By the Time I Got Home I Had Rocketed Up to Fifth Stupidest (5/05/09 Tuesday)

A talk with Julie always clogs my pen for a day or two. I came home last night, ate two pieces of leftover chicken, closed the blinds on the waning light, and climbed itno bed with a decaf headache. I had been concerned that morning about coffee breath for our meeting that evening, so I had a mug of green tea instead of coffee. I also didn't want to be overstimulated. No problem there.

It may have taken me an hour to fall asleep. I awoke again, just before two, as if a tv in front of me had been switched off. The traffic had ceased, and the birds were a few hours from singing. The headache was all I could hear.

"It's never good when we sit down together," was my opening line. There were only a few other things I had scripted. I got the laugh I was after.

She was drinking her "usual," Earl Grey. I had a spearmint green tea. We were sitting outside Starbuck's, though we agreed that if there was any other coffee shop near work, we'd have been there, instead. The sky was dark, but not so threatening, since it had been like that all day.

I'd hoped that she would start things off, if only to not feel so much as if the agenda were all mine, but I didn't expect it, and when she only said, "So...? i grinned: She has no idea how well I know her.

I stumbled, but when I finally looked at her instead of the reflective emblem on the back of the cycling shoe on the foot across my knee I told her, "These feelings I have for you are just not going away. They are going to be there till they're not. There's nothing I can do about it."

Julie said nothing then, and said little after that that I didn't solicit with a question. When I asked her, "How has my behavior made you feel?" she said, "It's about time someone asked me about my feelings."

That hurt, because I had ("You may not believe this," I said) very much had her feelings in mind and tried to explain my "stupid idea" that because she had no fellings for me, it couldn't possibly matter if I were "invisible."

"It's not true that--" she started, and I brightened at the prospect of being contradicted--that she really did have feelings for me--but she changed direction altogether, citing the tension of the workplace and difficulty of working together. She would not admit to her feelings being hurt.

To be truthful about my reporting skills, if less flattering to Julie's power to cloud this man's mind, I am not the best listener but to my own words, which I have the benefit of hearing first in my head before aloud. That, above their actual value or significance, is why Julie's words are poorly presented here. Even that said, though, I discerned little disclosure. With Julie, it is easy to tell when she is offering up a bit of herself: She breaks eye contact and looks down to her left. There was only one instance of that, and I'm not sure what, if anything, I said to prompt it--indeed, I can't even recall touching on this subject except with close friends or in this journal: She said she would never belittle me for having these feelings toward her. (I thought then of Mr. Gold, whose awkward advances upon her I had heard her mocking in undertones to Judy.) Its effect was to mollify and puzzle me, to small and large degrees, respectively.

I found a little peace, too, with the answer to a burning question: "At what point did you begin to think I had feelings for you?"

"It was when you became so insistent on setting a time for our...tete-a-tete."

"Wait," I said. "It was at your car, wasn't it? It was when I said, 'Oh, but it's taken me so long to get up the nerve to do this!'"

"Yes."

"I knew it. I saw it on your face." I shook my head and sighed at the immediate recollection of the suppressed horror that had frozen her smile as she crept around the edge of her car to put it between us.

"At that point I thought seriously about backing out, but I thought I should let you know that I didn't have the same feelings for you."

"Well, as painful as the experience was, I'm glad you went through with it." She chuckled, and I was bemused that she found humor in my statement.

We sat there for an hour. It was always me who filled the awkward silence, which were numerous, if only to head off the opportunity for her to announce her departure, and I offered much more of myself than I'm sure she cared to know. It did not elicit any like disclosure from her. But in regard to the reason we were sitting across from each other,I asked her to please just bear with me and don't feel that being nice to me was going to "inflame my passion--for want of a more pedestrian term"--because "the stupidest person in the world is me within sight of you."

On the way home I felt blank, but I was probably the precise opposite, a surfeit of thought and emotion overloading the system entirely, the best response to which was to shut down entirely. It seemed there was nothing to say, nothing to write--no more inspiration. Then I awoke at two a.m. to a deafening silence, and into the void rushed the petty regrets of things unsaid and missaid. The pandora's box opened, the pen is unclogged. And then there's the next day. And the next....