Black Coffee: No Sugar, No Cream

I've made it through 81 pages of Rebecca Walker's memoir. My morning commute was productive in that sense. Yesterday I completed Nick Hornby's How To Be Good, which was by turns delightful and frustrating. But it was supposed to be vexing--you are supposed to struggle, along with the central character, while her husband grows a conscience and makes her suffer through his impractical schemes to rid the world of all its social ills.

Sarahbina and Mr. Renaissance are going to the art supply store together today. Remarkably, this fact makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside (two years ago it would have made me feel undermined, blind with jealousy). Two of the people I care most about are doing something together--purely out of convenience--but still, it seems like a nice development. The Sarah-one needs to buy water colours, and Mr. R was going to go anyway... so, voila! Field trip.

When he returned her call last night he still had not replied to my edits of his letter via e-mail. After their conversation about paints and brushes, he asked to speak to me. In the course of this conversation (if it can be called that, given its brevity and my monosyllabic responses), he thanked me for my help, told me he was going to make all the changes I suggested, and would keep me apprised of the fall out. I told him that would be wonderful, that it was a great letter, etc.

I wanted him to e-mail me all this because as sick and twisted as it sounds, I prefer e-mail to actual contact with him. Because e-mail is the theory of a relationship; it is the hope of contact; it is something I can save for the files of my mounting evidence of his belonging with me; it is the buffer that keeps me from having to be my physical self to him. I am eloquent on paper, but I fear something gets lost in the translation of my bodily presence. I get nervous, absent minded, I can seem like a real stick in the mud when confronted with his physicality because I am trying desperately to keep myself in check, not give the appearance of wanting things I'm going to be denied anyway, keep my hands to myself. Whatever.

Earlier this winter I realized that I have a driving need to bring to an abrupt halt any event, relationship, or experience that is making me happy. I cannot be lulled into a false sense of security by bliss, because I have learned that despair is always waiting to blindside me. I spend countless hours trying to divine the method, time, and place devastation is going to occur. I can't relax into sing alongs, quiet moments of killer eye contact, or even pleasant dinner party conversation because I have spent my life listening for dropping shoes, doors slamming shut to me, finding out, by accident, the one piece of information I'll forever wish I didn't know...

But I want to be a real woman to him; I just don't want him to reject, again, that woman.