Rex,
I'm sorry I didn't return your numerous calls for dinner and the invitation to what you frequently referred to in your voicemails as an evening which would "almost certainly pass without a single avicide."
I haven't been feeling very well.
Also, Leo left me.
Why does everyone (Leo, my mom [because of my Dad], my Dad, Rick [because of you], and you [also because of you]) leave?
It's hard not to start to interpret each abandonment as further evidence that - for whatever reason - I don't deserve to be loved. I'm the one thing all of these situations have in common, you know? Then I catch myself feeling sorry for myself and I'm embarrassed for being so melodramatic and short-sighted. But so how am I supposed to know what the appropriate feeling is? Am I not allowed to be hurt or wonder whether there's something wrong with me? Why is it that, from an early age, I was told by my father and almost every adult figure in my life that I should never feel sorry for myself? That it was too self-indulgent or immodest - or that somewhere someone had a "real" (this well-worn consolation breaks down very quickly upon any serious consideration) problem that should make me feel lucky to have the pain I was feeling. What kind of thing is that to say to a little girl?
Sometimes, I think, we just need to hurt - that when something in life upsets us... it's okay to hurt and maybe some of that pain will manifest itself as self-doubt or pity... I mean not all pain can be the convenient kind that only hurts your heart and stomach - the kind you don't have to wonder about where it's coming from. Some pain is psychic. Sometimes it disguises itself as something else... sometimes I think it might even invite you to discard it as an insecurity or as self-pity and if you do that, dismiss it like that, you might even be playing right into its hands and now it can really hurt you. Maybe you hyperanalyze pain and think of it as this sort of nefarious Trojan horse kind of pain so that you can indulge your self-pitying tendencies and you're actually weaker for doing so...
Fuck.
What hurts me, Rex, really - is that I know you've actually gotten a good look at me. So did Leo. It scares the hell out of me and I hate myself for letting you get to know me better than I let Rick, because there are so many obvious reasons I could list that show how Rick deserves me more than you do. How is it that I can know that and still prefer you? What's wrong with me? What did you and Leo see that Rick doesn't?
Also, you're married.
Everyone leaves. And, honestly, I think that if you actually wanted me... I'd leave.
Why?
I really want to know why...
I don't think it's because I hate bare feet.
I want to know why I knew Leo had left as soon as I walked into my apartment, even though there was nothing to suggest at that moment that he had. I knew too that, when I wondered if something terrible had happened to him, I was just trying to avoid confronting this really simple, sharp pain that knew he was gone before I did.
Rick once told me that we're not interested in publishing stories without conflict because no one wants to read them and that maybe we've been conditioned to expect conflict and that maybe that expectation has actually burrowed its way so deep into our behaviors and fundamental interpretations of the world that we actually engineer conflict whether we're conscious of it or not... I think that might actually be true. The influence fiction has on reality and vice versa is no longer clear to me at all.
A week ago, I think I may have engineered this one conflict in which I all but demanded that Leo commit to me for the rest of his life. I didn't even want him to... the very idea of it freaks me out, but I really wanted to hear him say it... and yet I knew he wouldn't and that I would hate him if he did it and that he was hating me for asking him to do it... so what was I doing?
I think you've rubbed off on me. I looked up the etymology for conflict just now:
c.1430, from L. conflictus, pp. of confligere "to strike together," from com- "together" + fligere "to strike". The noun also dates from mid-15c. Psychological sense of "incompatible urges in one person" is from 1859 (hence conflicted, pp. adj.);
But I don't know what to do with it. I'd bet you'd have something really insightful to say (probably from Wittgenstein or Freud) about what the etymology means in some larger sense. Like the etymology for "hysteria"... which is completely sexist. I remember when you told me that. It was obvious you had said it a lot of times before to impress women, but it still made me laugh. See what I mean?
Let's talk soon. I'm sorry I've been so confusing. I wish I weren't. Does that help? Probably not.
Also, to make this semi-work related, I'm glad you found Amoretti. I liked his writing sample a lot actually, and seeing as how I haven't heard from Rick in a long time, I think we should move it a long ourselves.
In the mean time, I'm going to see if I can't find a manuscript that will help sort out this mess in my head... fiction, nonfiction - doesn't matter. I just want to feel better.
Sorry again.
I don't mean to be confusing.
Let's have dinner.
-L
