Author and Columnist
(This is what we in the business call a "teaser.")
You are trying to be more writerly with these missives. I am not sure that I like it. It may be a little cloying to your readers.
So, I scurried upstairs to as not to be guilty by association. Other people, better trained people (I wanted to prevent her from swallowing her tongue, evidently that it not what it done. The educational puppets lied to me), were attending to her and she seemed to be recovering.
You were a gawker, but that isn't why I am stopping here.
My memory of those puppets, thirty-three years later, is vivid enough that it could have happened only a year ago. It is odd to know how little of my childhood I have retained, but I might remember unto my death watching one hand puppet shove a spoon in the other, seizing puppet's throat to keep it from swallowing its felt tongue. I recall the hardness of the wooden chair in my elementary school library, how oddly pitched their didactic voices were as they assured children of dangerous lies.
Ask me anything else that happened when I was in second grade, and I can offer you maybe ten more memories, but the puppets are there.
It was my intention to see Sarah today. For the first time in over two years.
Without indulging too deeply in magical thinking, I expect that there was some higher self -- maybe me -- that did not want the two of you to connect.
You would have lost too much of yourself in indulging the physical with Sarah.
I will skip everything until the Post-Katian (my life, after the Kate break-up) period. Soon after that, I grew understandably smitten with dear Sarah. Quite possibly in a rebounding way, but there was quite a bit of honest affection with it.
You long had something of a crush on Sarah. The format of your blog was copied from her. You found her dreamy and passionate, her smoky singing voice pressing just the right button in your brain to release all the oxytocin.
When you met her for the first time, it was at Summer Scholars at Bard College the summer between your sophomore and junior year. Those two weeks marked you enough that you place your fantasy series on an amalgam college that occupies those grounds. It gave you an idea of what your collegiate life could be, one that was disappointed when you discovered that there was no way that you could afford the life of a Bard student.
You befriended her there, in this wild place where your RD, the inimitable Kimberly Yess (rest her soul), let twenty high school students do basically what they wanted as long as they attended each of their classes during the day. It was perhaps negligent of her, and you will be forever grateful to her for having had so unadulterated an experience. (Those who slept with one another or with a lascivious RA may have felt differently if their final performance, teary poems are any testament.)
You cared about Sarah then, but you didn't feel attraction to her. (You were dating Alison at this point and did crush on a few girls there, but Sarah managed to evade that.)
When you saw her a year later, after having kept in occasional (and not cheap) telephonic contact, there was a mutual, almost overwhelming attraction as you twittered to one another and played inter-collegiate games -- she went to the Marist program, and you returned to Bard. You were with Jen then and considered briefly that maybe you ought not to be if you felt this way about Sarah. (You regret that Jen didn't have the good taste to dump you before you went to geek camp, as your experience there would have been decidedly better and would have involved more than a little surreptitious kissing with two other girls.)
I can't promise that there was not an occasional flirtation between then and the end of your relationship with Kate, but I don't remember any. Well, besides the fact that Sarah quickly again rose to someone you wished to kiss. That didn't come from nowhere.
So I decided one warm October autumn day to visit the darling, though she is something like an hour from me.
I live there now. I pass her former apartment several times a week when I exercise.
I got as far as a town away when my car completely died.
Incidentally, though it is a bit more of a trek, I have walked a longer distance than you broke down and the center of Red Hook. If she wanted to, she could have met you at Holy Cow for an ice cream cone without more than an hour's walking on your part.
I decided to visit her again a couple of months later. And I did make it all the way to the street she lived on. Then she sent me home without seeing me because she had a date and couldn't psychologically handle what I represented to her. I promise you, this made perfect sense and I accepted it as a completely valid excuse because I am stupid like that. So I went home.
That is not a good excuse. I am not suggesting that you should have insisted, but I am reasonably sure that she invited you up, at least by implication. You didn't like driving in the best of circumstances and would not have gone for an hour to Red Hook unless you assumed that you would have a few hours with Sarah for the trouble.
That, in a word, was a cruel thing to do. She could have at least hugged you and sent you on your way with a promise that she would make plans with you soon. You were supposed to be great friends. However, Sarah always had her own issues. It is better that you were only glancingly one of them.
Today, I decided to visit her again. And I was three miles from her house, waiting at a stoplight. The engine died. I figured my car had just stalled. No such luck. It would not turn over at all.
Higher self wanted to keep you from her.
Dead, dead, dead! It's all useless! Knives, poison, ropes...
Oh, my boy. Quoting No Exit does set a foreboding and not inaccurate tone that I doubt you wanted to invoke when it comes to Sarah.
I was within walking distance of the goddess Sarah. And I could not get to her. Frustrating beyond belief.
She could easily have walked to you if she had wanted or met you in the middle. It is a straight road between you and her.
This is probably a perfectly dreadful thing to say, but I care more that I missed a chance to see Sarah than I do that my car is far from me and I might as well be legless.
See, this is demonstrative of your skewed priorities. You are more concerned that a woman who -- let's face it -- rejected you when you were fifteen feet from her yet again didn't see you than that your -- let's face it -- beater of a car suffered what would be an expensive fix. Would it have died without trying to drive to Red Hook? It is entirely possible. I recall that a belt or such was torn. But you couldn't help seeing the coincidence with a significance that you did not want to acknowledge.
In other news, I think Eileen is worried that she is going to lose me. As what, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind... um... I mean, I will always be a great friend to her, she is very important. I gave my word that I would always and I mean to keep it.
And speaking of women with whom you have an uncomfortable relationship.
I don't know what the deal with Eileen is. She still liked you. Maybe she hoped that you two would end up together somewhere down the road, though not yet. This is pure speculation on my part, you understand.
I still think well of Eileen, to the extent I know her. She just had a baby with her husband after much struggle. I liked the picture, but I did not comment.
She admitted to being uncomfortable when I told her I was going to see Sarah tonight and jokingly suggested biting would be involved because Sarah has a continued and growing interest with vampires and I am a minor scholar on them.
You may not be biting Eileen, but you surely are baiting her.
Sarah and Kate are competition for my attention. Not necessarily in a romantic way, but not a day goes by that I do not think of them and love them. That could be intimidating for anyone else whom I seek to make time for.
With the benefit of hindsight, I would like to punch you that you keep saying things like this.
If you want to be worthy of someone else, you need to let these immature and unhealthy crushes go.
Certainly Sarah is not vying for my affections, romantic or otherwise, so she has no need to be concerned over Eileen (aside from adoring that Eileen suggested she [Eileen] was jealous of her [Sarah.])
You have no right to suggest it, even if it has more than a morsel of truth to it.
Kate, I shall not speculate. Even when we were together, she so rarely confessed anything like jealousy or envy about other girls.
She did a few times. But, as I seem to keep reminding you, she is not wanting for company right now. Why would she be jealous when she could snap her fingers, and one of her boys would be in her dorm?
Nonetheless, I am very happy. I had an adventure and I shared it with you.
Fine. I like that you are sharing adventures and not simply vague emotions. I can and will still be frustrated that you behave this way, especially when you are not too subtly trying to play women who have not met off one another in hopes one of them will be pushed far enough to date you. That makes my skin crawl. .