do you think you can keep up with me? Well, no, actually, I don’t think I can; but that doesn’t mean i won’t try, and, if I can’t, i promise I won’t hold you back. Ursula had this way of asking questions that she thought you might want to ask her; so she tricked me, a little. My answer might’ve made her think that I wouldn’t wait for her; that I’d go on changing in some other direction without filling her in. But i wouldn’t do that—and I was waiting for her right now, as she must’ve known, so I think she was being a little insecure. A little insecurity is endearing; it’s as if people want to trust you, as if they believe in you. But a lot of insecurity made the equations too heavy—there had to be a better way, and, often enough, there was. But I knew that Ursula was only a little insecure—she couldn’t be the rising star that she is without having loads of confidence.
But, as in any relationship, there’s tension. That tension is usually taken care of when you have sex; but sometimes the tension only grows, and it has to come to a head. That’s when arguments ensue; i was prepared to share an argument, because, as it happens, I wasn’t prepared to have sex. I didn’t want to put myself in that position until a baby wouldn’t lead to a suicidal baby—one that goes unloved, or, even just thinks that it it’s unloved (since the parents don’t agree). But—and here’s the kicker; if I got off risperidone, and my confidence improved, and i met someone young enough to get pregnant, then, well, my attitude toward sex might change. After all, if you can, and you feel like it, you might want to roll with that—you might feel like that for a reason.
But those were a lot of ifs, and, although Ursula fit the bill, I was balding a little, and, I’m afraid, a lot of people don’t trust me. They wonder what I have going on here, that keeps me from them and to myself. They must think I’ll write bad things about them or defame them in some way—since, clearly, I spend most of my time alone, save for my audience, which does include friendship, but, well, it’s not anybody that could drive me to and from a colonoscopy. A colonoscopy? There had to be something that we could do about that—a substitute means of detecting cancer—that wouldn’t be so miserable and compromising. I was getting close to needing one, I guess, but I hoped we could stick with stool samples for as long as possible, and I hoped, too, of course, that advances in cancer treatment would make such an invasive procedure obsolete.
are you tuning it? Indeed, i was reaching my center, a quiet place, more so than I had of late. i thought you abandoned me but the reality was that my perspective had shifted now that I was making songs—and I’d discovered a voice that sounded a little different than the one I’d imagined. “that might slow things down a little, at first, but in the long run it should make things better.” but, yeah, i was slipping a little when it came to incorporating her. was I losing her? I’d broken off contact, recently, with a girl i dated long distance wise—no sex, we just talked on the phone a lot; i used to send her pictures of my daily paintings. But she said she’d come visit in a month and after a month she’d said nothing about it—and, furthermore, she never really tried to be my friend; it seemed, more likely, that she was just acknowledging all my stuff because she felt sorry for me—it was very rare for her to say something otherwise that would indicate the relationship was more than one sided. To top things off—well, i put up with a lot; everything from being shamed because of my sexuality to being shamed because of my schizophrenia, my “disease,” as she called it.
So she bit the dust—our only contact, now would be on Facebook—the occasional like, and, maybe, if I felt like it, a comment. That should soften any thought that she might have that she had, in fact, hurt my feelings. She’d only hurt my feelings after she ignored me and I was forced to break up with her—since I don’t deal with people that ignore me anymore—people that avoid discomfort when there’s a disagreement—people that probably want to break up with you, or are at least thinking about it, until they get dumped first, if, that is, you’re like me, and you won’t let yourself be treated that way. She was friends with my old art teacher—who, after a while, i realized that I didn’t even like, and, honestly, it was nice to talk to somebody, but, deep down, i don’t think this “ex” was “woke.” She clearly had problems with keeping her word and not being “off-put” when she discovered I wrote about homosexuals.
She was a wreck and she didn’t look after herself—going to a doctor, for example, to get the medication she needed. but enough of that—what exactly was happening here? Why was i even talking about this unless it was for Ursula’s benefit? That’s when I realized that she must have asked me a question—or I’d volunteered the information because i thought she might want to know—1 relationship over a period of 22 years, not counting the occasional “date” with the only guy that I knew that i could test out my sexuality with. Turns out I don’t like that person, either—granted, he may have a reason not to like me (I used racist language when having sex with him) but I did apologize and we saw each other after that; and yet, I suspect, he’d talked to his psychiatrist about me and asked himself why he accepted my apology. He wasn’t on the level, anyhow—he didn’t seem to understand that I was pretty much a bottom; I had no interest in doing anything that required me to have an erection—something we might’ve talked about, if, that is, i was in my right head, and, well, he wasn’t so clueless.
I think Ursula was happy that I was opening up, but I needed to project her voice when I was typing more than I was—I needed, to type in her voice, at least part of the time. This book wasn’t just about writing a book—it was also about pushing into the frontier of telepathic communications. So, what was Ursula going to tell me that would make this affair even? How was she going to balance things out? I wasn’t going to invest, like i’d just done, without a return—she had to give me something, even if it turned out that I was simply more comfortable making conversation about serious things than she was. I lived for serious conversations—not about preaching to the choir, but about dealing with things that might point, between us, in opposite directions. That kind of thing needed to be made clear—if it wasn’t, then, as long as you kept having sex, you were driving each other apart—deep down into the muscles in your back and the fluid in your spine. You’d be using each other for sex, then, and that kind of thing always comes back to bite you in the arse.