|
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.) | |||
|
Demons From The Past (That I Had Stored In My Elbow)
I fell this morning and banged up my elbow so I couldn't do the upper body work at the gym today. I tripped and fell and caught myself with my right arm, banging my elbow on the tiled floor, and after the surprise of tripping and falling, I thought first with dismay of my lost Starbucks iced venti Americano, which had burst when it hit the floor. I thought next, I'm hurt. I sat on the floor for a moment, assessing the damage. My right knee had gotten banged up, but only a bit. My right arm was the worst as I had apparently tried to break my fall by breaking my wrist. I failed to break either, but I was not sure for a few seconds that I could move--or that I wanted to move--my wrist. The right side of my hand was scraped and my right little finger was already swelling in an attempt to seal off the damaged part, and my arm ached to the elbow. I felt my wrist, told it to move and it did. I told it to move again so that I could be sure, and it moved again. So I got up, mopped up my lost Americano, and went to the bookstore. I thought I deserved a reward for my near broken-wrist experience, so I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a copy--finally!--of Palanhuik's Fight Club, and also Hemingway's True At First Light, and Bill Bryson's In A Sunburned Country. I was looking for a copy of Francis Kuffel's Passing For Thin, which they didn't have, but which gave me the opportunity to talk to a cute boy who looked remarkably like Ethan, Max's old co-worker, who I once had a tremendous crush on. Ethan. I hadn't thought of Ethan in a long, long time--not since I wrote about finding my journal for the roadtrip I took with x and Max to Los Angeles via Las Vegas, the trip where I cut off all my hair because I thought my heart was dead even though it broke and its contents ran all over the floor when I realized standing in an anonymous hotel room bathroom that x's laugh was Robert's laugh. I had been in crush with Ethan then, and we were on our way to see him in Sunnyvale, where he had taken a job with a software development company. I had met Ethan just before he left, had only seen him in person once, but he and I had logged many, many hours on the phone together (all of them with Max's blessing as Max cared not what I did at that point, having decided that our relationship, however close, was strictly sexless). It got to the point (and this was pre-caller ID) that the phone would ring, and I could say with certainty that it was Ethan. I just always knew when he was calling. At first, we would talk for ten or twenty minutes, then he would ask for Max. Later, Ethan dropped the pretense of Max's being the reason for his calling, and he would talk to me for hours and hours. We sent each other long emails--after Ethan bought me my own email account (this was also pre-free email), and I wrote him long snail mail letters which said nothing at all really, but which didn't say explicitly that I had a huge crush on him. (He had probably figured it out.) At the same time, I was carrying on an extensive email correspondence with Max's boss, who wrote me pages and pages every night after his wife had gone to bed. I took to calling him Papa, after Papa Hemingway, though I don't now remember why I had given him this nickname as he resembled Hemingway not at all, neither in looks nor in demeanor. (I think it just had to do with a discussion we once had about one of Hemingway's books, because I remember sending him a copy of Death In The Afternoon, Hemingway's great work about bullfighting.) After a while, everyone in Max's office started to call him Papa. And I don't know where this entry was going to go, but I know that I'm going to go and have some dessert now. Ethan and Papa. I am grateful for them.
More lies:
|
|||||