Once Upon A Time

[disclaimer of sorts: a wave of melancholy seems to have swept over me and many of my closest friends. it happens. and so this post has strayed a bit from my norm. apologies, if necessary.]


once upon a time a lunatic e-slut ran headlong into her greatest male foil and fell completely in love with him, which was altogether useless except that it allowed her to fancy herself a poet for like a whole month.

newly separated and very lonely, our e-slut took solace in the internet...finding it the only viable approach to the single's market (given that she was living and working alone in the suburbs in a big house she was trying to sell -- she wasn't exactly getting out much, you know?).

and so she e-met a man whom she thought was everything she wasn't (yet) and thusly perfect: he was deliberate. he knew what he wanted and worked to make it happen. he was well put together, well travelled, well cultured, well read. he was tall and strong and handsome. he was the opposite, if ever there was one, of being a crazy single cat lady.

but as these things (and men) go, he did not quite return her idealized version of their compatibility. he certainly found her charming and amusing, but also recognized the folly in the idea of their actually dating ("we would kill each other"), and also allowed small matters such as their not living in even the same time zone get in the way of the possibility of romance.

instead, he made room for a creative definition of what would be their enduring friendship.

and as they remain friends today, years and engagements and even a marriage later, so shall the friendship forever provide fodder for her wistfulness...

...and very bad poetry.


(i apologize again for the "poetry"/prose below; however, as always, i felt the need to share. this was written about three weeks into our 'relationship' and way before we ever met in person.)

*****

August, 2001

There is something in him about love that seems displaced. He identifies the emotional variable but won’t compute it, and it vanishes from his equations while he calculates. He does not know this.

He came to her in a straight path. He was neither transfixed nor confused. He would give some, and lose nothing, because that is how it could be with her.

She’s making a lot of assumptions; she doesn’t know him at all.

He gave her a story, but not the one he thought. She thought she would learn of him, but he remained as much a stranger as ever.

Once, she controlled all the elements, was the conductor of a cacophonous orchestra, the theater of the absurd. She could tell him about that, she thought, but she’d rather let it go.

Sometimes she says his name aloud hoping that he will become real.

He called theirs a post-modern relationship, which she liked except for the implied detachment. There was, of course, detachment, but that was the thing she wanted least. The more deconstructive their conversations became, the closer she felt to him, and the intrinsic irony left her feeling somewhat helpless. Meanwhile he, enjoying the exchanges, grew more comfortable with their definition.

He spoke of order above all else in a way that she could understand but could not believe. He had made sense of things he’d had to, until everything had to. That is what he had learned. The best way not to break things is not to play with them.

She hated that he was sure of the sense of things. She did things in a way that made them grand.

He would be many grand things to her.

It could be like this.




Who was the spider? The web is so fragile as it is spun, so unnoticeable a passing human fingertip destroys the work unknowingly. The spinning and the spinner remove to another space. The quietest corner receives the shimmering construction, full of cycles and holes and intricacies, all frighteningly delicate and soft. What do we trap?

Come with me into the corner, she asks him, and 'round we’ll go.