Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Letters with Sophia Part Four

An email later that evening, 

Sophia,

I am at a loss. I am finding difficulty in expressing this brood of thoughts without feeling like a sophomore. My adult-self senses obvious answers why I stood alone staring at groups of pedestrians, automobiles and bicycles pass innocuously this afternoon.  

Part of me was actually concerned for your safety, it still is on some level, as it is quite difficult for me to imagine the woman that I have been corresponding with and spoke to on the phone yesterday, abruptly not showing up or contacting me in any manner that she had changed her mind or was unable to attend today’s events. I am left to drink from the wells of immaturity, cruelty, uncontrollable circumstances, absentmindedness, deceit, or the entire consideration that the person portrayed to me is a fabrication of the internet.  

To reconcile the woman’s short-story I read and took the time to peer into the word-choices and character traits unlike anything I have done since reading Calvino’s Difficult Loves in my youth is quite bitter to swallow. I was so looking forward to learning of the inner you, by your discussion of these characters with me. Why would you send me your writing, something so personal, if you were just going to blow me off? To even entertain the possibility leaves me flabbergasted.  

Last night I received the text of your potential non-availability. I saw the kindness in this. It was communicating exactly that which I asked for earlier in the day in my email, communication, which is at its root assurance of ones intentions.  

I had an afternoon planned. I even wrote a playful list of questions to pull out my pocket to learn more about you. I was looking forward to finding out who your phone-a-friend might have been for question five.  

I have never written anybody a letter like I wrote you the other day. I saw the outline of another human being and sensed something so innate and potentially like the other piece of one’s mental puzzle at a similar juncture in life.  

I am pragmatist, a rationalist. Outside of long-term relationships, I repress the romantic in me. He is dulled and hindered at every corner of my processing to avoid assumptions and him overtaking my will. I make my living as an auditor, which requires a scientific methodology of assurance to discern the measure of what is permissible to be taken at face value. Yet my nature was awarded a stupendous imagination, a zest for passion, a love of poetry and an ability to see the glinting facets of sentiments like a gemologist to a diamond.  

The element I have sought more than any in my life is for a dynamic with another where she truly wished for me to listen to her, to share the depths of who she is, how she thinks, how she contemplates, the imaginative details of her fancy, of her nonsense, of her history on this Earth, into her totality. I have wished my whole life to encounter such a creature with such cavernous thoughts so that maybe I might find a reciprocal who would consider equal pleasure in learning, witnessing, and devouring my own.  

It is such a rare speck in the universe to intersect with a person of such capabilities, even rarer for the desire to share them, more so within the logistics of human age and zip codes. So I somehow come across you after this crazy writing project I decided to do and this little theater unfolds into me grasping at rationales for the silence confronting me this day.  

I shed a single involuntary tear on the ride back to my home this afternoon. In it there was a morsel of release, however fleeting, it did some smidgen to validate that the reality in which I sit did just occur. That has not happened in probably two years. 

The sky was an ironic blue, compared to the gray of the preceding week. I even brought my coat on a hanger in my car in case you might be cold for the walk I had planned down to my friend’s coffee shop afterwards. I thought about how I taught my daughter last Christmas when I was showing her Christmas lights, how it is proper for a gentleman to walk nearest the curb, so that as a maturing young lady she would have an expectation on how a man should consider her well-being when taking ambles as I imagined we would have had this afternoon. 

When you used the word obfuscated on the phone yesterday. It struck me that you used it freely, without hesitation, in a way that communicated an expectation that I understood the word. This subconscious sign of respect was entirely endearing to the point that I even wrote a poem about it to how novel the recollection and potential a single word could make me feel. It is entirely silly, yet true.  

Even now, a miniscule smatter of hours later as I write this, I wish there to be some legitimate explanation, except most legitimate explanations I can fathom involve something horrible occurring to you by the demons of New Orleans involving a hospital and at that thought I would prefer the other avenues of insult, callousness, or indecision.  

