hey, i scheduled this meeting to make sure i get my medications what was she saying? that she should be enough to make me happy and healthy? that she wanted me to stop taking my medications? To get at the real me—or something like that (this is the real me, but anyhow) what was she thinking? did she mean that our appointments were, for her, like medication is for me? To think that would indicate a problem, since there is no human being that can help me avoid the unpleasant thoughts i had when I wasn’t taking my medication; it doesn’t mean i can’t love somebody, though. you can love me she was playing around with me! I get it—i told her that i couldn’t love her until we got to the stuff that people talk about when they aren’t talking about the meaning of our existence, or the cruelty that comes with getting old and dying.
“very funny, Ursula,” I said. i’d managed, at times, now, to integrate an amplitude change in my counting signature, so that was progress, and I think it boiled down to this banter that Ursula was able to establish just now. she was going to prove to me that she loved me—that we could love each other. are you going for the hat trick “very clever, but let me think about what you mean by that,” did she mean, “are you going to try and have sex with me with a condom?” Or did she mean that we might know each other well enough by the time we got to it that we could skip that step and get straight to gambling with the directions our lives might take? Condoms don’t make a lot of sense to me, since I don’t sleep with a lot of people—they’re kind of like an abortion—they raise a barrier, they manifest as doubt about the relationship, they’re counterproductive; in short, if you don’t sleep around, then, in my world, it might be a bad idea to use them.
do you like to snuggle? now, i know that was a joke, because anybody that was interested in a sexual relationship with a mostly solitary man would know better than to say something like that. it was nice, sometimes, to synchronize heartbeats and body temperatures to channel a telepathic line of reasoning, but to “snuggle?” like you would a teddy bear when you were a little kid and you might or might not have thought that stuffed animal was the solution to all your problems—that you didn’t have to work at anything anymore; that you could let yourself go because you’d now secured the right person? Love is tricky—it’s not a game, but to play along requires you to hold opposing thoughts in your mind at the same time: on the one hand you’re thinking: “am i being intimate enough—can we sense where we are with respect to where we want to go?” On the other hand you might be thinking, “I’m in a good place right now, and I don’t want you to occupy my space right now—you need to occupy your own space, so that, when we come together, you have something new to share.”
but she knew better—she was kidding me, and she seemed, so far, to be pretty good at it. you need your own space? so, what am i? an ex already? now she was trying to irritate me—i guess she wanted to test my limits, like kids do with their parents. i guess, now, it was my turn to share something lighthearted and joyous. to do that i stopped intoning Ursula’s voice and used my voice for both the consonants and the vowels. “you think this is funny,” i said, (in my usual dry way) “but i don’t break up with people—they break up with me”. now, like all dry wit, it’s usually over fifty percent true—and, in this case, it was about ninety percent true—but i didn’t tell her that—except, well, I just did tell her that. Hence the irony.
i think she found that hard to believe, which is why, as banter, it worked—so i guessed right, she hadn’t realized or had already come to terms with the fact that relationships make me crazy—although i’ve yet to try one both medicated and sober, so I really have no idea what i’ll be like. I told her that, then, to whet her appetite—she was the hungry type, and by hungry i don’t mean she starves herself. “On the contrary I think you’re driven, like me—for some people, that’s not what they want, they want to be the most important thing in your life, but some things don’t compare.” I switched back, then, to my usual mode, with Ursula pronouncing the vowels of my counting mechanism. She might not have thought anything i said was funny, and, well, even when I’m joking, it’s not entirely meant to be funny—it’s supposed to bring up closer together. i know that—i prefer serious conversation, too—you’re just seeing me woo you.
then it occurred to me: instead of just using my voice when i’m trying to think of something to say on my end of the conversation, i should just invert what I was doing when she was talking to me—that is to say I should use her voice to pronounce the consonants and my voice to pronounce the vowels—that would be more difficult, and, because of that, i suspected the conversation would be more playful or more serious, one or the other. I think she had a playful side when she was nervous, but overall, I think she wanted to discuss real things that affected us in real time. Anyhow I’m trying that right now and I’ll tell you what I think of. this is what i thought of—and I don’t know what it means: “you’re a ghost! you’ll escape!” then i switched back. “are you afraid of me?” she asked. i was afraid of myself, and failure, and impotence—but I wasn’t afraid of her. So I told her that, “yes, I am.” that’s crazy! you’re like a puppet how am i like a puppet? so i asked her, and she said that I was going to have to wear a sock—which i thought was her way of half-joking and half-seriously saying that i was going to have to wear a condom (a sock). But she wasn’t saying that.
Or maybe she was! maybe she had reservations about sleeping with a queer man—maybe she didn’t trust me to be faithful to her—maybe she thought I needed men like I needed women, and I wouldn’t be able to remain monogamous—but we knew each other better than that, buy now. I’d already told her—or had I? that I haven’t been with very many people—and I probably never will, since that kind of thing takes time, and time, for me, is meant to be spent engaging the universe on all it’s various levels. Not trying to have my cake and eat it, too. I’d experienced something like that once—you’re in a sexual relationship, and her girlfriends are around, so you want to sleep with one or two of them, maybe to get them pregnant, i don’t know, but the mere presence of those friends on a regular basis seemed to indicate that my relationship was flawed. I didn’t have time to hang out all the time—i needed to sleep, to get ready for work, and to work on my projects, which got overlooked, which was bound to, and did, cause a heap-load of problems.