Cold

Cold.

Exhaust fumes rise from the ice as her vehicle rumbles to life.

The rear view betrays only futility with chalky gray cheekbones and auburn highlights.

She swears and kicks it into drive as I'm left behind to contemplate "fuck you" for the last time from her particular high horse.

Winter's choking laughter deafens the city in silence as I slip into enthusiastic apathy.

Cold comfort. Hard bitten, burning me numb.

A Thousand Innocuous Admonitions

A child's eye view of life's possibilities is expansive beyond boundaries at first, a vision bright enough to blind an adult's perspective long since relegated to the shadows.

But then slowly the light dims, the vibrant colors grow flat and muted; the edges sanding smooth, blending in.  A thousand innocuous admonitions handed down through generations combine to form an unseen family heirloom of dysfunction we all carry inside to greater or lesser degree.  Growing.  And choking.  Sewing a web around your dreams in translucent chains, hiding hideous across the expanse of your life.

Young childhood.  The unfettered joy washing over me with my hands on a new book, or a hot water heater cardboard box, or a kite.  The exhilaration in flying my bike up a plywood ramp over an overturned garbage can.  Happiness that trumps the best high I ever had as a grown up.  But it was a drug in itself, the flame we chase our whole adult lives, whether through workaholism, or alcoholism, or religion, or sex.

It's ironic we're so absorbed on tasting the pleasure again for ourselves that we end up unwittingly extinguishing this very ability in our children, our own chase futile thanks to our parents' rendition of the same sad song a generation ago.  The gift that keeps on giving.  Adam raised a Cain.  It's as old as history's introduction of the first vestiges of neuroses upon us in the form of predators, famine, drought, whatever.

The genesis of this particularly self indulgent screed was a mother standing in line at the supermarket today, yakking about some sort of marketing campaign on her cell phone out of one side of her mouth and telling her kid to shut up out the other side.  Maybe the child will emulate type-A obsessions the likes of dear ol' Mom one day, or perhaps he'll cultivate a drug habit instead, before he kicks that in favor of a fundamentalist bent aimed at beating down some target demographic vulnerable enough to curry his misdirected rage.  Now maybe Ma's just having a bad day and the kid'll emerge relatively intact from his youth.  Or it could be the brat's a born sociopath who deserves whatever tongue lashing he gets, though I'm not sure Mom even knew what she was yelling at him about.  In the end, I gotta bad feeling about this particular mother and child (re)union:  I think she's into herself pretty intently, he's mostly left on the outside looking in, and the prognosis for him isn't on the sunny side of life.

This parental watershed flashed me back to my childhood days.  My folks liked to try and put on a stylish face to outsiders, even when their world was obviously collapsing around them.  They remind me now of the Bouvier-Beale gals of Grey Gardens fame, all consumed with manners and close-ups and seemingly oblivious to the death, filth and smell that surrounded them.

Mom and Dad's plastered-on-smiles paranoia in mind, I was always told to shut up whenever we had company over.  In case I might point out to strangers the fact that Dad just finished his usual morning dry-heaves into the family vomit bowl an hour before their arrival. Or, "hey, didya know that isn't coffee Mom's sipping from her mug!?!"  In fact, when one of my friends spoke up out of turn in this setting, I would be the one who would be told to shut up even though I hadn't said anything.  It was comical in retrospect.  As though I'd developed expert ventriloquism skills and was throwing my voice.  Consequently, I've rarely spoken up in casual conversation from then to now.  I have a lot to say but am compelled to keep it to myself.  I make up for it with the written word, I guess, but my verbosity here does not translate to other forms of communication in my life.

If I had kids, would I have visited an innate shame of one's own opinion upon them?  Probably not.  My particular dysfunctions would likely have resulted in some other psychological damage, as unique as a snowflake up close and as depressingly similar from afar.  Some things aren't meant to happen, thankfully.  If Shirley McLaine is right, I guess there is some lucky soul out there who was spared my particular brand of self-absorbed parental neglect.

Or maybe I'd be a great parent.  It could happen.  And might happen still.   It's this last possibility that really gives me the chills.

Long Distance Breakdown

May, 1997. She looked at me quizzically, her face half hidden in the shadows. Then sadness, disappointment; finally, resignation. “I trusted you – and I can’t anymore.” We were sitting across from one another, lunch at Outback in Conshohocken a month and continent removed from my drunken, jealous explosion in San Diego on her birthday. A birthday ruined by a river of tequila overflowing my reservoir of self-loathing and suspicion, finally bursting the dam and fueling the outburst that precipitated our breakup.

So ended a torrid long distance relationship played out across six months of extended hotel sleep overs. We managed to manipulate things at work such that she’d travel to my city or I’d travel to hers on a nearly constant basis. It was easy enough to do: the company we worked for had us making the trek into each other's neck of the woods anyway; we just accelerated the frequency, stretched out each stay and coordinated travel schedules. It was hot and heavy and loaded with hysterics.

She started in the Philadelphia office right out of college while I had already been entrenched there for a decade by that time. I relocated to California just weeks after she came onboard so we didn't get to know one another until I traveled back east on business later that year. It was at an annual company outing during one such trip in September that we connected, when we were paired together as canoe partners on a little river run drunkfest. She made the first, second, and third moves and I didn’t recognize any of them. Finally she simply threw herself at me and that was that. Except "that" to her was something fun but to me it was something more.