I do not know whether to be angry, worried, ambivalent, or happy. It seems independent of whatever the actual reality of today may be that I am disappointed. I am just overwhelmingly disappointed, because the combination of qualities the Sophia that spoke with me on the phone presented were rare and precious in how she appeared to potentially match. I am left to bask in the irrelevance of all of it. 

The act of standing me up, if that is what this really is, registers deeper than I imagine it would for most others. Surely this occurs about the population with neither rarity nor great abundance, but in this particular case I feel it quite harsh, reminding me like a cascading echo of previous silences I have experienced. For I would have greatly preferred your disinclination to my cologne or the hue of my irises, than this, that would be tangible and more easily reconcilable. This silent quandary afforded to a poet to percolate is a far viler burden.  

If you have any respect for me, call me. Explain to me the truth about today or whatever this was to you. The history of my life has little bearing on today, but on a human level, what occurred this afternoon hurts. I will admit that hurt is exacerbated by my history that is in no way your culpability or known-consideration in such decisions. However, the vulnerable part of me feels compelled to inform you that the absolute most pernicious personal injury that anyone who really knows me can do to me is to simply not talk to me, to cut off communications and afford me no explanation.  

I was so hoping today would have gone differently.
 
Sincerely,

Pascal 

A final email a week later, 

Sophia, 

I may never know why you chose to do what you chose. I ponder your internal dilemma, realizing that this was about you not me. If it were about me, you would have gone another route and just called me and cancelled. 

Ninety-five percent of my being tells me whatever happened does not matter. People make choices, I wish them the best. I was hurt for about twenty-four hours, mainly disappointed. I was puzzled. I feel like I deserve a response, if not an answer, but again not really relevant.  

The thing that racks my brain is that whatever I saw in you, I thought you saw in me. That does not necessarily lead to a relationship, but it is something not to be overlooked. It was glaring to me. I do not make mythical correlations or connections with random women out of some inner-insecurity like some wanton pubescent school boy. This was not a crush; this was not some lascivious pursuit of a tryst.  

I am a grown man with a thorough understanding of who he is, what he stands for and what I want. I will be a consistent me independent of the preference of you or any other. I know myself extremely well. The times in life I have ignored my intuition I have regretted it. So I do not continue down this trail to redress thoughts of your internal debate lightly, but rather with contemplation of this inner you that seemed to reflect like light upon a mirror back towards my inner machinery.  

The style I was naturally using with you in our correspondence felt native to my inner self as if I was craving it, but rarely had an avenue to use that as an option like an ex-patriot finally returning to his homeland after years of being forced to use a foreign tongue. It’s like one of those deep compatibility things they put on cheesy commercials. Maybe we would have driven each other totally nuts, but that alone, that little symbiotic deep-thinking dynamic was nourishing for me to explore.  

You appear to be a watcher, a searcher, a studier. You seem like you come from a perspective, that you do not sense is common, as if you are seeking to understand the normality around you that may appear most alien at times. You sound like a delver of books and literature and the thoughts of the deceased and the living in tireless hours. These appear to be the journey of a traveler pondering the grand debates taking a piece from each land she visits to evolve the self she carries. I imagine you have sat many hours on benches, sofas, floors and lawns of grass over notebooks.  

While none of these may be primary truths, even in partiality I can relate to these sentiments. I have traveled an existential examination of our universe through the internal that I have only found kinship in writers I will never speak to. I have not met many people like you within my own generation. That may be the only reason I am writing this letter now. There is also a level of concern for you, but that measure of concern can only be valid with a commensurate measure of facts which I currently am not privy to, therefore I do not have the jurisdiction to take ownership of this concern in full.  

A part of my concern is drawn to the apparent search that you appear to be under. It is as if I imagine what it would be like for one ocean goer spotting another out at sea in deepest isolation trading stories and stores of rations under the most unlikely of convergences beneath the stars. I may walk away and have silence as my only retort. In most cases I would just let words slip into the calendar of never-mind, but you take me as a sea-goer Sophia.  

