~~~~~
“You are such a fool!”
The words burst from her, vomit born of frustration; guttural. It was a curse, an epitaph hissed in his face. Swiftly she moved as far away from him as possible in the twenty-five by twenty-five foot house; not even a stroll down a normal house hallway. Still, she wouldn’t have to look at him from the kitchen. Closing her ears, determined to hear nothing more, she slammed the teakettle into the sink and turned the water on full force, her body language telling even a fool to stay away. Listening to aerated water hitting the bottom of the metal container, she could still hear her words, feel the way she’d felt as she’d said them.
‘He truly is a fool,’ she admitted to herself, knowing she didn’t want to know this about him. ‘This is what has been wrong all along. He is a fool!’
Unhealthy under-thoughts, splitting hairs in her concept: ‘Does this mean he is simply sick?...like having the flu or maybe, pneumonia...?’ ‘No, probably more like something mental, like anorexia ...he can’t help himself.’ Another slice of her mind realized she could have avoided her outburst. She could have waited until his Adam and Eve tirade eventually ran down; it always did but it was the most-often discussed, the looming image on his mind. It permeated all his conversations –and thus hers! which was why she’d finally raged up from her chair to tell her proclaimed soul mate he was a fool. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ her under-mind was laughing wildly. ‘There is probably even a support group for people who have Fool’s Disease. I wonder if they’re anonymous?’ Under-mind chortled off into the spout of the teakettle.
‘I should have known!’ she berated herself, while another part of her racing mind went into an imaginary scene of a possible future: sorting, separating all their combined things, alongside the emotional overload of his hurt anger, listening to pain-filled bitterness and comparison with other “Eve’s” he’d trusted in his life; all the emotional garbage resulting from his hurt. Could she afford it? she wondered. Financially she could; she wondered about the emotional side of her nature. Knowing she’d seen a future she was willing to experience if it meant peace of mind when complete, she yearned for it to happen; to be finished and behind her, ‘It could happen,’ she thought, ‘but am I ready for it?’
The balance sheet of plus and minus – she’d been playing this game for months. There were so many potentials between them; somehow they’d not been able to make even a good start. She’d wondered why, where it began going wrong, and kept going back to that first image she’d had, of him putting an air conditioner into the window of her little house. That was before she even knew him very well, but she’d known he knew how to fix things.
Had she enticed him here with her playing “Eve”, just to have a built-in handyman? If so, she’d certainly been fooled in her own game. All the reasons she’d thought she wanted to have someone help her with this place were obliterated by the reality of his presence in her world. She had tiny slivers of herself left, lurking in corners, unable to connect with other precious portions of herself.
Flabby and soft he was, but solid; stolid, actually, now that she was admitting the dark side of their strained relationship, she could allow herself to say he was just like a big solid block of lard. Once planted --feet, buttocks or mind-- he was impossible to move. His eyes followed her every move. He did not want to be separated from her for an instant. She knew he would follow her to the bathroom if she would allow it. He wanted to do everything together, all the time. And through it all, that raspy voice, its fears and defenses rattling her mind, constantly taking issue over things that seemed unimportant to her, except they could never get away from them once started.
Life is just so damned awful these days, she would rage to herself, but unable to make herself do anything toward clearing away the debris of her life. She remained, instead, huddled into her computer, angled into the only private space she could find.
A closed mind will create a closed place. Stagnant ponds do not support life. All the while huddling, but feeling secure in her private world – the words flew from her pen. Her imaginary world where anything she could conceive existed. The words circled in upon each other, bouncing into concepts, each more flourishing than the last. Until one day the tightly held barriers she’d drawn around her decision to bring this person into her life fell with a thud and her throbbing hiss:
“You are such a fool!” This time she knew she was looking and speaking to the face in her mirror—her own. How much is enough? When would she force herself past this inertia into Truth; she knew it was entirely up to her.
Once a truth is understood and comes into existence in the mind, all pretensions fall. Thus is born the dreaded Writer’s Block. The problem? –an elemental concept: What Happens Next?
Who knows? Certainly not this writer.
~~~~~
