Tag: relationships

Make Peace: A Standard Operating Procedure

“I asked Julian Corrie to compose and perform a piece of bespoke music for antiquated hardware that I had turned into instruments then rigged together via MIDI.”
Polybius from James Houston. See also his Radiohead cover with hard-drives: Big Ideas (don’t get any).

I spend my work days writing processes. Instructions. Do this, then this. I write manuals and craft standard operating procedures. How to manage tasks, when to escalate issues, how to solve difficulties. Troubleshooting. I carry these skills within me. When I look at a problem, I see where the fault lines lie. I know where to gently lay on hands and where to sink my thumbs down to the bone. I am constantly being called upon to break enigmas open and rewire and disentangle where their threads went wrong. Communication as communion. Problems as Pietà.

Meanwhile, people are terrible. They lash out at their dearest ones when they’re angry, hurt or scared, which is as close to the opposite of ideal as is possible. And no one seems to know how to manage those emotional outbreaks. Even the smart, kind, and compassionate people end up in relationships with untenable conflicts and undeservedly crappy break-ups that leave wrecked humans and pools of misery in their wake. There are no handbooks or manuals. The best we have is The Golden Rule, do unto others how you would have them do unto you, which is fundamentally broken. It should be do unto others as they would have you do.

So here is how to put a relationship down.

-::-

Explain Where It Hurts.

Remember the template. “When you do X, it makes me feel Y.” Keep it reasonable. Be specific. This is not a chance for accusations or recrimination, keep it fact based. Remember to stop to breathe if you find yourself using unfair, irrational, or hyperbolic words like “always” or “never”. Review what you need to convey. Do not be passive aggressive or otherwise allergic to confrontation. You are showing where it hurts in order that those pains may be assuaged. You are not showing where it hurts in order to point blame.

You’re going to be emotionally vulnerable, which is scary, but that’s the point. If you feel like an upset, quivering mess, accept it and move forward. Nothing is too petty if you’re carrying it as pain. Cry if you have to or crack a joke, give yourself that, safety valves are important, but try to stay on topic. You are being responsible. You are explaining with a purpose. You don’t hide a physical injury and expect it to heal, you treat it, and this is the same.

(If you are dealing with someone who would be perfect if, put that down. That also counts as irrational. Give up the dream that they will one day be the person you wish they would be and accept that you are dealing with what is, not what could be if.)

Listen.

Remember the template: Comprehend, Retain, Respond. Being an active listener does not mean being silent. You both need to have it clear that you are being understood. Repeat things back in your own words to make certain that you are both on the same page. Language, especially emotional language, is tricky. There is zero guarantee that you use vocabulary the same way, even when you feel an incredible rapport with someone, and you do not want your words to dry up. Whoever is speaking must know they are being heard. Paraphrasing their message is necessary as it both refines it and functions as a filter finder. When your interpretation does not match up to their message, that helps show where an assumption may have been clouding your communication and allows you to correct for it. It also leaves little doubt as to what is meant by what has been said.

Accept what is being said. You’re going to feel defensive. Someone you care about has just laid out how they feel you have contributed to their unhappiness. That sucks, but be aware of your knee-jerk defensive responses and swallow them. (If they get out, immediately follow with, “I’m sorry, that was unfair. I’m feeling vulnerable/threatened/whatever.”) They are not rational, the same way “always” and “never” are irrational. Be honest and open up to what the other person is saying.

You may feel that a lot of what they are saying isn’t your fault. You might even be right, but that is not enough reason to interrupt them. A lot of this stuff is subjective and if you want to be understood, you have to be understanding of others, too. Suspend your judgement. Someone you care about is showing you they hurt, your first response should be to assist them.

Own What You’re Responsible For.

Engage with the results of your actions. Do so with courage. Even when well meaning, no one is perfect. There is not an adult alive who has not hurt someone. Accept that your actions have had consequences. We have all wounded, disappointed or neglected someone we care for, even if by accident. Claiming responsibility does not necessarily imply that you must apologize, though you may wish to, even for things they may not have mentioned, but accepting and declaring awareness of the results of your actions.

