I’ve started seeing in all the memories where she was saying/doing/meaning something completly opposite of how I took it…and the great tragedy was that my past and my mind could only see those things in a negative way.

How sad. I can’t believe that was me. It’s been like watching an implausible movie and thinking the whole time, “That’s stupid! No one would do that! No one acts like that!” I keep laughing because I can’t believe what I’m remembering.

The one that gets me the most is the last memory of her. I realize now that it was her “last attempt”. We both wanted to act, we both wanted the other to act, and if I may paint a picture…

Tucson is hot in the summer and the cooler my apartment has barely works sometimes. It was night and I was really warm. I mentioned that idly meaning nothing in it. She told me I should take my shirt off if I were warm. I did and we laid there idle chatting, looking at each other. Tense and strained as it had been over the previous months. Her foot touching mine, neither of us acting.

Eventually she said she had to go to get up to go to work at the cat hospital in the morning. I followed her out. She stopped by the door. I happened to stop in such a way that my arm was just barely touching hers.

In the real world or in a plausible movie this is where the passion would have taken over. Instead of sanity she said, “You’re standing very close.” I was standing there, my hands in the pockets of my shorts, my back taut and aching from of being tense for the previous six months, hell the previous year.

I said, “Yes. Yes I am.” She looked at the ground. I kind of looked out at where her car was.

At that moment, our arms touching, a kind of electricity bouncing back and forth, we stood there, neither able to act. A few seconds later she said, “Bye” and walked away.

She couldn’t say anything to me outright and I couldn’t understand anything after so much internal twisting of reality to suit my self-destructive needs, to coddle a ridiculous story I started telling myself when I was 10 years old.

How amazingly funny is that? I read it again and I can’t help smiling at utter ridiculousness of that moment. It is absurdist comedy at its finest.