I always used to think my cousin was kind of a delightful nitwit. She's extremely pretty in that all-American, Britney-Spears-before-all-the-nonsense kind of way. She once made a statement that at first seemed incredibly shallow to me but that I would, over time, come to staunchly believe in, and in fact I admire her for figuring it out a good ten years younger than I did. She said, when I meet a man, the first things I pay attention to are his shoes and his teeth. Cynical, you say? Unromantic, perhaps? Try it. She's right.
It's this kind of shrewdness in a young person that makes me think we may not have oh so much to talk about, she and I, but I certainly never worry about her ability to get on in life. Which is why it's so shocking when my aunt calls to tell me that she's just picked up her daughter from the cops, drunker than she's ever seen her, and has to physically restrain her so she won't run out into the street thinking she's going to drive or walk or whatever the fifty miles back to where his sorry ass is evidently real sorry for how he treated her starting at four o'clock this morning. How is this happening? my aunt asks me. Like I'm supposed to know, I'm thinking.
Except actually I do. Who is this guy, seriously? He's poison, poison. He's not your type and you're the only one who can't tell. He's not bad, not really, just not for you, you've nothing in common, he just comes around and you can't get him out from under your skin, even you can't really explain it. He's like heroin: way better than real life and all you can think about is how you're going to secure your next fix. And you want to know the worst part? He loves you. You can tell he does, he's just too emotionally vacuous to own up to it, to act upon it in any kind of meaningful or consistent way, and then just when you decide you've had enough, he dispenses just enough affection, reveals just enough of himself to keep you hooked. Any woman, I think, is a potential psycho girlfriend thanks to these unearthly creatures. You do things that would never have occurred to you in deeper, healthier, more satisfying relationships.
I was driving along in the rain tonight when I realized that, through a combination of self-reflection, healing, and sweet sincere loving from a small man and a smaller dog, without noticing when or how it happened I have forgiven my own heroin man-- and perhaps myself, at least for a couple of things.
The Sharks is back from Puerto Rico. He wants to have lunch next week. I'm glad he left for a while, and I think he's detected that the basket-case tone is gone from my voice when we talk. I'd like to explain to him another something I seem to have stumbled onto in all this: my impatience and frustration with his indifference a couple months ago was deep down a cartoonish attempt at gaining closure with that man, which -- I'll spare you the suspense, or maybe this is painfully obvious to everyone but me -- with a heroin man, never comes. I probably won't tell the Sharks, because this would only more deeply entrench his impression of me as a basket-case.
Gawd, I had so many pithy and fascinating things to say. Smart ideas, I've got billions of the damn things, and at least a couple dozen of them have nothing whatever to do with boys. But then too, I finished "Sight Hound" by Pam Huston today (Sweet Jesus, I've never cried so hard I couldn't see the pages before; my dog, who can't read, can't figure out why I've been clutching him for solid hours), and she had this to say:
"If I had a daughter, I would tell her what a funny thing love is, how it never looks the way you think it's going to, how no matter how old you get, it is love that keeps surprising you. How in the songs sometimes it involves beaches and champagne and chocolate-covered roses, but in real life it is just a prematurely balding man standing in a drought-dried field telling you that he loves you , and that you should do whatever on earth you want.
"But I don't have a daughter. I have dogs instead, and they know more about love than anything."
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