d heard the full spectrum of bullshit about me and my lack of love and morals and then I saw me out with a new Mr. Man before the body was cold, I would make certain not-unreasonable assumptions, and I would harden my heart towards me for good. I�d think: That bitch. Then again, only now that it�s over, I can let myself see the evidence that perhaps for Todd the heart was hardened and the body had cooled long before those things happened to me. I don�t know about that either; in addition to being a waste of my energy I think it�s also unfair of me to approach those kinds of assumptions about his state of mind. Thou shalt not talk trash about thine exes, I really believe that. But, OK, getting back to the evidentiary perspective, the facts don�t lie of the composition of Todd.doc, and everything I was saying in it being heart-ripping-outly true, and then not two weeks afterwards there I am in some other guy�s bed sleeping the sleep of the just, and when I was driving down the highway with Vanessa in the car last weekend we looked up at the Amazon building and marveled at how quickly a year can seem to recede, how flat some dreams are when recollected from a state of full vivid consciousness. How does that happen? How is that even possible? And no matter how often I apply the testing prod to myself as if hoping that eventually I�ll crack under the pressure, the answer is always the same: it just does, it just is. And although the *sense* of certainty is reassuring, my science-seeking, methodical, analytical brain does not like those answers at all. It craves the disinfecting vapor of logic and demands to know who�s been lighting vanilla-scented candles around here instead. So I have no for-sure answers here and have to go on gut: I think that how it can happen and how it is possible has directly to do with how, with Todd, I went all the way to the end. I said I wouldn�t give up, and I didn�t, I threw in the towel only when it could not have absorbed another drop. My integrity in this matter is unassailable, and nobody gets to tell me otherwise. In fact I decree my conduct in general on the long-slow-breakup-with-Todd tip to have been exemplary. I did it, I lived it, it�s done. Regrets? Maybe, some. Doubts? Not at all, and this is why I think I can I am the car and I am the driver so speedily away from the scene of that wreck and on towards wherever it is I�m going. And in a way it�s the same sort of thing that made it possible for me to have seen, for an instant on Wednesday night, that if Steve should ever turn a Todd and decide finally to cast me as Girl On Pedestal of whom he is some kind of unworthy, then that would make me disappointed, and sad, but I would get over it, and it would not be the end of my world. Myself and my experience, and its integrity, would be undiminished. I can�t tell you how badass I felt to realize that. I wrote about ballast last time, and I am also thinking of the priest and the marrow, of inoculation, how maybe it�s better, going forward and on-towards, if in the glorious gloopy honeyed mouthful of the beginning of something there is the tiniest infusion of the end. Kind of like in the grammatical sense, where every statement contains the possibility of its opposite, and to recognize this is the opposite of fatalism. So I�m wondering about that too.

Also I�m wondering how awkward and ha-I-was-right-about-you-you-bitch hatey the vibe is going to be when the cold body and the warm one happen to come into social contact with each other, what meteorological phenomenon is the likely outcome. I had thought I might find this out at the Long Winters tonight, but Steve has to stay in and work on a project, and the more I think about it the more I believe that even if he wants to go and doesn�t have other plans, Todd has the decency to accord me that band for myself, at least for a few months, as part of the divorce settlement. In return I offer him both the Lawnmowers and the Dear John Letters. Isn�t that big of me? See, we are mature adults here, it will all be fine. Did I mention that one of the women he�s dating lives two blocks down the street from Steve? Ha! That�s comedy, folks. And I wonder whether Steve will ever read my diary. I think that was another part of my reticence about writing in it last week, because I was trying to get past the point at which the containment of that possibility would have left a bad taste in my writing, where I would have not exactly censored myself but been writing to the Maybe. It�s interesting to me how I forget for a few entries at a time that this new diary is supposed to be open to anyone who happens to find it and unjudging of them for having looked. Maintaining this, and not being chicken of it, is more of a discipline than I thought it would be, but I breathe in the scent of vanilla and I wrap my lips around the slight bitterness, because the same way I believe in and have seen my essential integrity, I know it is good for me, it makes me not better but more of what I already am. And let�s be clear: this is not martyrdom. On the contrary, this is the practice of religion.

I like him a lot. Who knows what will happen, but I�m OK, I�m good. I�ll say the b-word out loud when I am ready to, and if in the meantime this feels to him like I�m muzzling him from saying his words, I know he knows it�s only temporary. Life is settling down, nicely, nicely. The car, the driver, the difference between wanting and needing, the possibility of all opposites, the treasures that this time I am choosing to protect against mockery � against anything, really. The nouns. I will say no more.

Here was my mom�s joke, after I�d breezily referenced the bacon shack in e-mail to her and then had to clarify just what it was I was talking about: "Sounds more like the pork shack to me!" Thank you, she�ll be here all week. Me, I�ll be gone all weekend, and although the reason I was originally fighting so hard to get the laptop here by then was because of an idea I had about much much diary writing, now I�m not sure, now I�d maybe like to write some letters and get my head around some other things, and I doubt I�ll be back in this space until early next week. Until then.