Story problem

Math and stories intermingle

Saturday 10/07/17 (23)

“I hate story problems,” she says.
“Why?” I ask.
It’s like they’re trying to make math real and failing. It’s just a cover up.”

Eithne, I think, they’re trying to recreate reality. They’re trying to teach you how to look beneath the surface, to find the numbers.
“There are numbers under everything,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I prefer to live in the real world.”

She’s mad at me for my admission that I’m waiting until the 29th day, before making a decision. It’s day 23 after she broke up with me. 6 days before the mark, the 6 matching the 6 days after she broke up with me that she told me she wanted me back. She claims that number is arbitrary, just me holding a boundary for my own cruel amusement.

I tell her that if I am going to step back in with her, it needs to be on my terms. I need to come from a centered place. That sure the numbers are arbitrary, but they’re necessary. She doesn’t buy it. Numbers are barriers to reality, not the portals into deeper knowledge I know them to be, but she doesn’t need to buy it, just endure.

There are numbers I cling to. Lines of arithmetic that remind me what’s important. Geometries that orient me. Storylines I like to follow.

Numbers that trail unseen. The whole world ensouled.

---

Thursday 10/12/17 (28)

I wake up around 8:45, get up and let the chickens out, and then crawl back up into my bed, ensconced in its loft, to write. At 12:50, I find I have done less writing than I had hoped. My phone service stopped last night, despite all my work yesterday to set up automatic billing. All calls redirect to Verizon and I reactivate and pay the 44.99  over the phone. Then I immediately start getting phone calls.

A woman calls, I answer and can barely hear her voice, just that it’s female and fairly young. She hangs up. I look at the number and decide that it was probably the devil. Who else calls from LA with a 666 number?

Then, 10 minutes later Mama calls, wondering where I am, even though I told her 5 times my schedule was different this week. She asks if I’m going to be there at all and I say no. I hadn’t decided, but in that moment it seems that I have. We’ll play it by ear.

I’m just crawling down for breakfast when the 3rd phone call comes. It’s Peter, calling from the Port Townsend Storyteller’s guild. He wants me to be one of the storytellers at his event. The auditions are next Sunday. I’m excited, but as so many storytellers - he likes to talk. It’s 1:15 when I finally get down to make breakfast.

I’m doing dishes shirtless to loud lady Gaga when Eithne arrives, right on time. I told her I’d be done at 3:00, but I’m running about fifteen minutes late. She’d joked she wanted to see the show - it seems to fit. Once she’s tired of ogling me, she goes out to play with the chickens wandering free range.

She wanted to come early and write, but hadn’t slept well the night before, and ended up taking a nap in my bed instead. I’m aiming for dinner at 5:00, so start in immediately so I have an hour and a half. There’s only 1 cup of white rice, and I’m not sure it’s enough, so I end up adding Risotto to my sticky rice. It actually works quite well.

I work slowly, chopping up the other sushi ingredients while I wait for the rice to get done. I strain the chicken broth I started the night before, and get it heating for miso soup. The tuna comes out of the fridge, successfully thawed from its frozen form Tuesday. At 4:00 I start in on the soup in earnest - sauteing onions in the cast iron, and adding miso, ginger, and soy sauce until I’m satisfied with the broth.

The rice gets fluffed with honey and vinegar and set to cool. Udon noodles, broccoli florets, mushrooms, and tuna all go into the soup, and it ends up being a lot. Maybe 4 times as much as I need for tonight’s dinner and lunch tomorrow - ah well. The soup is finished long before I’m done with the sushi. I made about a cup too much rice, and keep making rolls until I’m out of ingredients, playing with different combinations of tuna, carrots, cabbage, and my leftover sauteed mushrooms and onions. Home made mayonnaise makes its way into the ones without avocado. They get rolled with rice on the outside, fish eggs feathered across the top. It’s 5:20 when I poke my head upstairs and summon her to dinner

---

Tuesday 10/10/17 (26)

“What’s the most romantic dinner?” I ask. She’s asked me out on a date, a concert, and offered to come pick me up. Knowing my tendencies, she offers that perhaps I could make us dinner before so I don’t feel bad for dragging her the ½ hour drive from town.

