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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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The Demon Who Finally Gets Around to Saying What She Means
Bonus Second Entry: Well, it turned out to be a bit of a lackadaisical New Year's Day. I didn't wake up until just before noon, didn't get my lazy ass out of bed until 1:00, didn't do so much as take a shower or wash my face before leaving the apartment. As I left, I ran into the Demon Who Always Does the Right Thing. She was sitting outside with the Landlady, both of them enjoying the tiniest bit of New Year's Day sunshine. Oliver the Dog was out, barking and whining at a new neighbor dog, and he ran over to be pet for a bit. We sat and chatted, my Demon friend showing us the ring her girlfriend gave her for Christmas and some pictures she took over the holidays. Then the Landlady took Oliver and went off and the Demon friend and I chatted for a bit longer. I told her about the Divine Sushi Chef, about wanting to return to see him and maybe, you know, hit on the poor guy, and she said that she wanted to go see him too. She said we could take her new girlfriend along with us. I said, "Oh, great, so one night I come in with my gay ex-husband, and the next night I come in with my lesbian friends?" She laughed and said earnestly, "We can act straight!" I said, "Demon, you and your girlfriend are constitutionally unable to act straight." And she cracked up, starting to mime acting straight, which apparently involves some kind of ramrod posture, a prim face complete with tight lips, and a purse carried over one shoulder. (I love it when one demon imitates another, the Demon Who Always Does The Right Thing playing at being the Demon Who Feigns Being Straight was just the funniest thing I'd seen all day.) We talked for a bit more about what we wanted the new year to bring, and then it was time to go and collect Max. Max and I came to his office to do a bit of surfing and then, exhausted from that, headed off for a Vietnamese lunch. I had mussels and he had vegetarian pho. At one point, Max was quiet, so I asked him what he was thinking. He said, "I was thinking you're eating so much seafood these days because you are going to be living by the ocean within a year." I was so surprised by this statement that I asked him to repeat it, and he did. It was strange, but reminded me of having gotten the same fortune at two different times in two different restaurants from two different fortune cookies, two different slips of paper that I carry in my wallet, each one saying the same thing: "Know the right moment." We finished our lunch and as we paid the bill, the woman at the counter asked in very bad English about whether I had enjoyed my mussels. I said I had enjoyed them very much and she made some comment about how she liked to see me trying new things. This was also a relatively strange statement, as she has seen me in the restaurant before, but has never spoken to me. We decided to do a bit of shopping so we went down to Ye Olde Navie, where I wandered for a bit and found nothing even remotely wearable. Max wanted to go to B'n'N, but it wasn't in the cards. We drove all the way over there and then I didn't feel like browsing a bookstore, so we drove around a bit. We stopped by the studio, but Martin was there, so we didn't go in. Instead, we went back to my place and then came here, back to Max's office to do some more net surfing. Now Max is on the phone with his mother, and I am writing out this too, too boring second entry. However, I will say that I have noticed Magdalene's absence from this diary. By that I mean that she has left off the daily checking for signs or mention of herself here. [Updated to add: I am apparently the Demon Who Speaks Too Soon, because as soon as I finished writing this, there she showed up on the stats page.] I was a bit worried after the whole Magdalene-Matthew-Sublingua happening that I wasn't going to be able to work things out with her. I wasn't terribly interested, I don't think, in having the kind of relationship that she wanted to have: I think at some level that she wanted to be romantically involved with me (I'm not imagining this, she said as much in one of her diary entries), but, as attracted as I am/was to her, I realized that I was not interested in a romantic relationship with someone who already has a partner, however liberal the relationship between them. I wasn't sure I could deal with a friendship that included this also, and, as I hesitated, not knowing how to respond to her overtures, she got bored and disengaged. I suppose I am thankful for this on some level. I'd love to be her friend, but I don't want to get tangled up with someone who is already involved with someone else. Though I am interested in pursuing relationships with other women, I am not interested in pursuing relationships of that nature. Not my style. I'll likely run into both her and Matthew next semester at some point. I would have liked to have been friends with them, difficult though it may have been. Anyway, the brain has spent a lot of time trying to disentangle the heart from the situation, and I don't know that I want, after all that work, to go ahead and fling the heart back into the briar patch--even if it has been some monkey's paw-like means of escape for me in the past. I won't lie and say that I don't miss Matthew's friendship. I do. But it wasn't as though, over the last semester, it was very rewarding. He was as rejecting of me as he could be without being outright rude, and I suppose I can see my way to being grateful to him for this because it allowed me to I see him and his friendship for what it was--not a mutual attraction, but perhaps only a kind of mutual distraction, and I know now that he never would or could have gotten close enough to make it a rewarding friendship for either of us. I did want to be a friend to him and likely pushed at this too hard, but it was an honest mistake. And anyway, I see now that though a lot of it was personal (he didn't like me terribly much, just wanted, as I said, some new bit of distraction and, once it stopped being new, once it became problematic, he was willing to drop me without hesitation), a lot of it wasn't personal (he doesn't want to get close to anyone at all and it doesn't matter whether it's me or anyone else on the planet). But I am grateful. I am grateful that I have the maturity to see this as clearly as I do. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to go through it, despite its having often been difficult and hurtful. There were good things that came out of it too, and I am also grateful for those things. I am grateful that I was able to feel as much of it as I did, able to understand it even in such a limited way. So be grateful, Sublingua. Be grateful that this new year offers you new possibilities. Be grateful that you know in your heart that you are capable of moving on. Be grateful that you have other friends who love you and care about you and who are not afraid of accepting you and getting close to you. Be grateful that you are able to accept them and be grateful that you are able to touch and be touched and to recognize this as the healing force that it is. Be grateful that you are capable of gratitude. Be grateful, Sublingua. That is why you are here.
More lies:
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