comfortable, not mundane (8/09)

She let the phone ring once, then twice, then three times before answering. It was just something she did, not out of uncertainty or apathy, just a subconscious ritual in delaying gratification until the right time. Or so she liked to think.

"Hello." Always a statement, never a question.

"Hi sweetie. How are you?"

Sometimes she didn't answer when he called, though she answered his calls for more often than anyone else's. She didn't bother to think the question through any more. Her life was all but static and operated with the regularity of a leaky sink's slow drip.

"In transit. How are you?"

"I had a good day. I talked to my professor about the paper."

Sometimes she would remember to ask, but more often, he would have to provide the cues. Stand on the blue tape, look just past the center aisle, and remember my appointments. They are critical to a conversation in which we keep up the appearances of caring about each other.

"Sounds great. What did he say?"

It was an unfair exaggeration, though. Caring was not the problem: caring had become a reflex, the physical motion that had brought the phone out of her pocket and up to her face.

But curiosity, interest: those were not ingrained actions, and the moment they became conscious actions, their definitions changed. She listened with lazy attentiveness to his words, an idea here and an exclamation there getting caught in the flimsy mesh of memory, to be filed away in a soon-to-be abandoned corner of her mind. She let his enthusiasm wash over her, gently flowing around her passive state, and by osmosis she assumed a vacuous cheer for him, vacuous because she never learned what that cheer was about.

This was on a good day. Anything less would have prompted her to wonder why her attention was not being spent elsewhere.

He knew all of this and because he knew he had trained himself not to care, to believe that patience is a virtue and security comes before novelty and the correct term was never "mundane" but "comfortable." Every affectless motion they made was euphemized, saccharized, gussied up so as to be a little more digestible. Love does not permit such open aspersions, and they supplement their fraying bonds that tie with the illusion of memory, painting the past onto the present and the future because it was not "mundane" but "comfortable."

Neither of them could comprehend the transition between young love and adulthood, and neither of them pretended to, though sometimes they tried. It was a favorite thorn in his side to pull out in times of disquieting lucidity, and one she would take great trouble to thrust back in, because confronting the sad and inevitable was infinitely more painful than future of unknowns. It was easier for her to step into the dark than to cancel out hopes upon hopes. She would have admired his resolute desire to map out their fate now if the very thought of it did not cause helplessness and frustration to cloud over her rationale.

But except for during those futile stabs at figuring out what lay ahead, he was the intuit and she was the intellect. Both intelligent, but where her mind preferred to move like a delicate machine, his worked in bursts and flashes of suddenly realized brilliance. He could weave an intricate narrative filled with subtlety and symbolism; she struggled to get two lines on paper that could be taken any deeper than face value. She preferred the concrete simplicity of numbers and if-else statements; he more appreciated irony and contradictions and purposeful ambiguity. She wanted to boil people down to formulae, to input A and receive B; he embraced human complexity for what it is.

Even here, it is written as though they are a dichotomy: they are not. The ungifted narrator lacks the depth of imagination to build a bridge between two seemingly opposing ideas, much less take into consideration the infinite dimensions of character that collude into what we call personality.

So they did not exist as binaries, but rather as two beings whose patterns of thinking collided in harmonious discord. And it worked for them, except when it didn't. All this time his words were floating through her ears and the best she could do was smile and nod to herself, just as he did whenever she accidentally went off on a tangent related to her own interests.

"That's great. I'm happy for you." It wasn't a lie.

Neither of them could remember what their love had been cultivated from. It began with words: text on a screen devoid of tone, inflection, expression, all of the things that mark perfectly raw human interaction. Tone and inflection were introduced later on by means of telephone, but the last could not be achieved despite modern technology. Being miles and months apart forced an awkward and aberrant courtship between them, who would divulge their innermost secrets more readily than show their faces. It was the distance that was bringing them closer, and distance that was tearing them apart.

Life is a series of obnoxious contradictions.

"Did anything interesting happen to you today?"

