Slept late this morning, and while I was still 98% asleep a tapping noise wormed it’s way into my dreams. It was subdued and even — tap tap tap tap tap. Familiar, but distantly so. A sleepy woodpecker? A neighbor practicing a soft shoe tap dance? I couldn’t place it.
It continued, softly and evenly, as I started coming into consciousness. Finally I opened my eyes, looked at the clock, rose. I peeked out my window to see what I could see, and everything was blanketed in heavy, gray fog. The tapping was water dripping from the water spout.
California is suffering from severe drought, and like most Californians I’m forever praying for rain, and even looking forward to the wicked El Niño we’re supposed to get this winter.
But somehow it hadn’t occurred to me for one second that it would rain on my chair project. Each day I’ve spent on them so far has been hot and sunny and perfect for the task, because in addition to the obvious — needing the wood to be dry — working in the hot sun is delicious. I love how the sun warms my skin; seeps into my soul and enriches it. I love sweating and therefore feeling like I’m doing real work. I love drinking an ice cold beer when I get hot and thirsty.
But now it’s Saturday morning, which I had slated for disassembling Chair #2, and it’s wet on the back deck. And all I can really think about is this song by #1, and all the things I don’t know.
Because of the dripping fog, but also, maybe, because I still have this weird Thursday in my head.
On Thursday morning, I was getting ready for work when I decided to test the air out back, see if I could get a whiff of the weather and what the day held. I stepped out onto the deck and oh, damn, that morning air. It fucking kills me, the taste and feel of it, when it’s still cool but there’s an undercurrent of warmth and you can feel that it will be hot later and the sky will be so brilliant blue it will pierce your heart.
When the morning air is like that I feel there’s a cavalier god watching me, laughing, booming this: a whole day, Manning, this air and this sunshine and 12 hours of light, what are you going to do with it? Like he knows I might try to seize the hours – and that I might fail – or that I might just let them tick away. Like he’s mulling over the many ways he could toy with me – the small beautiful things he could put in my path; the memories he might serve up with a song or a smell; the miniature heartbreaks with which he could test me. Little things nobody could fault him for, like shimmering light off the glass of a skyscraper or the way my kids look from behind, walking away from me and into their worlds when I drop them at school.
Yeah, things nobody would think were a big deal, only this imagined god knows, of course, the exact condition of my heart. He knows its tendency to overflow and he knows every crack, every fissure. He knows it’s made of glass.
Anyway. It was that kind of morning air on Thursday, and the trick this god threw at me was this: the impulse to take the clamps off Chair #1, to sit in it and face the music. Would it be solid or a wobbly mess?
So I did it. I unscrewed the clamps and sat down in Chair #1.
The seats of these chairs are wide. Even with my big butt and thighs there’s room on either side of me when I sit down. To rest my arms on the arms of the chair means my arms are away from my sides. I’m wide open, sitting in Chair #1, not tucked into myself. I feel vulnerable, and like I might cry. I rock at the hips to test the chair, and no answer comes to me.
I couldn’t assess the stability of the chair. There was no definitive wobble, but there was no definitive solidity either. I couldn’t tell if it was strong now or still weak. I couldn’t tell if the new bonds were temporary or lasting.
I couldn’t tell these simple things.
I sat there, breathing that wickedly beautiful morning air, open to knowing but receiving no answers. And all I could think was I don’t know.
A.
I don’t know.
And all day Thursday, this feeling of knowing nothing. This feeling of being naked, of having said too much, to him and him and him and all of you.
Smell of wood smoke, of every campfire, real and imagined, solo and with companions.
And that night, Thursday night, I couldn’t sleep. This swirling nausea in the pit of my stomach. These Joe scenes in my head, but more so the vivid remembered sensation of feeling so sick I often thought I might puke.
That sensation, and these scenes, remembered now with the after-the-fact knowledge that he was/he was/he was, Joe, with another woman, saying to her the same things he’d said to me about love and heat and destiny and walking on air.
These scenes, for example:
~~~~~~
Me saying I’d come over since he couldn’t come to my place, and him insisting he’d be terrible company because his allergies were so bad, and me saying, That’s okay, I don’t mind, and him saying, No, really, don’t come.
~~~
Me not being able to reach him all night, and him perturbed the next day at the rising urgency of the texts I’d sent the night before. I just fell asleep and didn’t hear the phone! I’m supposed to feel bad about falling asleep? Stop being so needy.
