i’m not going to absolve you of this she spoke! She’d just previously said, to kick things off, go back to normal. But the person I was in the present was my normal, and i think she knew that, so I guess she was making a joke. Part of the problem with dry wit is that you get tricked by other people with dry wit—you tend to take them seriously, at least a little, at first. here in the nether regions of Antarctica another joke, if i interpreted her correctly, that i existed in some harsh and remote place—and that it didn’t have to be that way. you bet your life but my life was Ursula—she was what kept me pursuing all these wild telepathic ideas; it was great to have someone I could talk to. talk too? do you mean me? more jokes. what was i going to do; her sense of humor involved beating up on me a little—it think it was fun for her—she was playing, like a little kid.
“You want to know what’s going on in Russia?” No, i want to know what’s going on here, your home. so i told her i’d done something neat in physics by matching a couple numbers that allowed me to describe both the muon and the tau particle at the same time—but she didn’t know what the muon or the tau particle is—and I didn’t want to bore her, at least not at this stage of our relationship—ok, for real, i don’t want to bore you at all, and i know what you’re going to say, you’ll tell me if you’re bored, right, except I don’t think that you will, because, when it comes down to it, you want me to be myself with you—you want me to open up to you; yeah, you want me to be what you expect when i do, and, because of that, opening up often means getting dumped before someone’s invested enough in you, so i just told her: a muon and a tau particle are the heavier and the heavier version of an electron—a trio called leptons. I’d been trying to explain the two as functions of an electron’s mass using a pattern that involved exponential decay. that’s enough for now, but, over time, i’ll want to know more that sounded perfect for me, actually, because she wanted to invest more in me. That was what mattered.
You have me now so what else was going on, “here, at home?” (I can’t afford to live in New York City—i couldn’t afford a big enough apartment (we couldn’t afford a big enough apartment, a place where i could store my paintings and a room that I could use to paint) well, i’d just posted a reel showing my painting on Facebook and it was getting a good response, i’d written a modest poem—a portion of a single book-length poem, which was moving right along, and what else? that was it, other than the fact that it was becoming easier to switch voices and, in so doing, talk to Ursula, which was a big deal to me, even if i acted like it wasn’t. But she knew that—she just couldn’t believe it.
Now my more obnoxious self might’ve said that she was cheating on me with her boyfriend, but I didn’t want to get into that; after all, if I had someone I settled with, what was keeping me from intoning their voice, thinking, all this while, that they were the source of my conversations, when, in fact, it was always Ursula on the other end? But I wasn’t going to be obnoxious, even if I was managing on my own because someone right enough never stepped into my life. No, i was going to be smart about it—i was going to give her the benefit of the doubt, while bearing in mind that, as our conversations became more intimate, and she remained in a relationship with someone other than me, then my hopes could be misplaced, and she might not have been the person that I thought she was—but she was that person. I don’t think I was wrong about that. She was invested in her boyfriend of i don’t know how many years, and an extremely tenuous and short-lived relationship couldn’t compete with that, no matter how interesting she thought i was.
I’m hanging on hanging tough, i guess. she was indulging me and I also thought she was indulging herself—allowing herself to grow into the person that she was meant to be, and, in so doing, investing in me. Now, you only have so much you can invest, and, although she was indulging us, after a while that would turn to something more and more real, and, if I was right, she’d be forced to reinvest some of the weight that her boyfriend represented into me. Eventually she’d be single—and my idea that she was the right person for me would be given a reserved vote of confidence—a cautious vote of confidence. well, that’s the worst of it meaning, i think, that i’d seen her at her worst, stringing one or all of us along, unable to make a decision.