The key is to accept accountability where you see their observations have been accurate. Acknowledging both your mistakes and your rights are equally important. If you are not honest with yourself about what you need to say, you are effectively putting a band-aid on a broken bone. Do not accept blame you did not earn. Do not offer platitudes. Offer sincerity. Be loyal to yourself. Remember that you are working to seek atonement, to repair distress and make a new normal, one with less damage, not trying to “make it all better” in an effort to go back to “how it was”. That was then, this is now. Show compassion. Allow yourself to be emotional, give yourself space for grief and fear, but own up. Accept your radiation and fall-out. Bite the sun.

Validate.

Appreciate and acknowledge how difficult this process is. Appreciate and acknowledge each other. Appreciate and acknowledge that you are both worth the effort. You are both valuable. Ratify your worth. Be present, avoid distance. Sit and hold each other, even if only in words. Take a two person shower, then go for dinner together somewhere nice. Show team work. Offer comfort. Allow sadness with care and compassion. Act as shelter.

You liked each other, it didn’t work out, that sucks, but it’s okay, too, because you’re leaving each other as unharmed as possible. You’re following Campground Rules: leaving everything better than you found it. You are choosing a better future.

This will be difficult, but so is cleaning the grime off a bathtub. Some chores suck, but they make your prospects better. Without a clean tub, a sweet, relaxing evening of candle-lit bubbles can’t exist. This process is precisely the same. You are cleaning your past, the better to open your future options wider.

Acknowledge The Good.

Remember why you were together in the first place, confess that it was good. It’s normal at the end of a relationship to focus on what didn’t work, to look at it through a lens of pain or regret and devalue what happiness existed, but then you’re rejecting the essential along with the inessential. You were together for a reason. You rocked, there was joy. Who you were together is going to be different than who you are apart, but that time helped create you. You care about what you’re losing, so recognize it, don’t invalidate the pleasure you shared. To discard that happiness robs you both of it.

Share what you’re going to miss. Share what you valued. There was a time, that distant memory, you sang together while making dinner, do you remember? (How did you get to painful here from charming and sweet there? Irrelevant.) It was glorious. You’re a better person for it. So bask. Acknowledge the sex on the kitchen table. Acknowledge the surprise flowers at your desk at work. Remember when you believed the other wanted what was best for you. Concede that you are going to miss each other. Concede that the future is unknown, but the time you spent together mattered and that joy was yours.

-::-

And that’s it. The important part is that you do it, that you invest in the end as much as you invested in any other part of the relationship, no matter its length or importance. That you grieve, give and receive respect, and go with grace.

EDIT: This has gone mildly viral since I wrote it and thank you letters have been coming in from people from all over the world. Thank you so much, in return, for taking this to heart. Every one of you has given me hope.

Life is short. Do stuff that matters. – Siqi Chen

Postcard from the Party

You have to be invited, and there’s nothing
you can do to be asked. Headlines and bloodlines
don’t help. It’s a long way from home but I’m
here, the view much better than I’m used to.
How did this happen? Dumb but good luck,
right place and time, the planets aligned.
No contract, no deadline, no risk. And what
did I do to deserve this? Slept with all
the wrong people, gambled too much on friends
of friends with light bulbs over their heads.
Wrote every day no matter what.

by Wyn Cooper
from Postcards from the Interior

We mostly do not exist except in small windows. Welcome to my apt-for-any-century, turn-based text-based slow-budding relationship. It isn’t enough. It is just right. It’s perfect. It’s frustrating. I worry. I care too much. I don’t care enough. I am honored. I am afraid. Sometimes I fade into sleep with my phone on my pillow and wake with it sweetly cradled to my chest, a voice on the wire device warmed by my skin.

Approximately fourty-eight hours from now, give or take a handful, a radiant man (not a boy, though I often call him a boy with the same precision used when I often call myself a girl) will begin to travel North. He will drive a large metal beast across his country’s border to find me, following a road that I have traveled a thousand times, and he will succeed.

Living the Social Event Horizon.

Before I offer the rather wildly satisfying anecdote that I want to write about, I need this caveat: there’s a persistent rumour-myth that claims “Jhayne knows everybody” that is patently untrue. There are thousands upon thousands of dazzling people I have never met and will never and, though I find this sad in the same abstract way that birthdays are, that’s just the way it is.

My relationship to this rumour is complicated, as it affects my identity, community, and influence, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. While I appreciate that it allows me to play with social capital in a way that not everyone does, it also flies in the face of my self interest, beating black wings of denial that chase opportunities away. (“Oh, I’m sure she already knows that fascinating person. Spoiler: No, I don’t! But you’re right, I should. Introduce us!). I treat it much like fire, warm and attractive, but requiring a respectful distance. There’s a lot of layers there. Reality – only a vague relative to myth. So it endures, even as I persist in my role as a philosopher-assassin, refuting it to death. And honestly, it persists like most myths because, underneath the hyperblown twaddle, it contains a seditionist seed of truth.