~~~
Us in my kitchen, together, cooking. It feeling so solid and profound and fun, and me feeling all giddy about it, and him, it seemed, feeling the same. He wraps his arms around me and I look up into his face and he says, Jeannette says you’re really lucky.
In.
My.
Kitchen.
I pull back and he says, You know, Jeannette from the program. She says you’re lucky. She wants to date me but I told her I have a girlfriend.
This burning feeling, this absolute understanding of his psychology, of the sweet, devilish satisfaction I know he feels saying another woman’s name aloud to me in that context in my kitchen. I know he wants to make me prick and burn, to make me feel jealous. But I don’t know if he’s lying or telling the truth, do I?
I’m wide open to knowing, to letting the truth come to me, but it doesn’t.
I don’t know.
But I feel sick.
He gets mad at me when I don’t want to touch him anymore. Gets mad and says I’m a baby, that I have no reason to feel insecure, that she likes him and wants him but he said no. Because he loves me. So much. Forever.
~~~~~~
These things in my head, these moments of cocky, premeditated deception, they make me feel like there’s a fist grabbing at the insides behind my belly button. Grabbing and twisting and pulling — those guts connected to my heart and so my heart is dragged behind, and everything is battered/crushed.
But I can fight that.
My instinct is to fight that, to rage that I AM NOT SURPRISED, I ALWAYS HALF KNEW. I TRIED ANYWAY BECAUSE I’M BETTER THAN YOU, A MILLION TIMES BETTER IN EVERY WAY. I HATE YOU SO MUCH YOU MOTHERFUCKING LYING CHEATING SOCIOPATHIC ASSHOLE.
And in fact I’d like to stand by what I told #1. That Joe could really not damage me, not in any lasting way, because I was never fooled. I simply hoped, against my better judgement, obviously, but I was in love for some goddamn reason and for as long as I could I hoped.
But if those things didn’t damage me, then why could I not sleep on Thursday night? Why did I start crying and why was it so hard to stop?
It was because of these memories, I think, these ones:
~~~~~~
Us sitting cross-legged on his bed when I finally got to his house after a long day of missing. Knee-to-knee, face-to-face, just sitting talking about his day and mine, so purely glad to be in each other’s company. Simple as that.
~~~
This one exquisite hello kiss, sitting in my car after I’d picked him up from BART. The longest and lightest touching of lips; barely touching, not moving, our breathing in sync, slow, slow, slow. Eyes lightly closed. And a minute into this barely-kiss, Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” came on the radio.
~~~
Frisbee. God. Stupid, but it was such a deeply satisfying thing just to throw that disc back and forth with him. What a weird thing to feel like love but it really did. Partly because of the perfection of his throws, and the way a frisbee floats, and the green grass we’d play on. But also because every once in a while he’d say, “break?” and start walking briskly toward me. I’d meet him in the middle and we’d stand, he was tall, we’d stand and just kiss for five minutes, and then we’d go back to our respective spots and resume our game.
~~~
And this: when the acoustic version of Everlong came on the radio while we were driving across the new span of the Bay Bridge under one of those killer brilliant blue skies. Windows down. Air warm. Holding hands. Not talking, but catching each other’s eye now and then, and smiling because our hearts were just so fucking content.
~~~~~~
So, see? The memories that fill me with righteous rage, those I can rise above. But these. The ones that make me want to plead, BUT I LOVED YOU, EVEN THOUGH! And YOU LOVED ME.
YOU.
LOVED.
ME.
Didn’t you, Joe? Didn’t you? Did you? Did you?
As ridiculous as sitting in that fucking chair and not knowing whether or not it’s true, I don’t know. Can never know. Shouldn’t care, and yet…
Some damage was done after all, I think.
because now, A
I don’t know, and I’m hungry to know, and I’m so sorry
I don’t know, and it’s not coming to me. I sit in that wide chair and that cocky god reveals nothing, just chuckles.
~~~
It’s almost 2 p.m. now and the fog has lifted. The sun is shining and the sky is that brilliant blue again. I don’t know a goddamn thing, and maybe when all is said and done I’ll take those four boxy old deck chairs and toss them into a heap and light a fire under them, have the bonfire of my life. But not yet. And in fact when I get back from late lunch with JVO I think I’ll get started on Chair #2.
Philosophy of Rebuilding 