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and you are finally realizing – having confirmed—that I felt superior to you. Ha! You say (chortle, snort,, huff – amateurs love those words but you’re right: I’m a snob and I find such verbs indicative of ordinary minds.) Or at least of ordinary writers.
You thought you could do anything. Actually, you did; you made valiant efforts.
I wonder how you are responding now, as you read this, to know that I felt, really, that your efforts were valiant, took some bravery. I think, though, that you’ll zero in on that noun: efforts. To you they were results, accomplishments.
What are my examples? That clay stuff you shaped into misshapen animals, and then baked or roasted it or whatever one does with a kiln, and had them sitting around. Your “sculptures” you called them.
I always admired your trying, but you didn’t feel my admiration; you felt my clear judgment in my even thinking the word “trying.” To you, you not only tried; you achieved.
Well, yes. Then, if you were happy with it all, what did I, my opinion (even silent) matter?
It was stupid of us to compete, yet you insisted, even in areas where one had nothing to do with the other. Learning to ski, for example. Who learned to ski more quickly? What did it matter, when we could ski together? Or, getting a tan? How could that matter that yours was darker than mine, that you endured sun longer?
It was all pretty stupid.
I loved you. You forced me into these games that I don’t think you ever saw as games. I mean, so much that you seemed to be playing at, you won hands-down. I mean, you made far more money than I, and felt superior there, for sure. Well, maybe not “for sure.” You seemed to begrudge me my involvement with my high school students, my coaching the musicals or the Knowledge Bowl tournament, my liking them. You were always “tied up” when I invited you to a performance.
A couple of things that I ignored because I loved you—these were “competitions” that revealed more than I wanted to know. One came quite early, although I didn’t discover it until years later. It was a tape recording where you had each of us talk into the tape recorder and discuss our philosophy of life or some deep (your word, that “deep”) meaning we found in life. When I listened to what you had to say—and maybe I thought it then but ignored it all, so smitten as I was with you—it was all shallow cliches. You didn’t have an original thought in your head. How could I have been so affected by such a person? That’s what I thought later.
And there was that immediate reaction that I had – the incident at the skiing lodge. We were sitting by the fire, and you wanted us each to write a “sexy story.” Even that so-called assignment makes me cringe. So we got our notebooks and wrote and you read me yours—some “fucking scene” that used “sexy” expletives but was, as such things are, boring. And I read about a woman who “came” at the oddest of moments—any sort of stimulus, with of course her embarrassing incidents and reactions. (Well, I was young then—or youngish—in my thirties.) You grabbed me by the arm then and pulled me upstairs to our room, so turned on were you. I guess I “won” that “competition,” but I felt I lost, too. It made me sad.
Well, we lasted for a few years after that and had some wonderful times together (I think) when I didn’t feel judged, and perhaps you didn’t feel judged–at first–but then felt too judged, and you finally dismissed me.
Actually, I don’t know that you’re reading this. You’ probably tore it up, half way through.