There, now that my denial is out of the way, I’m going to blast it completely with indisputable evidence to the contrary. Probably with a sound like “quash.”

(It’s a terrible thing to share after I’ve just spent a paragraph tearing down the splashy premise this anecdote supports, namely that no one is out of reach of my network, but too bad, I’m new back to this writing thing and I’m going to be a dreadful player until my vibrato returns. There are going to be far too many commas, oblique and post-modern applications to punctuation, unruly mazes of brackets, harrowing mixed tenses everywhere, and wandering, unhelpful, and contradictory mixed metaphors. And you, dear reader, and future me, will just have to suck it up, because this little tangle of connections is just too baroque and delightful not to share.)

So! Livejournal. Bringing it back. Way back. Eight years, maybe. Possibly nine. Somehow I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a scathingly clever Jewish woman who lived (and lives) in Wisconsin. I don’t remember how I found her, probably Warren, same as everyone else, but I fell in friend-love with her immediately. Here in the present, we’re still friends. We didn’t meet until 2012, but our connection was enough for her to hand-pick me to attend her intimate wedding anniversary party in Madison last year and it was enough for me to put my life aside to better scrimp so I could attend. I probably would have stolen a car to go if the plane thing hadn’t worked out, actually. Stolen a car because it would have been less work than hijacking a bus. This is a lady I’ll hide some bodies for, is what I’m saying. For her or her beautiful husband or their beautiful child because that is how I roll.

She and I, we chat sometimes. We discuss disabilities, recovery, life, bravery, creativity, where to get good chocolate, all the usual things. And boys. Oh my, have we ever. She has hers all nailed shut, she’s set for life, but my history? We once sat in a chinese restaurant in Minneapolis and looked at my shoddy relationships and threw our hands up and despaired for at least an hour. Deservingly so. More recently, though, we’ve been talking about family. Bailing my brother out of jail, my dying parental figure, the trials and tribulations attached to both. (I don’t have many local people to discuss topics thickly smeared with emotion). Except our last conversation, which took an even more unexpected turn than usual. I think I had maybe been catching her up on the latest episode of The Lame MisAdventures of My Autistic Brother when I dropped an unusual name into the mix. (We will, for the time being, name him M, which is the most transparent sort of obfuscation possible. Sometimes I’m not entirely sure why I bother. See: paragraph 4.)

“M!” she exclaimed, “His name is M? Where do I know that name?” I am completely taken aback. That was a lot of excitement. Yes, I replied, jotting in a few background notes. He’s in Seattle; I met him though the people I camped with at Burning Man; we’re in the midst of a surprising flirtationship. She shook her head, dark hair flying everywhere, trying to remember. “There was some drama there, oh hell, what was it? I know that name, I know who that is! This is going to drive me crazy.” My curiosity blazed. There was no feasible way it was the same person. None. But the name!

I stopped what I was doing, nearly holding my breath, fluttering panic hanging in balance with mad delight, waiting in paused dread for the revelation that would either justify or cause everything we had been building to tumble and fall. (Running through me like dark water, in which way had I been gullible this time?) I felt weakened the way rust melts iron. How could these two people, from such wildly different backgrounds, wildly different everything, be connected? I love the impossible, but drama is hardly ever a positive word. They would get along, but how would they have met? I couldn’t think of a way. And she was right there with me, overcome by the absurdity of this strange potential connection.

A few frantic minutes later, it surfaced. I laughed in incredible relief. When I had first met her on-line, years before I ever went to Burning Man or started visiting Seattle, her best friend was S, a woman from New York. S was smart and sassy and fun and completely in love with a boy.

A boy named M.

Two degrees apart, a decade away.

Isn’t the world splendid?

I love it.

Authenticity / Nourishment

  • On November 20th, 1998, the first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, was launched.
  • On November 21st, 1905, Albert Einstein’s paper, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”, is published in the journal Annalen der Physik. This paper reveals the relationship between energy and mass, which leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc².