“. . . Are you trying to kill me?” she texts back.
“A little death. (If we’re french)” I joke.
“Not if you don’t kiss me damnit.” She complains. “I mean that dance was pretty close, but . . . anyway  . . . dinner.”
“??? What do you want?”
“Besides you?”
“For dinner -_- “
“Besides you?” a pause “Ok ok ok, serious now. How about some Pan de amore bread?”
“Oh gods . . .” I lament. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“Something fried in a Pan? Pan fried steak? Ok ok ok . . .I’m really thinking though.” a pause. “I like . . . . . . . . tacos.”
“You eat tacos approximately 5 times a week.” I point out. “I’m sorry but I don’t think that counts as special.”
“Burritos then.” she counters. “I think the most romantic dinner is with the person you love. . . How about a surprise? Since I clearly can’t handle this conversation like an adult.”
“My parents did have tostadas on their first date. I guess there’s precedence.”
“TACOS!! I F*****G LOVE TACOS. GOOD IDEA.”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll surprise you.”
“No tacos? :( ”

---

Thursday 10/12/17 (28)

“These are Japanese tacos,” I tell her as I introduce her to the food. I’ve served her soup, and we start with that, pausing before to hold hands and breathe the 3 breaths of my people. I silently thank the food, thank her, and arrive in those breaths. No words, but so much spoken in silence.

We eat and talk. I pace myself on sushi, waiting until I’m sure she’s had as much as she likes before I really go all in, but in the end even I’m full and there’s a 3rd left over. She’s shamelessly flirtatious - what does she have to lose? - and I find myself compelled in the thrill of it.

She’s wearing a maroon sweater, I see, now that she’s taken off her coat. A week ago we were reading through my “how to manipulate me” piece - she had asked how to get me back, I had told her I wrote a whole piece on that - and in the midst of it she latched onto one of the freebies. I find women who wear red more attractive, men who wear red more dangerous, I wrote.

She’s been joking about it all week, threatening to come in a red dress, and while the flirtation has been fun, I’ve actually been worried about it. I’ve seen her in skirts, and she pulls them off, but I have never seen her in bright colors.

At dance, after I had tried all afternoon to get her to follow me - she came to me slow and willing to go anywhere I desired, trying too hard to listen to where I wanted her,  afraid of the consequences of stepping out of line. Halfway through our first dance she asked me how I was doing.
“I’m in dangerous territory,” I told her “Something isn’t right.” The blood drained out of her face, I could see it - all her trying wasn’t enough. She wasn’t enough. I kept going.
“Can you let loose? Try less?”
“What!? Are you sure?” She asked incredulously.
“I’m sure.”

I ended up almost dropping her on the floor. We ended up in a beautiful dance. When she danced with me as if on eggshells it felt as if I had destroyed a beautiful thing.

I was afraid of her showing up in a red dress like that. That she would look like a doll dressed up to fit my fancy. That she would be trying to be someone but herself when it’s her that I love, but I shouldn’t have worried. She looked at red dresses and came to the same conclusion, pulled out a maroon sweater, the same color as her trademark shorts that have driven me crazy a thousand times, and walked into my seduction in a way uniquely herself.

How very valuable.

I end up packing the most of my soup into a gallon jar for her to take home and feed at her community potluck. The remainder goes into the propane fridge to await my return on Friday evening.

As we’re walking out the door I remember the wishbone from the chicken the night before. I bring it out and hand her a side. As always I wish for her to get her wish, as always remembering the time Mama and I split a wishbone and each wished for the other to get their wish, creating a rebounding wish that echoed out into infinity and had us giggling for a long time.

This woman knows her mind though, and she takes only a moment to make it up. I can see it written in her eyes, and when the bone snaps, and she gets the big end, I revel in her smile.

---

Thursday 10/05/17 (21)

“What are you doing next Thursday night?” she asked me. We’d come to a pause in a deep conversation.

“Hanging out with you?” I ask, and then reconsider. There’s no dance next Wednesday and I’m not working in town so I was thinking of just spending the whole week at home, and not going into town at all. I type this out and send it just as her message pops up.

