[26] Man will be cheated of experience by technology

 

I was meant to always negotiate my life, coming up to it sideways on soft soles in conditional mode: would, could, should, ought, a function of everyone else’s desired whims. I’m only glad my teachers were a bad example, or a reverse good example: yes, Emma, one day, if we’re unlucky, you’ll learn never to be what we are. So I’m steeled for that world if it ever catches up to me. But I do all right in the parallel one I’ve engendered with him.

I’m always practical when Paul isn’t there. I’ve trained myself. Grant you, he almost always is there: in person (which is my preference); or coming back from somewhere, which he does once or twice a day. When I picture my guy, he’s usually in the mode of coming back from someplace, stepping through a door or coming round a corner, our emotional vectors honed on the same point, never quite parallel (though parallel ones connect too, if you travel them quickly enough – that’s the new theory this year). Or in the marks he’s left behind on all I see. I’ve learned to step around those – he leaves space for that.

Besides me being mad for him, and knowing (from the sight of him coming back) that he’s mad for me, these seven years have been good. The gods have spoiled us beyond reason. My guy, you need to see what he looks like when he isn’t there, when it’s just me there and he’s filling my head. He injects himself into the world – he’s got the walk that tells you, he’s got the long stare when he needs to throw it. He’s brave without having to reach for it; he can scare people whenever he knows he has to. The world angers him, but in the part he can affect, he knows what he needs to do next, so there’s no bitterness to his nature, no sense of loss, no existential grief at being half-alive. Almost everyone else I’ve ever met has been half-dead compared to him, so who else could I want to be near? And he shows me every moment we’re together without thinking to that it’s me he wants. Besides, a name like Karsch, there’s going to be a lot of success out there for him, for us, in the crowd – not the family money (which he won’t touch), but the entitled kind that he knows is just as much his birthright – which means we can play together for lots of extra happiness now that we’ve brought our own to the table.

I know that periwinkle-eyed bastard is out there, so it can’t matter to me whether Paul finds him or not. It won’t stop him from being out there, whatever Paul’s thinking of doing about him. It’s the darker side of pride that’s making Paul want to find him (it’s what he’s thinking, of course), and nothing to do with me. Don’t, Paul – I told him right when he came back from the Rosemeyrs’ with the canvases – don’t look for him. I’ll surmount this on my own. I already know I will. I have too much at stake not to do it myself. That’s what I told him. Which means he’ll do it without telling me, out of a faulted notion of what’s good for me. When you love a guy, and he completely misses the point of you sometimes, you just have to accept how love starts out as an overpowering truth before it turns into a mystery you’re never going to solve.