    “I don’t want to write about you,” I said. Adding you to the narrative would make you real in a way I’m not prepared to risk or handle. This is a place that defines me, that nails my history down to the page, that makes things legitimate, that allows my future self to remember. We were wrapped together as completely as two people might be, but I was not so sure I would survive bringing you back with me, I was not sure I would survive binding you to my story. I do not want to lose myself to a fire again.

    Yet here I am, three in the morning, and the edges of my heart are dripping words onto a page two hundred kilometers from where I just saw you fall asleep. You wear my name on your tongue. I am your voice on the wire. You are terrified, but you remain. I am terrified, but I fight for you. You wear a ring that belonged to my dead. I wear your care as a protective halo. I am tearing down my walls even as you held on to me so tightly an imprint of your hand lived like a welcome shadow on my skin for days.

    We have saddled ourselves with a thin leather of responsibility, but somehow it will be okay. We don’t know where we’re going, but we know we’re discovering it together.

    I wrote this for you in a letter, but want to keep it here in my tender on-line cottage, a decade old and counting: “In the meantime, we don’t have to go alone into the dark night of the future. We can loiter together in the parking lot awhile, get extra batteries for our flashlights, talk about music, look at the stars, make out, ask each other questions, both teach and learn. ”

    So here it is, you’re real now. Welcome to the story. You’re going to like it here.

    • the beginnings of failure finished stories (think that you are capable of more than you believe.)

    Once upon a time laying awake, laying together, the chance is there, the thought, the idea. She leans over, up on one elbow, any audience would understand this gesture. Next is the kiss, the closed eyes, the heavier heartbeat. Instead, the moment, ready, pared of seconds, is interrupted. “Did I ever tell you about my screenplays?” She falls back down on the bed, body convulsing with laughter. He looks offended. She gasps, catching her voice in tiny snatches, “You have to be kidding!”

    Another time, another story. She sits in the bleachers of a damp arena. One of her favourite bands is on stage, “We’re half awake in a fake empire.” Everyone sings along. Earlier she recorded a video of their best love song on her phone. She ended by turning the camera around and blowing a kiss. She would send it to someone but it’s too big for a text and she doesn’t have his e-mail address.

    Another man, a different story. “I never got to finish the story about how I lost my virginity! So there I was in those chunky heels and I blew a guy. Didn’t do it for me. That’s when I figured, there’s something missing. This isn’t what I’m into. Definitely need to have a vagina involved. But anyway, that’s how Anne Rice made me think I might be gay.”

    The music continues, beautiful, deeply melodic, rushing in bursts if drum roll and guitar solos, the singers voice woven like brocade into the horn section. She admires their lighting, their glitchy graphic video accompaniment, their stagecraft, their everything. The compositions are flawless and they choose excellent designers for everything else. A mental note: to find out who later. Every good artist is worth following up.

    None of this is linear. This story only holds together by one thread. They sit in a restaurant in Whistler, exquisite, bracketed by alcohol and discussions about religion. His eyes are strikingly beautiful, huge and blue. “I saved up all year for this dinner,” he confesses. Unsaid, to keep it off the books of his government. In his wallet are a collection of commemorative prayer tracts from the annual pilgrimages his family arranges and attends.

    Later, the same week as the concert, she’s upstairs in a velvet and brass lined restaurant in Yaletown at a Women in Communications networking event. Tucked near the back, typing again on the phone, she hasn’t been in a room of this many women since grade school gym class. It feels odd, but sweet. Another mental note: She should have more business cards made.

    They hold hands as he walks her home in the rain. “Who are you?” He asks, baffled. She explains about the social event horizon. She explains about similar orbits on opposite sides of the same metaphorical sun. Her free hand traces ideas in the air. Socioeconomics. She is already wearing both his sweater and his coat. Something here feels destined but she hasn’t yet pinned down what. He asks again, ablaze with wonder, “All of that is brilliant, but who are you really?”

    The woman on the panel up front is explaining how to use social media. The specific key seems to be making it easy to make people to help you. Know what you want, learn what you can, and remember you don’t know what you don’t know. All of the advice seems sound. The only moment she’s uncomfortable is when she notices a peculiar detail: how the women present unconsciously arranged themselves when they sat. Except for the latecomers, everyone is grouped by the colour of their hair.