“Yeah, I mean I hope we hang out sooner than that, but I have 2 tickets to see one of my favorite bands that night. Wanted to know if you’d go on a date with me.”

“Actually thinking of not coming into town at all this week, still undecided,” my message reads. “Who and where?” I add, intrigued.

There’s a pause, a long pause, finally she types: “phew, we’re just ticking down all my triggers.”

“You okay?” I ask, confused.

“I thought you would be excited,” she types back, “I thought, ‘would Pan want to go on a date with me?’ sure, no brainer. But whatever, I feel dumb.”

It takes me a bit to figure out what she’s talking about - the seeming rejection. We talk late. At one point she closes her computer and stalks off, but comes back. Eventually she comes back to center and we call it a night.

The morning finds a beautifully crafted thank you for the night before. An invitation with all the details, and a link to the music in case I need to listen to it first. The assurance that there probably will be dancing, and that she’ll be okay if I say no.

“I’d be delighted.” I message her back. “Thank you.”

---

Thursday 10/12/17 (28)

It’s a nice drive. She has the music off most of the time for a change, and so we talk the whole way into town.

“I have something important to ask you, but not yet,” she teases.
“I’ll make sure you don’t forget,” I assure her.
“Oh, I won’t forget.”

The concert is at the Cellar Door, the same place she dropped me off at after breaking up with me. This is only the 2nd time I’ve been there since they moved. We’re stopped at the door by a friendly young man, and Eithne gives her name to be cross referenced with a list. We both get a green key imprinted on our hands.

We go and sit, there’s a long table that’s half covered in CD’s, but seems unoccupied on our end. She sits on the bench against the wall, I at 90 degrees, facing the band. My coat goes on the back of the chair, scarf draped over it. Her things pile next to her on the seat.

She’s warm, excited, bright with hope, and shy with worry. Every movement seems transparent, a storybook style of seduction.

“Would you like anything to drink?” She asks.
“Everything non alcoholic is going to be full of sugar.” I remind her.
“They have tea,” she points to the menu.
“It looks like it’s all caffeinated.”
“. . . If I find you something that’s not caffeinated or sweetened or alcoholic - will you have some?”
“Sure.” I’m not trying to be difficult. She goes off and comes back with some peppermint tea for me, and a non alcoholic fruit juice for herself that she insists I sip. It’s a clear repetition of what she’s been telling me all night. If she had gotten alcohol I couldn’t have kissed her. I don’t believe that it mixes well with consent, and she knows that. This is her saying - If you want me, here I am.

After we’ve both sipped a little she asks me if I’ve ever been to the photo booth in the back. I’ve never been to any photo booth, and tell her so. She’s shocked and says I have to come. We go figure out how it works together, sharing the single seat inside. As it’s loading we decide what the 4 pictures are going to be. The first will be normal, smiling, the second silly, the third crazy, and the 4th . . . she pretends not to have an idea for the 4th. “We’ll just leave it open to whatever comes,” she says. Kiss me. Her eyes demand.

We don’t get warning, so the first picture ends up being our normal faces bland and waiting. For the last I put my forehead against hers, but I do not kiss her. Fortunately she seems unbreakable tonight, toppling between confidence and care.

The first band is not Lemolo, but they’re playing along to a recording, which makes me think they’re a local band copying Lemolo but they’re not. The woman is just the curve of woman that I appreciate most, dancing to her music as she sings along with herself--the mic cord draped around the back of her neck. The man holds his electric guitar phallically as his fingers dance nimbly up and down its length.

Eithne summons me to sit next to her. “You have to feel this.” and sure enough the base is vibrating through the bench and wall behind, so that sitting there I can feel it through my bones. As has become our custom of late, we sit with legs pressed against each other. I asked why she finally started giving me contact points instead of making me ask for them. She told me she finally realized it let me read her. Unspoken, that she is finally ready to let herself be read.

On the break between bands a man comes over to talk to her, and I scootch out of their way. When I introduce myself he says we’ve met before at magic, but I can’t place him. He leaves his things on my chair and saunters off, returning occasionally to add a comment. He’s the only one who stands close when Lemolo asks everyone to come up close. I find I like him for this.

