TheBanyanTree: The first boyfriend gets his pink slip

[Tobie Shapiro]

May 9, 20000003


Dear Lovers and EX Lovers, All,

	I'm leafing through this huge, 200 page spiral binder which I 
have not named.  I buy these in quantity from "The Binder Bin" (or 
any local stationary stationery store - where the paper doesn't blow 
away).  Since I swore an oath to write every day without fail, I have 
started filling these things up, every page, both sides, maybe three 
or four of them a year.  Maybe more; I haven't checked.  I found 
something dated March 10, 2003 that snapped me between the eyes.  So 
here.


Monday, March 10, 2003

	Feyna borrowed a line of mine to use with Josh.  She was 
asking me about relationships and what happens when people break up.

	With a look of innocent surprise and bewilderment, she said 
she'd always figured that splitting up would be a logical thing, and 
that two people would be talking to each other saying things such as 
(and here, I shoot myself out of my own canon of fantasy and deadly 
experience):

1)  Well, I really need someone more social than you are.
2)  And I need more solitude than you do.
1)  I had hoped we would be compatible, but it turns out that I'm 
dissatisfied with your lack of desire to articulate your feelings.
2)  Yes, you're right.  I can't.  I don't.
1)  Perhaps, we should separate.
2)  Yes.  It's a sad thing.
1)  Yes.
2)  Goodbye.
1)  Goodbye.

	The scene she envisioned, in her head and her expectations, 
was lousy with civility,  civility that seldom happens anywhere near 
the human heart and nowhere near bedtime.

	I told her that it's seldom pleasant, and frequently painful. 
I even had to break the news to her that it's usually ugly, even 
infantile:  grown men and women (men and men, women and women, 
transsexuals and gendered non-pan-sexuals, etc.) stomping their feet, 
shouting epithets and hateful things at each other, purposefully 
wounding someone they once thought they treasured.  And then, they 
each cringe away, reeking of regret, anger and longing, take a 
breath, mourn for a while, act like idiots, eat themselves into 
stupors, or drink until their shoes are soggy, write mean, desperate 
letters, finally cool off, gain balance and say, "Thank God, I did 
that.  I wish I'd done it sooner."

	The differences are in degrees, decibels, time frame, tempo, 
style and method of madness.  But it does resolve.  And with skill 
and a nod to guilt and emptiness, we learn something and move on.

	She asked me for and example of something  I'd said to 
someone I was breaking up with.  She wanted to hear something pithy.

	I repeated my line to Andrew (the cheapest emotional miser 
I've ever known).  I told him, "Go grow up all over somebody else." 
Feyna liked that so much she used it as a message on Josh's cell 
phone.

	That was last night.  Today, when I arrived to pick Feyna up 
at her orchestra rehearsal, she looked so settled and her sea so calm 
that I was afraid she may have been given or given herself a snow 
job.   If so, well, she'll be going through this again with Josh, the 
roller coaster ride and the moments of decision.  Again and again, 
again and again.

	It's really more nostalgia than I ever wanted to experience.

	The record scratches again.  We hear the same one and a half 
seconds of a disjointed awful discordant spit of music and the same 
segment of a word
		over and over and over and over

	"...be all alo... ...be all alo... ...be all alo... ...be all alo... "



Tobie
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net