    Those eyes, those hands, the catch in his body that’s blessedly shaped like her name. Inside the moment, can you know? Can it be identified? Or is your perspective too close? I cannot remember. It might be artifice. Is it unreal, a fiction built into solidity by narrative later? Retconned into the shape of relationship. Perhaps it is only in hindsight we think – that might have been it, in another universe of possibility, if things had gone differently, if he had, if she had, if the, if: that’s when I first fell in love, that’s when I knew.

    to hell with me, just let it burn

    I dreamed this morning that there was someone else in my bed with me. I woke up quietly, slipped to the foot of the bed, brushed my alarm off, and then crept around the room, getting dressed as silently as possible in the still, quiet dark. I dreamed the details of clothing, the smooth sound of carefully opened wooden drawers, the brief blindness of pulling a dress on over my head. I could feel that he was still asleep, though I knew if he was awake he would be watching and I liked that, too. I chose earrings he had made for me and over the knee high socks with a pattern of flowers that I had worn for our last anniversary. I sat at my desk and wrote him a little note to find later, “good luck with the promotion. i love you. x” then I left it by his keys. I knew he would get up later, read the note, smile, then bike to the library to work. I kissed him before I left, nose deep in the crown of his head. I wanted to crawl back in with him, but there was a focused satisfaction in padding around so quietly, getting ready for work and knowing he was still sweetly warm in my sheets.

    When I woke for real, I felt like I had traveled through time and space. Same room, different universe, worse place.

    It was a memory of a time with Jon that never was, a time-line where he didn’t commit suicide.

    as relaxing as a one night stand or an offer to kill a man.

    This place feels familiar, I think, in the same way I connect to the silent gestures of the person who lives here. Ikea furniture, matching sheets, off the shelf living. Not quite anonymous, it all feels lived in, but only just, in that way where some apartments function as places to work and sleep but not to eat. I have only rarely been here, and never alone, but I understand. How it was chosen and created, how it came together – the underpinnings of decision, of an entire person, laid out in a cluttered blast. Like most living spaces, it is the best sort of map. Tech casual, male, young adult, somewhere in their thirties. Clever, dependable, very little struggle, not a lot of travel, but enough to have some stories. There are some framed prints leaning against the wall, (probably line art or something Japanese), but half buried behind papers and other detritus, and very few actual decorations.

    And so, curious, I look around. I see. An instrument case under the kitchen table, thinly coated in a breathy envelope of neglect, and an electric piano, folded with a basic black stand, equally unused, translate into a desire to be musical, likely long passed. I pick up a book, one of the many casually piled next to the bed, (on the other side, an empty wine glass that I, for no particular reason, believe to have been left there by somebody else), and note that it has been read, but not dog-eared, which I like, because it’s the precise observation I expected and it’s sometimes nice to be right. The whole place is like that, down to the toiletries in the washroom, (the correct, responsible array, but with too much dust on the multivitamins, I’m sure the bottles are still full), and the programs on the laptop, (expensive, a macbook, no stickers).

    It makes me comfortable, but wary. I wonder at the wisdom of this visit. I like these places. I like the people who live in them. But. There is a proposal here, an offer yet unspoken, dreadful and heavy, laced with a false, Proustian nostalgia for a life I never had a chance to lead, “where feelings of tenderness would always be reciprocated”. Not quite a lie, it rests in the back of my skull like an entertaining artifact from an imaginary era, something to dismantle and examine and potentially loathe.

    We sit on the polished cement floor by the gas fireplace, turned on with a switch, click, and ignore the obvious question for more prosaic pursuits. I confirm my theories like dominoes, with only a few charming surprises, (which I also like), and gently offer too much history, the most toned down form of my best defense strategy: tragedy, violence, a childhood of poverty and occasional terror. Out of your league, it offers, a way to make a polite escape dipped in sad anecdotes of senseless destruction and death. An excuse for abdication, withdrawal without judgement. Usually this is the cue, exit stage left, pursued by bears, but instead it all diffused in the air, accepted.

    I had wondered at myself while walking to meet him, why was I there? It’s not like I had hope, even as I delighted in his company, but perhaps this was it, what I unconsciously expected: this gloriously uncomfortable acceptance. Superficial, possibly, and weak tea, but honest. Trust. Staying would hurt me, ruin me more, a proposition which under the circumstances I could not even pretend to accept, yet the visit was a feast. Within my boundaries, freedom. I woke up feeling absolutely amazing. All I needed was a break. There has been no one left alive to bear my weight.

    (He promised weeks ago that he would write a reply.)