My insecurities are always on the look-out for the acid rain lurking in puffy white clouds. The glass might very well be half full, but in my worldview it's probably half full of cyanide. All that to say I'm a bit pessimistic.

Due in no small part to a crippling shyness and social retardation, serious relationships seem to come along only every decade or two for me and tend to last not more than a few months, once it's clear we're operating at different speeds with divergent needs.

Usually the girl has to make sufficient moves to wake this idiot out of his emotional stupor and I don't exactly sport the Johnny Depp-caliber looks that might inspire such actions very often from the women I meet. But unless and until this occurs, my passionate side tends to go into a hibernation of sorts. To paraphrase George Costanza, "I'm a sexual camel." It takes a seismic event by a determined gal to jog me out of this slumber, but when it happens I awaken with force.

I identify in a sense - though not proudly - with the protagonist played by James Caan in the movie Thief. Caan's character gets out of prison after a lengthy stretch and methodically plots to romance and marry in very short order to make up for all the lost time. For me, the prison takes on a different form but the effect is the same. In brief, it doesn't work out all that well for him. In short, it doesn't work out all that great for me either. But this comparison isn't truly apt. Really I identify most completely with the 1970's Woody Allen persona: Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable... The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life ... The miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable ...

All of this whining background is meant to frame the emotional volatility seething under the surface on her birthday, six months into a relationship that had been on its last legs for at least the last two of them. It was a good crowd gathered at one of the cantinas we frequented for such revelry, the Old Town Saloon. Most of the group was on travel from our Philadelphia office save for me and a couple of others who were based on the west coast.

The margaritas flowed for all but they went down especially easy for me. As I got more intoxicated, I began to fixate on the fact she had seen some movie with another guy; it didn't matter what flick or dude, jealousy rained down on me like a tsunami. She caught that vibe and started peppering me with pin pricks through continued allusions to her boys back home. The long distance thing was really getting to me. She was on occasion dating other guys when back east and I couldn't handle the competition, figuring I'd lose out to whomever else might be around. It was a self fulfilling prophecy.

She was staying at the Best Western Hacienda Hotel across the street from our cantina and although I lived in San Diego, I was as usual staying with her. The rest of our crowd remained blissfully unaware of the tension between her and I; for the most part, they were unaware of the relationship itself. Unfortunately for those on travel staying at the hotel, they wouldn't be ignorant of it for long.

The tension between her and I during this birthday drink-fest grew as taut without snapping as could be, mixing the tequila-laced salt into unseen wounds in my psyche. She was largely unaware that the barbs thrown my way were being compounded and magnified in my mind through the booze; however, it seemed very much the opposite at the time to this soused and beaten clown. On the contrary, it seemed that each zinger thrown was more calculated than the last, calibrated with my intoxication to deliver maximum damage. Finally I could take no more and excused myself, stumbling out into the night with fear and rage burning my brain.

She stayed awhile longer at the cantina while I stewed and seethed pacing her hotel room. By the time she left the bar and I heard her keycard in the door, I was at the apex of my anger. Little of this was about movies and boys back home. It was all about expectations and reality annihilating one another. But there was no clear-headed analysis going on, just six months of frustration about to pour over her and then back over me again.

We ended up in a yelling match that spilled out of the room. I said some things that I couldn't take back, that made taking back beside the point. I spoke them again, I screamed them. Taking them back was beside the point. She threw my things out the door, over the balcony and onto the ground outside. So I did the same to her things. The bar was clearing out and the others arrived on this scene, her and I both in fits and tears.

One of the guys led me back to his room - I couldn't go back to hers. It quickly became clear that my words were a one way ticket out of the relationship and the plane was already in flight. But I needed to make things right in my delirium, so I tried to call her. No dice. I managed to slip out of my new prison, reel up the stairs and began knocking on her door. "Get out of here!" She called my new roommate/guard to walk me back down. I slept in his bathtub until I sobered up and then drove jittery/sobbing home the next morning to an apartment I had grown used to not living in. An apartment that would now become my prison once more.

I didn't go into work the next day. It was hell on Earth. It was the worst day of my life. I was hung over, I'd lost it and I'd lost her. I paced my apartment/prison. I threw up. I made calls to colleagues to try and figure out a way to fix it. Perhaps now that she's slept on it, things might be okay? Perhaps not. I met with the others that evening. She did not accompany them. They'd been at work with her, they knew her fury. I was truly fucked.

When I saw her the next day at work we talked quietly in a corner. Her deadpan tone and lost eyes destroyed me and I lost it, dissolving in this dissolution. It was over.

I ended the evenings for the balance of that spring screaming into my pillow until the noise quieted the silence of being alone again. Until the anticipated emotional hibernation took hold. The winter once more of my discontent had arrived and it's with me still to this day.

A winter of my own making, to be sure. I'd like to think I've grown some in the twelve and a half years since this meltdown in SoCal. I moved back to Pennsylvania only a few months thereafter and we became friends again even before then, in fact not long after our lunch at Outbacks where she finally aired her feelings at our breakup (my breakdown). Where she finally aired her feelings all along.

Friends and no more. That's where we kept it, likely it should have never become more. After all, we had nothing in common except misguided passion in the dark, fumbling at cross purposes and rubbing vulnerabilities raw.