Well, here we were, in some deeper realm of analytic thought, concerning ourself with mathematical stimulus, trying to prove the existence of heaven. That’s what everybody would like to do, I think, but most people can’t understand anything but love for one another; if told them that math is love they’d say it’s over their heads—as if they didn’t want to think about going to heaven, even if it meant, in thinking about it, you increased your chances of getting there. I’ll be a doctor one day, but this came from someone else, someone I knew only a little, from the church, and, once or twice, his appearance, along with two missionaries, at our dinner table. The root of that—the person I thought of after I overheard that, was Ursula—I wondered, even, if she said it. What was she doing? “Did you say that?”
She immediately said no, she didn’t. Then, on the other hand, she said, well, I might’ve said it. That almost certainly meant that she did, and she was ashamed or worried about what I might think? What was she thinking? Was she telling me that, well, John, you’ll write classical music, one day? Or was she saying, instead, well, John, you’ll find love one day? Meaning that she’d arrived at the conclusion that we would never be together, and, that, well, I might never find a partner, since, by nature, I was meant for solitude? But then I got the impression—i went back to the idea—that I’d actually overheard it, and she was thinking, without wanting to tell me as much, that she felt that way about her partner, right now. She said, before I’d even finished typing it, that, indeed, that was the case. She, I guess, was going through relationship withdrawals, the kind that come from getting real with yourself, and saying that, yes, i will be lonely, and yes, I might never get another chance, but yes, this person is no longer going in the direction i want to go.
At least i don’t have a kid. But then she said, i didn’t say that! and, i don’t know, maybe she didn’t. But she might’ve been thinking it, and, then again, she might not have been thinking it, since she, no matter how good she looked, might find that, no, she’ll never find the right person. Did she think, like I did, that she’d find another in the afterlife? I wondered about that, of course, with respect to myself, and my conclusion had been that, no matter how nice it might’ve been, I wasn’t meant to be with one person. I was meant to visit with people, and have visitors, but as for choosing to go with someone else—well, I was too interesting to do that. I needed to live a life that—i guess—didn’t involve reshaping myself to fit someone’s idea of happiness.
The very idea of happiness, for most people, is flawed. They want security at the expense of love, but I, as it happens, feel insecure when I am with someone that I am not in love with; i need to avoid love altogether, or be in love, which is not the same thing as saying that I would love someone—and I would love them even when I was lonely—i don’t even know how that’s possible. People get lonely inside of marriages, too—they get lonely because they are inside a marriage, but they imagine that they’d be even lonelier if they were on their own—maybe they’d be right, since most people won’t live for themselves—they need to live for someone else in such a way that living for someone else excuses the way that they treat themselves when, in the long run, it should be clear: you’ve given up on being in love because it’s easier to not even try—to conclude, at every angle, that we’re forgiven, when, as the case may be, you’re slowing killing yourself.
You’re not even meant to have visitors, and maybe she was right, in some sense, but, in another, she was way off: if I didn’t have a partner, then, because I’d wind up spending so much time alone, I, on the contrary, needed human contact, i.e., friends, also known as visitors, since I don’t like to leave the house unless I can do it without driving—and, even then, I find myself grateful for the people that are in my life, but, also, I’m subject to unwelcome thoughts that would insist i get back to my work—since, in point of fact, I have nothing to learn from most people unless we share something genuine in common, such as the desire to have sex, or, more generally, the chance to talk about myself, the chance to have a serious conversation, one that gets at the heart of what I do every day—not what I would do every day, if, to have friends, that meant changing my lifestyle to fit in.
Happily, Ursula took all this in stride; she saw this as a challenge—to remain in love with someone, one person that continually changes, too, and, as such, comes with something new to share, and do, that we can learn from. So I should say this: I suspect that I can never be with someone indefinitely, because, as it happens, I’d get bored, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t someone out there that wouldn’t make me bored; I’m posing the thought that most people don’t want to think about: if you are with someone, and you are not in love, then, I have to ask, do you really exist? You might say—well, do we exist when we are not with someone—and the answer is, yes, you entertain yourself without subjecting yourself to a path that bores you, and you rely on your family, and your visitors, to share that experience with. You redefine space and time that way, in a way that shapes itself around your natural way of thinking.