    Today’s best telescopes could see the amount of light produced by Tokyo from as far away as the Kuiper Belt.

    I put the idea down, feeling like a fool as I walked down the path, dismissed from the large green house, and stepped under the arch of the overgrown hedge, a thick, living wall as solid as any made of stone. From the street, the house is hidden by its branches, as invisible as the steady burst of static that clouds my brain every time I approach it or even pass it, as I usually do, a solid block away. Something deep in my chest thudded as I walked under its shadow, wounded, let down by my own betrayal, that I had even approached that door. Why do I do these things? Why do I try? I was an echo of the spring, drained of everything worthwhile, too tired with myelf to even be angry. All that was left was to walk away.

    Seattle was nice to visit. I rearranged all the furniture in Aleks’ apartment while he was at work and made a bed out of pillows in front of the fire. I enjoyed the concert, then the after concert concert, and two different movies, all of them good in distinct and lovely ways. I introduced friends to friends, met new friends of friends, spent some time chatting with Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaimen, who were gracious and sweet, had a cup of drinking chocolate while I wandered Pike Place Market, and Tony bought me a steak. It was like a teeny, tiny vacation. I no longer have any comforting intimacy there, nothing deep, it’s not my home, I still couldn’t sleep, but it was enough to feel okay on the surface, just to navigate a handful of days without any struggle.

    my life as a misery ghost

    Portal 2: Exile Vilify, a hidden song by The National

    Monday: It was just after midnight when he opened the door. In the interest of brevity, I will leave out the next three hours, excepting my desire to be wanted, kicked in like a knife, a piercing pain that has yet to fade. Suffice to say, A. has gone away. Like in the old stories, antique, anonymous and trying, everyone a letter instead of a name, places expressed as an initial and an em dash. Off to the sanitarium, he cried!

    After: I sat crumpled in the street where I had been dropped, left salty eyed blind and exhausted, my glasses on the hood of a stranger’s cold truck, too tired to stand, even as the the night evaporated as thoroughly as the warmth on my body where his hands had apologized and cradled me goodbye.

    So that, for now, is that. After a multitude of absences and various failure situations, he has decided that he is not currently capable of being responsible in regards to my un/happiness and has withdrawn from my life. I do not know when he will return or in what state, but it is my hope, however small, however sad, that he will come home to me when he can.

    scraped empty

    When I have said “I love you” I have said
    Nothing at all to tell you; I cannot find
    Any speech in any country of the mind
    Which might inform you whither I have fled.
    In saying “I love you” I have gone so far
    Away from you, into so strange a land;
    You may not find me, may not understand
    How I am exiled, driven to a star

    Till now deserted. Here I stand about,
    Eat, sleep, bewail, feel lonely and explore,
    Remember how I loved the world, before,
    Tremble in case that memory lets me out.
    Islanded here, I wait for you to come —
    Waiting the day that exiles you to home.

    by Valentine Ackland

    Tonight is the first night of Passover.

    I am meant to be taking photos today for an art exhibition in New York. I am meant to be doing laundry, looking for work, applying to be an enforcer, editing my belongings, putting more of them for sale, and processing pictures from Seattle and yesterday’s shoot with Shane’s band at the Cultch. I am meant to be showered and dressed and fed. Together, sharp, useful, active. Defined. There are things to do, tasks to conquer, opportunities waiting. Instead it is as if the air itself has thickened until even breathing is an effort. I am suffocating, a captive unhappily complicit with my aching inactivity.

    It has been a week of silence. Out of respect for my love, for his dismissal, his vanishing outburst, I did not call for days, even when the wet beauty of thunder and lightning was too much to bear, when it cracked me as open as it did the sky. Even when I felt that all I could possibly desire was his voice kindly speaking my name. Instead I bruised my fingers knocking at his door. Small gifts in my pockets, a snub nosed bottle of imported ginger ale, a tiny square of rich, hard to find chocolate, my hand raised once more to the wood, knuckles swollen into a pale rainbow of purple and blue from repetition, (less painful than the quiet), but to no answer, even when his vehicle was parked in the drive. At home the phone would ring in a quick, beautiful burst, but the numbers were wrong – the wrong people, the wrong names. Outside would be footsteps, car doors slamming, false hope leaping up in my heart like flames. Every night, sleep became farther away.

    When Friday slid into Saturday, still without word, it became obvious that the relationship had been abandoned, released into the wild without even the courtesy of goodbye.