I’m feeling shy and not like being the first on the dance floor. Eithne hurt her elbow and is having a hard time dancing, an excuse, I think, to avoid ruining this with a partner dance still not quite ironed out. I ask about her elbow and she defers.
“It’s stupid.”
“Eithne, tell me.”
“I went to the bunkers yesterday, and climbed up to the secret spot you showed me, but then when I went to slide down I slammed my elbow on a pipe with the whole weight of my body.”
“That’s not stupid, why would that be stupid?”
“I went there because I missed you.”

Fortunately the table behind us gets up to dance in their entirety, I give 1 last beckoning look at Eithne, and then get up and begin dancing.

---

Sunday 10/08/17 (24)

I think best when I dance. The constant motion of hands, the beat of feet, the rhythm of breath - in dance I think with my entire body.

And where lying in bed with nothing but the still dark to pin my thoughts has the illusion of reason - thoughts set in a line that leads at last to a conclusion I gathered -  thinking while dancing has momentum and constant movement. It is hard to stop a thought that uncoils from your body, difficult to reconsider when you’re halfway through a leap. Dancing thoughts have impact.

So it comes to me while dancing, she has asked me to a concert on the 28th day, an annoying 1 day before I am allowed to step in. I have been resolving myself to hold that tension, frustrated that the next time I’ll likely see her is 6 days later.

6 matching the 6 days after she broke up with me, that she said she wanted me back?

It is while dancing that my body suddenly remembers the power of 28. 1 moon’s turn. 1 true month, 1 cycle of life, death, and rebirth. 28 is a woman’s number, a number beneath the surface of things, a number mirrored in every cell of her body.

29 is only powerful in its relationship to the moon 28 + 1, it is a step forward beyond a cycle.

Step in a week after and we are making relationship with the woman who wanted me back. The hormonal mix that had calmed and considered. I don’t fear her. I fear the woman who could let me go in 1 premenstrual week. Allow me to pass on an emotional flood. It is this woman 1 week before the moon turns dark, who frightens me.

And so, I realize as I am dancing, she’s the one I need to talk to. She -  I must step towards or stand in fear every month of what could be.

They both have their poetry, a low spin informs me. You don’t have to step towards 28 if it’s going poorly.

Step in when you feel seduced, say my feet.

But when the time comes, says my chest, you have that option.

---

Thursday 10/12/17 (28)

The lead singer is a tall woman, willowy and blonde. On a pause she points to me, and says “You. I like your moves!”

I’ve been struggling to move, this music is beautiful, layered like a pacific northwesterner, with a beat that’s more complicated than it has any right to be. I often find myself stuck in the fastest form of it, bellydancing until my hips ache and my center shakes. It was at the old Cellar Door that I learned how to do a belly roll for the first time. Watch how I’ve grown.

I pause and go sit next to Eithne again.
“Okay,” she says, “feel free to refuse if you like, but my family is meeting tomorrow night, and you’re invited. My sister and her husband will be there, my brother can’t make it.”

I consider. I’ll be tired after work. Do I want to give her 2 days in a row? . . .  and then I do the math. Tomorrow, the 29th day. She has arranged this so that we will be together on the day I said I was waiting for.

At the same time she’s been calling my boundaries stupid, arbitrary, and irrelevant - she was listening to me, and made her plans around my lines in the sand. Rather than push me as so many women would, she’s willing to wait - though not a moment longer than she has to.

“Yes, please,” I say. She smiles in surprise - she’d expected me to take longer than that. I’ve been taking time to think through each step until now, but this requires no thought.

This woman is incredible. I feel heard, and in that hearing, loved, and in that love, loving in return. It rises up in me, inexorable, unstoppable, breaking up through my chest, through the boundaries I’m holding with her, washing through my thorns, to crash into a foam of raw desire. I want to kiss her, or take her on the table - or something to let her know what this means.

I take my head and bend it over to rest it on her shoulder. It’s uncomfortable given our heights. She’s only 2 inches shorter than me, but I have to slide way down on the bench. I keep it there for as long as I can.