My mind processes emotions in far more detail and speed than most. So if my abrupt reaction to this weekend’s events seems a hasty excess, it is only out of the commensurate level of contemplation that you appeared to exhibit in which I am quick to disallow coincidence and turn to deeper considerations.  

You said finding people to talk to like that was almost nonexistent. I am assuming there is some crux in your belly that drove you to truncate this in the manner you did. You are entitled to that.  I don’t want anything at this point, but I was pursuing you for a reason. I wanted to know you, how you thought, how you worked, what you want out of this short life. This was not a flit or convenient dalliance, but a response to a rather rare opportunity of human logistics. I wanted to dive in and open up to see what was here and your response was reticence.  

You told me you were closed. What that comes from, I have no grounds to know. For most people it comes from getting your heart broken. I have been there and crawled out the other side a man in full. If you want to walk through life choosing that fear, that closure, I won’t try to stop you. But if you want a human to listen to you, to take the feelings you have in there and be a person who wants to hear that, to present an empathetic platform to process such thoughts by simply expelling and not have them criticized, but held for the moment so that you can return them to your capable prism, you will never find that from anyone acting in the way you treated me.  

Despite what was a pretty shitty Sunday, I would rather walkaway with a personal experience in the record of my life, chancing my pride to see humanity that so many people obliviously pass. I don’t care what my job is, where I live, what possessions I may have. I am on this Earth to dive into the deep human stuff, the raw experiences of purpose and memory.  

On my death bed I will regret not lost industry, but the slivers of humanity I ignored when they were glinting through the mirage of the day to day and I did not take the time to pull them close and partake in purpose to be as God for one another through the interconnected grace of kindness, empathy, generosity, recognition and love. Arrogance and anger are feckless rarely appropriate nonsense to me. Sunday was not about the person who showed up, but the internal of the person who did not. 

What happened Sunday, makes me ask myself how close is the Sophia I was sensing in my mind to the real woman I was talking to on the phone. Although our conversation was short, there was a moment when you were talking about the horses. I picked up on how alive that made you feel. Those raw elements that make a person, the deep part of a person sing and shine out and bleed upon the pages of this world was present. I picked up on that and there was an inflection in your voice when you responded with recognition that I saw you.  

There is no way the woman on the other end of that phone was not real in that vulnerable window of disclosure. And if that was real, then whatever happened in your gut between Saturday night and Sunday morning to not show up was dabbling in debates that most people would never consider on the precipice of a first date if that or something near that did not startle her. As if there was an unearthed vulnerability that you did not expect to be there, but was, and how does one react to such lapses of the superego?  

I could be way off target, but there is a contemplated rationale behind this occurring. Like I have written so many times in my life and I shared with you in one of my emails, life is a choice between love and fear. I am not asking for your love, but I would like to help you take away your fear, if that is what this is. Because whatever happened Sunday, you chose to bury that, but it will walk with you until you deal with it, not through me, but inside yourself. I have seen it in too many people keeping safe distance.  

Whatever relationships you try to forge, will be imprinted with your own internal knowledge that you are capable of that reaction and denying yourself a measure of human intimacy due to the compulsion that prompted that response. That would be sad, because you sound like such an amazing splendid woman and to close yourself off like that is a shame.  

I am trying to be human here.

Pascal 

I never got a response.  I may have been in a modern term catfish-ed. I am not sure.  I know I spoke with a real person and read someone’s short story.  I ponder how often reality is shaped independently in one’s mind and the blazing tentacles of serendipity.  In the end these letters, this brief window of time left me more cognizant of what I want.  Whoever Sophia is or is not is irrelevant to my story.  I wish her the best, knowing I am better off without people choosing such ways of acting.  Love, Oh, Love.

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