the power hadn’t gone off yet—but I was in for another 20 hours of danger. it was cold—getting outside to paint was going to take a little burst of will-power, but doing a painting was a priority. How else was i going to spend my time? Since, as it happens, i finished the first section of my physics paper yesterday, and I wasn’t working on it for the usual three hours or so. you almost forgot about me. yeah—so i started writing without going through all my passwords; i guess i was feeling inspired by her telepathic email—the little bits and pieces of her day that, when summed, describe a wonderful aspect of reality. You’re going to try and control me, now? I didn’t know where that was coming from—i might’ve characteristically been a little controlling, but I learned a long time ago that i can’t control people—they aren’t going to let me tick a little box.
so i think i might’ve overheard her thinking about a conversation she’d had with her boyfriend, who, after over ten years together, you might wonder how he could be controlling someone as willful as Ursula. but, no, she was talking about him—she admitted it when i posed the question. But I wondered—was that Ursula on the line locally, or was that something she’d said in the past—something that she was sharing (whether she knew it or not) in email form? I guess she was saying that i had better not be controlling because that was a problem. He’d promised not to be, when she was traveling the country giving speeches with her mentor; he’d promised to do better. But I don’t know why she said, “now.” You’re going to try and control me, now—as if she’d already gone through that with him in the past, and, by now, she meant me, after she’d let on about him.
Anyhow, if you feel the need to overstep—to control your partner—then your partner doesn’t love you as much as you love them – if, that is, what you’re doing can qualify as a function of love. It’s more likely that, while you may be in love, the real you is wrestling with that person, trying to get out—and that person is not necessarily a fit with this person that you love—or think you love. The question becomes: Did Ursula’s partner love Ursula in the way that she wanted to be loved – or did he go all in because he was afraid of being alone, or in pain? Did he think, this is it? This is my chance? And, well, he might’ve been right to second guess himself, because once you leave the college life you don’t meet a lot of people anymore. You’re chances of raising a family drop dramatically.
Which might be why they got back together. Yes, that’s what happened. Anyhow—i was creating this narrative around Ursula’s life, and it occurred to me that she might try to destroy me if she ever read it: i know she was super-protective of her man. She might even find my analysis of her relationship to be “creepy,” unless, of course, she was somehow aware of the fact that she was in love with someone else—someone that she confided in on a regular basis. But here’s the thing: if that was the case, and she didn’t understand how I was able to read her thoughts (she was just thinking them and feeling happy) then she really might lash out at me. I don’t know if she could ruin me, but I didn’t want to take that chance – so i tried to be truthful because that was the only way that any of this was going to work. The minute I tried to “back down,” was the minute that she got angry, not realizing, perhaps, that, all this time, she was talking to me. A “creep?”
Ok, so it’s time for my reality check. I’ve had trouble getting an erection all my life—especially after starting my medication; i interpreted that to mean that there was a big part of myself that was suppressed. Now, granted, we want the medication to regulate or suppress the part of me that can’t control what I think and believe. That’s important. But this math person that I’d been becoming over the last several years, was still waking up inside—this person played a dominant role in my life, now, and it was my job to keep going, to integrate this man as much as possible. I sensed that, once my full intelligence and talents were out of the closet, then, and only then, would I be like I imagined I should be—a fourteen year old discovering the opposite sex—a person that didn’t already know that any possibility of a family of my own was trumped by my mission to become the greatest artist that ever lived.