She felt like the kind of person who told too much too fast, who was bad at creating rising action but relished being put through it by another. One, two, three rings. She felt like the kind of person who spelled things out too clearly, and she wished she could stop herself from blurting out the obvious. She rifled through her short-term memory in the hope that one of her monotonous daily activities would yield an epiphany, or suddenly be imbued with intrigue and meaning.

She found nothing, and grunted. Tendrils of annoyance crept and curled in on the edges of her mind. She knew it wasn't just happening in hers.

* * *

They tried to be sociable: at first, in spite of it keeping them apart, and later, because of. No, that wasn't completely true. But they had to get away from each other sometimes, to be with real people. Sometimes this went successfully, sometimes it did not.

She was genuinely glad that he had friends, people to lean on besides herself. She was also genuinely jealous. Through exposure to other people's lives, he was more and more seeing the flaws magnified in his own. His dissatisfaction was left unspoken except in times of anger, and it was always unclear whether bringing it up was a cause or consequence of their arguments. All of the things she couldn't give him, ranging from sex to good conversation to real-life presence, began to manifest in the other females that surrounded him.

There had once been a time when all of these things would have made her jealous, but she had managed to get over the sex. It had taken a while for understanding to come, and longer for her to accept what she understood. The desires programmed in by nature are difficult to repress once the chemicals are released, and more importantly, there was no chance of him being physically unfaithful to her. Trust played only as much of a role as the actual chances of a possible sexual encounter. When the odds reduced to zero, it became much easier to stop worrying about sexual replacement.

Other areas were not so easy, and she wondered if she would ever be able to rationalize them in the same way. She had liked to think that they had decent conversations with each other, that they could stimulate each other intellectually, until he pointed out the all-too-obvious fact that they didn't. In the place of conversation lay the same typical questions and answers they felt obliged to say to one another out of politeness, surrounded by sticky dollops of enough cutesy talk to make the most romantically naïve of pubescent females vomit in disgust.

But tonight, for once, she had something she wanted to talk about with him. It was something she (quite openly) had been trying harder to do – making their interests overlap again. It never occurred to her that the "again" she instinctually appended to her goal was a misstatement. They had always been interested in different things, and what interests did overlap were the result of one introducing said interest to the other. The only common interest that had ever brought them together was interest in each other. She was trying to revive the wrong thing, but what else could she try to do?

She never thought about these things anymore. She just wanted to be closer to him – not just as a lover, but as a friend. Again.

(She wished that she could force her thoughts beyond brute-force narration.)

He had said he had a couple favors to do for friends, but out of habit, she asked him where he was. She dawdled and waited and pretended the past was the present. He had said he would be driving. She expected him back at any moment.

He wasn't, and she found out why, and it didn't make her happy.

Her first reaction was one of anger, then embarrassment and shame. So he had decided to do something out of character – they were growing up, he had friends, they were changing. And she thought about it: if it had been any other person she cared about, she would have been annoyed, but not incensed. She would have thought they were stupid for that night and left it at that.

Conflicting forces of emotional distress overtook her. There is little to say after this point, other than that everything quickly degenerated into melodramatic, incoherent chaos. Name-calling and taunts, directed both at him and herself. She was reminded of the time he asked if she had ever considered counseling. She was reminded of weakness and evolution.

The present, the two clashing presents of "general" and "now," neither merged nor disappeared before her. They both hung there, love and hate juxtaposed in an awkward and ugly tangle.

Emotions are the least binary concepts in the world. Dimensions within spectrums within corners and curves containing thousands of independent variables of light and time and chemical. The fact that love and hate can exist in tandem on the same emotional plane is both terrifying and heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking. Brute force.

He came back, eventually. She had been afraid he wouldn't &emdash; she knew he would be back by the next morning, but the morning was too far away. She could not wait for the morning.

She knew he loved her, and he knew she loved him. And yet, like every other fight in recent memory (and this was the third? fourth? Of the past two weeks), it came back to that old, familiar taunt: break up with me. Neither of them were capable. Neither of them wanted it. Both may or may not have been better off for it.

It was because no matter what, everything always turned out all right again. Until next time.

One, two, three rings.

Not "mundane," but "comfortable."

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