I was trying to get Ursula on the line but I kept seeing her picture and thinking: what’s there to write?  She already loves me!  But she wasn’t talking for like 20 minutes as I sat here drinking sparkling water and getting a little buzz off it.  I kept listening for some still small voice to speak up, but we’d pretty much covered where we’re at yesterday.  Or at least that’s how it seemed right now.  In reality, however, she was back there—but I was writing, in this instance, after painting instead of before—so she might be at a different address right now—I’m really not sure.  You want me to come back  there, she finally said something—so i told her, “of course i want you to come back.”  We’re going somewhere special, you and I.  i was only thinking, right now, about getting a truck, filling it up with paintings, and convincing one of my brothers to drive it.  We were running out of space here—so, yes, we must’ve been talking about space, or she was thinking about it, and how much of a problem that was going to be for me—since she can’t afford, to my knowledge, to look after me.  Eventually she will be able to, i think, but for right now?  She doesn’t curtsy for rich people—which is one of the main reasons i like her, but that also meant that we couldn’t be together.

     Still using, at this point, just Ursula’s voice—that was getting me into conversation land—short “texts” that we sent back and forth—sometimes with space between them and other times back and forth.  You don’t know how i feel  so i figured i’d touched a nerve; i think what she was really saying was that her boyfriend didn’t know how she felt.  I wondered, sometimes, if he loved her more that she loved him, or if, on the other hand, he was just doing what he thought he was supposed to do, i.e. get married, be the first husband, maybe have kids if she wanted them, maybe not if she didn’t—as opposed to doing something that defined him outside of working hours.  But I wasn’t going to ask her about that—and then i thought, well, it is only natural to talk to the person you’re having an affair with about the person you’re cheating on and how they make you unhappy.  That was what forward progress in an affair looked like.  All affairs, at least a little, amounted to gossip.

    Now—I don’t want to be a negative Nancy, but I told Ursula that she would be attacked in her presidential campaign if she didn’t put an end to being a fiancé and get married—otherwise she needed to break it off.  This was her weakness, and, the more she put it off, the more vulnerable she became.  I expressly told her this.  You don’t know what i need.  touchy subject, of course.  So I decided i would do my best not to say anything more about that—if I did, I risked having an argument with her—and let’s be real: you don’t argue with someone that you’re in love with unless something isn’t right about the relationship—which, is often the case, and hence this idea that all is fair in love and war.  I didn’t really want to get into an argument with Ursula, not with something that could lead to ultimatums, or saying things that we can’t exactly walk back a little.

     We’re all going to make it—we’re going to be rich and famous!  that was the actress Margot Robbie talking; she used to live jammed up in an apartment (in NYC i guess) with the man that was to become her husband; i have to admit, I wasn’t exactly sure how her marriage worked—but nobody was talking about divorce and i would probably know, given the amount of time, of late, I’ve spent scrolling on Instagram, a social media outlet . . . but the odd thing about it was, no: that was Ursula’s voice—that was Ursula talking, so i wondered if my 5D self was trying to tell me something.  I don’t know why Margot Robbie popped in my head—but here’s the thing: she was already rich and famous—so what was Ursula saying?  That she loved me in the way that Margot Robbie loved the man (Jacob Elordi) she partnered with in the movie Wuthering Heights?  But our love, like their love, was never meant to be, i.e., would she go back to her fiancé after the completion of this book?