Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Postscient

It didn't shift in an instant, not like the tungsten glows, then extinguishes. Falling out of love is not just the opposite of falling in. The flash of recognition, the nights spent dreaming with wide-open, starry eyes. The element of surprise. "Falling out" is slow, sneaky and wily, and you often don't know you've fallen until you feel the thud. Then you understand the gravity of your situation.

So, in just that insidious way, I have fallen out of love. My beau leaves me cold, bored and unsatisfied. I work with his friends, and that's awkward. In fact, they're not just friends, these people. They are all in love with him, too. He has so many lovers, and just as many haters, but few ex-lovers. These people won't understand. Not at all. I'll lose that crowd in the divorce.

How will I replace him? A ridiculous question, when the real question is how to leave. I want us to stay friends. I'll still read his letters, some of them. I can't forget him; he's all around me. I'll always remember when he showed me Fibonacci's number. What is more delicious than the feel of Avogadro against my molars? He gave me that first - I was only sixteen. The voltage! The resistance! Ohm my God. I had all of that with him, and mho.

I can't even say it was a childish passion, this parabolic rise and fall, this astronomical, meteoric flight through variables and constants. Let x= whatever it wants to be - he was my x-axis and I never asked y. You can't calculate the factors that made me love him. The rithm, the log of my obsession was natural, both real and irrational. It was a sine, not a tangent. I didn't need a proof.

I'm no fool. I know I can't live without him. Neither can you. I just know I can't be his mistress any longer. I must unwind myself from the double helix of his devotees. The bonds have loosened. The resonance is gone. I have to leave his house to be real, but he has always paid my bills. What new lover will take me in when I have divorced Science?

Everybody must get

Sharon Stone
Stone Phillips
Chris Rock
Kidd Rock
Rock Hudson
Rock of Ages
Like a Rock


It traveled the earth never leaving its own Pangean neighborhood, the way I travel the solar system at home in my bungalow. Maybe it heard the news - Plates Shift! Families Separated! or maybe it lay like a stone waiting for something to happen to it. Silly stone. Pack a bag and take a trip, before you're sand! You were a mountain once, a continent; you've got to see where this is going! Another billion years will be gone before you know it and you'll be just an eroded shadow of the You you are now.

Taking nothing more than the dirt it could grab, it finally had an adventure. A rolling stone gathers no moss. You eased yourself into the slipstream of glaciers. You stop when they stop, where they stop. Were you disappointed to stop in Ohio? It's not a bad place for a stone to spend a few millennia, not a bad place for a girl to spend seven years. Were we the first of our kind you ever knew? A man and a girl, on a sunny hillside in the spring. A story about glaciers in the heartland, cycles of Ice Ages and global warmings, a little stone taking a trip and getting buffed along the way. Another story about a man, a flood his boat and a poop deck. A girl can't choose both stories, and a rock doesn't care, knowing its own truth but keeping mum. The man has no particular credibility and the other is a mother's story - infallible.

The stone didn't stop in Ohio. There are too many other sights to see inside a cedar box. It isn't fair for a stone to have seen such things and to have been tumbled and polished, and then land in a box without a view. I should have at least put it in the windows of the nearly thirty homes I've had since then. And maybe, like me, the stone is ready for another journey.

Monday, June 1, 2009

As Heard In Our RV™ (Roxi)

If this trailer's rockin' ... come on in and help us tear out carpeting.