If a cow ever got the chance...

Sometimes even now I think it can still work out. In bed with him under flannel sheets and feather comforters, in the thin light of early morning with the October breeze through the open windows and the radiator banging uselessly, his skin is warmer to the touch than anyone's I've known. But there's more to it than that. You can't lie in bed with someone, keeping the world locked outside, for the rest of your life. (Although for years and years I thought that's exactly what a relationship was meant to do, and what a good one did. Which I didn't realize until recently is a pretty fucked-up thing to believe, and which is probably how I got into this.)

When I graduated from high school I swore never to return in any meaningful way, except to visit my family and the one friend I cared about. I would never go to reunions or even respond to the Five-Year Committee's periodic requests for names of spouse, children, etc. The only thing I would do would be to update my address in the reunion booklet--not because I thought people would be writing me, and not because I would write back if they did--just so they could see from the city name that I had Made It in the larger world. That I wasn't living in Pardeeville Wisconsin and working at the Cenex station, killing time, kids named Madison and Tyler and shopping at the Fox Valley outlet mall.

With all this hubris and pomposity, it's perhaps not surprising that I ran right out and settled down with someone who could have gone to my high school. Yes, smarter--and yes, good-hearted--but I think I was fooled by his pretty color into believing he was different. This anti-intellectual strain in him (and in his friends and in his family) is something I should have recognized. Not that I have a Ph.D. in anything or even a 3.5 GPA, back when, but deep down I still think I'm a brilliant supergenius if I would only make something of myself and stop being so fucking lazy. So I don't want to still be standing around while his cousin talks about "college kids" and how they think they know everything and are therefore hard to manage. Or while he talks back to the TV (and in other contexts, the movie screen) while watching Saturday morning cartoons. Or is considered by his friends and family (and believes them) to be a bookworm because he reads Stephen King and books about bartending. I'm no supergenius--my bookshelf contains about 55 percent crap and someone was recently made disdainful by my admission that I hadn't even read everything on it--but at least I know this and am trying to work with what I have and do better and learn more, rather than sitting back and letting myself be congratulated.

Although if you want to congratulate me, I will admit that my syntax is flawless.

I still love him, very much. Trying to square this fact with everything else.

Saw Kill Bill. It was pretty good.

<<|>>

You might have missed...

wah - 2005-03-14 - 9:24 a.m.

Let's review - 2005-03-07 - 7:29 p.m.

- - 2005-03-02 - 1:07 a.m.

yay? - 2005-02-16 - 5:53 p.m.

all apologies - 2005-02-15 - 5:56 p.m.