I'm not illiterate. I read sometimes. I like to read non-fiction, handbooks, tutorials... when I was in middle school I used to have a huge stash of romance novels. I liked them for the romance, but I really read them for the sex scene or two in each. I average reading maybe two books a year. Some years, it's more like ten, but most of the time it's more like two.
This has always been a source of some weirdness in my relationship with my spouse. Stephen sometimes hands me books that I'm mildly interested in and asks me to read it because he's SURE I'll love it, and maybe a couple times I tried, but I usually walk away from them. I lose interest. My attention span falters.
I like to write a whole lot more than I like to read, that's for sure.
Maybe if I felt like I had more time to myself. More time to be in my head. I need to remember that while people are expecting me to be home at a particular time, that doesn't mean I have to be home at that time. I need more time that is just mine, and no one is expecting me to share it with them.
I walked home from work yesterday. It took two and a half hours, and it should take less than two. I dawdled. Paused on my way to inspect things. Built a structure out of sticks in the park. Took a picture of my face in profile in front of a sculpture of a face in profile and sent it to Stephen. A deep appreciation of whimsy is something that all four of us have in common.
At that point in time, Stephen was on a train on his way downstate to visit Allie.
Anyway, the reason I started writing this was because Stephen handed me a xerox-copy of some pages out of a book, the kind of packet I'd get in school, with two book-pages per one xeroxed page. It was a short story that he felt like I should read, and so far, all of his attempts at getting me to read short stories have been successes.
I looked at it on the train. The first xeroxed page of the packet, the right hand book-page was the title page of the story, but the left side of it was the last page of the preceding story in the collection. The lone last paragraph of the last story was crossed out, there was an arrow pointing to it, scrawled in the empty open space beneath it, and a note: "This story was pretty good too." And then, another arrow pointing to what must've been a stain, but was invisible now with a circle around it, and a note attached to that other, smaller arrow saying: "Pasta sauce, whoops."
And then I looked at how the packet had been folded. Tri-fold. It looks like it could have come in an envelope. Maybe in the mail.
Then I get to making up stories about how they're mailing each other handwritten love letters...
And then I get a little jealous. Jealous of handwritten letters, envious... I was a little bitter about Stephen passing off a story his girlfriend passed to him...
But It's just a story I made up. Maybe it didn't even come from Allie. And here I am, letting it make me sad. Besides, what's there to be sad about?
I have a hard time accepting that there are things about Stephen's life that I may never know about. That's something I like about monogamy. When monogamous, it is possible one day to feel like you know everything about someone, but with polyamory, there may always be secrets. Maybe not secrets, but dark corners in history... fuzzy spots. Things told to Stephen in confidence, moments Stephen's shared with other people, things it's just not my business to know. When you're monogamous, you'll never know everything about the person you're with, but it's at least easy to feel like you do.
No comments:
Post a Comment