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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