our styles just didn't coalesce

I will forever remember that cold morning. 

I'd just returned from traveling cross-country in a beat-up Chevy on a month-long road trip in a quest for spiritual renewal. 

She was in absolute blah, standing by the picture window, looking typically unavailable, visibly moved by the leaves changing in the front yard. 

"How were those long, lost hours in the Hollywood Hills?" she said. 

"Like a platoon of soldiers searching for truth amidst an army of lies," I said. 

"That's deep," she said, and gradually, we slipped into some sort of shared psychosis. 

"I've been doing some thinking," I said. 

"Did it hurt?" 

"You were right. I have given up on life. I need something to bring me back so I can start caring about something again. Where I really am or ever have been remains anyone's guess." 

She shrugged. "That's the price you pay for living the life of the oblique mystic minstrel. Then tomorrow morning, you'll wake up, tell me how bored you are, and ask me how to resuscitate those facets of your personality that drive your creative spirit." 

"My myth-telling surrealist poet days are over." 

She laughed. "I've always found your tangled, impenetrable writings rather charming. In a self-aggrandizing, self-pitying sort of way." 

I ignored that. "I wanna come back," I said.

She shook her head. "I love you." "There's only one man in my life right now, and that's Jesus. He's the only man I can submit to, the only man who can teach me anything." 

"I taught you how to make a whistle using bamboo." 

"But you don't know how to teach me to be a better me. You can't teach me how to live in Christ and be built up in Him." 

"How do you know?" 

"Because you don't even like people. How do you expect to teach me how to live in Christ when you're such a misanthrope?" 

"I'm not a misanthrope. I have some trust issues. Lemme tell you something, you want me to teach you to be a better you? I'll teach you how to be even better than a better you! While I was in Northern California, I went to this little motivational seminar where we all had to firewalk on hot stones as part of a test of our faith. Do you wanna be taught? Trust me, you'll learn a lot very quickly. I'm serious; there was a very definite divine influence in those stones. I was transcended." 

"Interesting how there are no references to firewalking in the bible." 

"It could have been edited out, you don't know. There've been more revisions to The Bible than an Arnold Schwarzenegger script, for god's sake. Look at all the translations. The interpretations. You can't even get a roomful of scholars to all agree. And you're gonna trust King James?"

"Yes, you know all the angles, and you choose to stay on the outside. You choose." 

"Because people like you continue to push me to the outside. All you people who wanna convert me." 

"You push yourself. And I have never tried to convert you."

"It's the language you use. The nuances, the subtleties. That superior sort of holier-than-thou… that personal relationship you have with Jesus. How you're going to heaven because you have that relationship, and I'm not because I'm a Jew and I don't live in Christ." 

"You're crazy." 

"And you're a bigot!" 

I don't remember anything else that was said that morning. But I remember that slap. And I remember her eyes welling up, and I remember those broken sobs. And I remember driving home without any heat while a few pattering drops of rain came down, followed by snow and sleet. 

When the phone rang at noon the following day, the voice at the other end said, "I forgive you for calling me a bigot." 

I said, "I love you." 

The voice said, "I love you, too."