uh... WHAT?

So here's why I stopped writing...

“Stop this world, let me off. There's just too many pigs in the same trough. There's too many buzzards sitting on the fence. Stop this world, it's not making sense.”*

Have you ever sat huddled together with your guy of several years among an assemblage of friends and others along a string of laminate tables at the back of a poorly lit artificial ornamental Thai restaurant tucked into a deserted Hollywood strip mall in celebration of a virtual stranger's birthday on a dreary Sunday eve in October, when an entity endowed with plasticine perfection and massive mane saunters into the room, slows, eyes her choices, glides to your side, slides perceptively into an empty chair balancing her generous largesse, leans forward fluttering fathomless false eye lashes and purring repartee through pink plumpish lips into the rapt eyes of your drooling-tongue-on-the-table guy while wickedly acknowledging your invisibility for an instant before you vanished altogether?

And you don’t know how you got home from the party but you’re pretty sure the party’s over as far as your relationship is concerned and sure enough later in the week your guy announces he’s moving to Hollywood as soon as possible because there’s just not enough room for the two of you in Santa Monica now that you’ve closed your Minneapolis atelier and he’s an artist who wants to “do whatever he wants whenever he wants to do it” despite the fact that you’ve supported him financially, artistically, spiritually since before you moved him and all his earthly possessions to California and though you have no idea how you’ll afford this apartment on your own till you’ve had a few moments to figure it all out, you’re given a temporary reprieve as Thanksgiving approaches because out of town friends come to visit for some pre-winter beach time and then it’s all over but the shouting with a bit of that thrown in as well when he says he’s already rented an apartment with a little help from his friends and he packs up and leaves while you’re visiting your mom in AZ over Valentine’s weekend, so you give up that apartment amid promises of it will be better for everyone and nothing will change and the next thing you know he’s driving you to the airport so you can meet with your publishers which is a really big deal and something you’ve put off far too long so you’re excitedly ambivalent as he professes sweetie baby miss you love you while handing you your luggage at LAX curbside along with hugs and kisses and see you soons and that’s that. Literally. Though you don’t know it yet.

And you arrive in Minneapolis with expectations running high and meet with your publishers and believe you can actually finish this book this time and may actually have a bit of fun and success with it. So when you finally reach him after a few days of whatever he does when he falls off his various wagons disappearing for days, you both say you have a lot to tell each other and he says you go first, but you think your news will be so much bigger than his you tell him to go first and so he reminds you of the conversation you had about starting to date others and he says he’s going to start seeing some women for coffee and this weekend he’s going to see “that” woman he met at the party with you last fall. And while you try to imagine her at the beach with him thinking it just doesn’t seem plausible, he admits he’s been in a full blown relationship with her for he can’t remember how long and he’s not really allowed to talk to you on weekends (or ever actually), but since he spends weekends with her there will be no communication except for the occasional text snuck in between their couple activities of going to the dog park, swimming in her pool, working out in her gym and shopping for new wardrobes and other creative necessities, he still loves you and can’t live without you and you hang up struck dumb knowing you can’t tell anyone because you have to go to a Viking’s game as one of their guests and Kevin Odegard et al’s Blood on the Tracks thing and geez, you can’t remember what all.

So you suck it up and extend your visit indefinitely while giving up writing altogether because your creativity has been paralyzed by the desire to live with as little humiliation as possible (not to mention – live!) and because you sure don’t want to run into “them” at any LA parties or have to explain to gawd knows who all where he is or what’s wrong with you. And he texts you he thinks that’s a good idea because he loves and misses you so much he’d feel terrible thinking of you sitting alone in Santa Monica over Thanksgiving while they’re in Paris, but he’d like to see you for a few hours when he travels to Minnesota to see his family for the holidays before you head off to Arizona to take care of your sister who you’ve just discovered has cancer. So you agree to spend a few hours together before flying off in your separate directions and the last six months have pretty much been a blur of caring and giving care and generally being there for your sis who seems to be doing very well (Light for the Highest Good) and now it’s forever ago but he still texts he can’t live without you and misses you and loves you and begs you to wait till he’s finished with his next series of acting classes and... uh... WHAT?

*Diana Krall/Mose Allison