Retired Waif

Obviously, despite the occasional rant or ramble, I haven’t really been blogging.  

There are a few reasons for this. Practically speaking, well, I’m back in school. I made such an awful hash of last year that I’m loath to spend any time doing anything but my homework for the next year-and-a-half, to be frank. My sparkling wit and dogged singleness of purpose has been absent from my online communities for a while now, and although I keep wanting to post here I try to sit on my hands and keep doing my readings for school (oh, but I have a whole post I plan to make on reading… as soon as I get the chance).

Otherwise, and this isn’t such a great reason but… well, I’m in remission. MS is a weird little thing. I find I’m superstitious when it comes to writing about remission, yet at the same time uncomfortable writing about disability when I’m… kind of not? Right now? I still have some symptoms, natch, but I can walk, so it seems kind of beside the point to be bitching about a numb hand, and some tiredness. I’m desperately trying to enjoy this while I have it, to keep up with the kids and get some aikido and strength training back in and generally build myself up enough so that the next downturn might not so utterly chew me up. Maybe. Not sure.

So I used to have a former lover, or rather I currently have a former lover who used to be a current lover. Several, actually. But one in particular with a definite way with words. Not the only capital-W-Writer I’ve dated, obviously, but probably the only one I found remotely intimidating in that context. And he was. Intimidating, in that context. This is going around in circles.Rather than having a way with words, I have a facility for language. Very different. I read blindingly fast, memorize well, learn languages with ease, and generally can string together an evening’s worth of Things to Talk About if, you know, I have to. Most of the people that I see, I see rarely enough that I can simply run their tape: the bits of conversation I’ve memorized to repeat if and when I see this friend, or that cousin, or Dr. So-and-So, or Father Thus-and-Such*.I’m wildly attracted to men who can sort of wrench me off track and get me spontaneously going in a direction that I haven’t planned, men who can quickly become fascinations in their own right. This does not, however, come naturally. I have literally never had a love affair that didn’t begin with conversation unwinding itself late into the night to the point where it becomes ridiculous–six hours talking, seven hours talking–and eventually has to change into something else. I’ve had it not change, too, and had the talking spin itself into a week, a month, a year… I’ve had that exactly once. It was worth going through to come out the other side. But mostly, talk like this leads to romantic relations of one sort or other. It’s also few-and-far-between enough to be special when it happens. I’ll stand by the characterization of my husband as the best talker I’ve ever spent time with, because he’s literally hypnotic when he wants to be, was able to talk me through labor, can be irredeemably filthy without seeming uncouth, and always picks up where he left off.But this particular man knew how to talk. He knew very well, unlike my husband and I, who when you strip away all of the book-learning and get down to bare facts, are basically stammerers when it comes to talking for no reason. Not that we don’t hold our own, my husband and I, it’s just that as I see it, we’re fairly earthbound people. We use words to claw at the space between us, or to store up treasures to show off later, but this man I’m still talking about used to send them spinning off into the air like fireworks. He had a gift, as a talker and as a writer. Couldn’t spell for anything. Really, could barely string a sentence together. Severely dyslexic. And as a writer? Largely crap. Never wrote anything that you could actually pick up and read from one end to the other, although as his lady friend I did so with all of his writing on numerous occasions, occasionally making suggestions that would spiral into late-night-conversations of their own and engender Zelda-Fitzgerald-level co-opting from the gentleman friend, who could be quite the snake in the grass when it came to writerly ethics.(Do you like “snake in the grass?” It’s my grandfather’s expression, and I’ve found myself using it a lot recently.)Wow. This must be utterly annoying to read.The point being, that this guy who lives in my head now because we had completely inappropriate sex when I was a young not-yet-retired waif… a currently-active waif… probably wrote the best things he ever will write, and said the best things he’ll ever say, at nineteen, maybe twenty, maybe twenty-one. And he probably thinks those are the worst things he’s written, the juvenilia, and tries to forget them himself. Meanwhile, the book in my head has a small chapter just composed of those sentences, and will until I lose my mind, go senile, or die. At which point one of the most beautiful writers ever will die as well, even if the actual man is still alive clicking away on his keyboard industriously, because he descended into unreadably pretentious self-parody years before he ever published a word.Oh, yes, and I’m back. I do hit the ground rambling, don’t I? If you read through this ex-lover-meditation to see if there was a life update contained herein: I’m back in school, relapsing and remitting on a slightly more livable pitch right now, trying to raise the little ones to be compassionate, admitting to myself that I can bake my own bread or have time to put on nice eyeliner but not both and picking the eyeliner, realizing I have no goddamned clue about what I want to actually do in grad school.*=Father Thus-and-Such is a real person, and I did in fact have a lovely talk with him recently in which absolutely everything I’d planned to say in my mind to make me sound smart and cool matched up perfectly to every question he actually asked me. This is something that I have only ever observed before in Hollywood agents, and a sheer joy to work with.