09 January 2002

I'm supposed to be in my room reading... I've got 500 pages to read before the weekend, and a paper to write, so I REALLY should be working on that... But alas, I need some slack-time... Lazy Helena...

So I thought I'd maybe write a little tribute to somebody... Forgive me if it gets a little sappy. Forgive me if it really sucks; I'm using a computer I don't really understand, with a really irritating keyboard (fucken Macs!)... But it seems like a nice time to do this...

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Dear Norman...

So, I was sitting in my room, whining all to myself about the amount of work I have to do just in order to catch up with the rest of my class... I was reading, but I was also poking around with some papers on my bed, screwing around with my cup of tea, fucking with the window, wandering around in the hallway trying to figure out why my room smells like weed... Just stalling, really... Procrastinating... Being a generally shitty student...

But in procrastinating, I opened the book up to the front cover, and noticed that the author of my book wrote one of the books that's on your shelf... I think maybe you had it in the bathroom for awhile. Seems to me I picked it up and tried to make sense of it at one point. Seems to me I gave up pretty quickly...

Gahd I wish you were here. Even if it was only for a few minutes.

I used to really resent you sometimes. I had this real feeling of contempt for you. Maybe sometimes I still do. I'm not really sure. I loved you; it wasn't that I didn't love you. It was just that you fucking KNEW so much more than me.

It wasn't that you made me feel stupid. It wasn't that at all. I made myself feel stupid, I suppose. It was easy to do, living with you, living around you, feeling like I was living in your shadow... I'd pick up the books in the bathroom and be lost by the first page. I'd poke around on your shelves when you weren't home, and wonder what the fuck kind of MIND you had that you could comprehend some of that stuff. I wished I could have understood what you'd been devoting your life to studying. I wished I could even begin to break the surface, but I don't suppose I ever really did. Not yet.

Let me say it again; it wasn't that I didn't love you. I loved you greatly. I loved you, and I wanted to KNOW you better. Didn't want to BE like you, not exactly, just wanted to understand what made the wheels turn in your head when you'd space out and stare into your cigarette plumes... I damn near hated you sometimes for being so complex. For being so damned intelligent, and so well-read. For being so above and beyond my experience. It was as though, even though you said you loved me, I hadn't a Yugo's chance in the Santa Fe mountains of knowing you, of having anything consequential in common with you...

I "cheated" on you in moments when you seemed furthest away. Maybe you'll never understand my thoughts at that point, and it's okay; it's kind of a lousy excuse anyway. After all, it doesn't seem fair to say you seemed detached, removed, far away, when you were, after all, so close to me, so loving and so affectionate to me. It wasn't that I thought you didn't love me; I just felt as though I'd never really know you...

I pictured you sometimes as some sort of guru on a mountain. Don't scoff. With more than a few years more than me of gazing out at the world over a book and through a cloud of cigarette smoke, of course you were, and are, and will probably remain, ahead of me in a great number of ways. And GAHD I loved you. It just seemed like such an impossible climb to reach you. And gahd knows, I didn't want to ask you to make the trek down to little old me... I loved you, Norman, but sometimes I hated us both.

I had this little daydream while I was reading/not reading this afternoon. I pictured us in a bar, which looked sort of like the Belmar, and sort of like the Roadhouse from "Twin Peaks." We both had beers: yours a dark snobby thing, and mine a cute, weak little Olympia beer in one of those cute bottles. And we were arguing in true Belmar-style, about books and philosophy, and all that nonsense. And it turned into laughter. And I hugged you, and for the very first time, I didn't feel like asking you why you bothered with me, why you didn't spend the greater part of your emotional life on somebody like Margaret.

I smiled to myself and stopped daydreaming. I turned back to my book. Someday, Norman, I'll buy you a snobby beer at a snobby intellectual bar, and I'll argue intellectual stuff with you, and I'll win. And I won't remember anymore why I sometimes resented you. One of these days, I'll catch up. I will. Really.

I've been thinking about you all the time these past few days. Not so much of curling up on the couch and watching Lifetime movies with you. Not so much of watching you play guitar while I dashed off letters to penpals and things. Not so much of curling up next to you, or making love, or whatever. But of the Norman I admired from afar five years before I really met you: the tall, freaky fellow with the book and the cigarette, with the eyes the color of Northwest moss, with the daydreamy gaze that seemed simultaneously vague and ultra-focused.

I miss you.

I was drinking an americano today (ohhhh, they don't make 'em like that in Binghamton!), and smoking a cigarette, staring at my book... And I realized suddenly, with this perfect clarity: this is where you came from. This is where that beautiful, vague, brilliant gaze of yours gained that razor's edge focus. Probably sitting exactly where I was sitting, probably with an americano and a cigarette in hand, perhaps reading something by the same author I was reading. Who knows.

By the next time I see you, I expect I'll have "met someone" (that is, I'll be regularly screwing somebody who expects me not to be screwing anybody else...), and perhaps you will have too... I knew when I boarded the bus out here that our comfy little relationship would have to kind of die (and HOPEFULLY reincarnate as something else). So, our boundaries will probably have changed a lot. But I KNOW something; I just had this overwhelming knowledge today that when I see you next, I will not feel so isolated by the look in your eyes as you stare back into your own head and sip your coffee... And as I loved you when I first met you, I will love you then, not so much as a guru on a mountain, but as a sort of mentor who helped -- more than anyone else -- send me off to climb my own mountain.

[I shouldn't be writing this now... I'm sitting in the lobby of my building, and I'm trying REALLY hard not to cry, but I'm failing miserably...]

I miss you. I miss your music. I miss having coffee with you at Lost Dog. I miss your eyes.

I'm going to go back upstairs now, make myself another cup of tea, and then find some nice place outside to have a cigarette and read... I've got some catching up to do, after all...

I love you.

~Helena*