The ratio between what I feel, and what I can communicate is always insurmountable. 1/1’000th is not actually all that different than 2/1’0000ths. I could give her everything, and perhaps 10/1’000ths might get through, and what of the 990 that remain buried in my chest?

And so, this little gesture does not seem smaller than any other. All I can do is give this 0.5/1’000th of a kiss, and know inside what it means to me.

When the last song ends, and the band begins to break down the set, I turn to her.

“Would you like to take me home with you?”
She looks at me with those big eyes of indeterminate color, wavering between olive and brown, wavering between exasperation and delight. “I wasn’t going to ask.”
“I know, and that’s why I offer.”

And with that we make our way home.

---

Friday 10/13/17 (29)

It’s Friday the 13th. A good day for endings, a good day for breaking, and so a good day for beginnings too. We awake together in our shattered mirror, wondering what has died and finding among the fragments of ourselves the carrion that will feed us dancing forward. It feels right.

But as we awake, drifting up from dream, I find that part of my mind working on the symbols beneath our lives, unwinding the connections to answer the eternal question: what story am I in?

When we got together the first time I was, without a doubt, held holy in ‘The Firebird.’ I watched a single feather burning before me, yet unmelted in all its fire. The king ordered more. I crossed the ocean and sat in my tent surrounded by my finery. Patient as a stone I waited until she came. I lulled her asleep until she awoke to find herself delivered to the king. She ordered more. I crossed the ocean again for her bridal dress, hidden in the depths - and when I returned she ordered for me a burning cauldron. I leapt in rather than waiting to be dragged, and when I stood up in the boiling water again I found I had not burned away.

But then the story shifted, in the way of fairytales. Coming near the end I found myself emerging from the cauldron unburnt, but now enchanted into a frog. I watched her golden ball roll into this cauldron, now a well, and brought it back to her. At once a little girl, and a self sufficient woman she walked away and I followed her hopping up the palace steps to bang on the door. “Let me in! Let me in!” I cried.  Grudgingly she gave me a place by her seat, wrinkled her nose when I’d stretch out my tongue to catch a passing moth, and gave me tidbits from her plate - but when I asked to sleep upon her pillow, she picked me up and hurled me as hard as she could against the wall. “I’m done with you little frog!” she screamed.

But splattered there, against the wall, body broken into goo, she saw a prince, and came crying to take him back, but my faithful servant had placed 3 great bands of iron around his heart, lest it should break in 2. As we rode back to my palace 3 times the great bands around my heart cracked and I though the carriage beneath us was losing a wheel. In fact I was learning  a language to feel.

And where does the story move from here? Do we live happily in the ever after? Do we pass into sequels, just repeats of what has come before? Or can we step into new stories, striking in their structures, and inviting our souls to stretch where they have not tread before?

There are as many stories as there are stars in the sky, numbered and numberless. Perhaps my numbers will lead me to which one comes next.

---

Thursday 10/12/17 (28)

We arrive home, and I walk in, following her in the dark, wondering as I always wonder, how much she can see, and how much she needs me to guide. I take the big bottle of soup and put it in her fridge on her shelf. I had wondered if I would ever open this fridge again.

“I have a surprise for you,” she calls from her room. I go to see.
“Woah!” She’s gotten a full sized bed, set on a wide wooden stand, with space beneath, and a headboard besides.
“I decided I was finally enough of an adult to get a real bed,” she tells me. I laugh. It is a real step.

She goes to brush her teeth and I change into pajama pants - the ones I wondered if I would ever want to wear again. When she’s done I go brush my teeth in front of her mirror. Reading once more the rules for being a wolf, taped to its side.

I sit down on the bed. This is not the same bed I wondered if I would ever sit on, but it is still her bed. It is here on this floor that I found the hard truth that I cannot contain her. That this woman is more than my capacity to honor. That I am not enough.

Yet somehow beside that truth sits Eithne in the moment, lighting candles with her butane lighter with the efficiency and will of a huntress, and then sitting, her back against the headboard, looking at me with the eyes of a lover. Somewhere beside that self contained power that I can’t hold, is someone who wants me to wrap my arms around her anyway.

I find myself centered. Watching from some distance through still-loving eyes. I set my knee against her thigh as the contact point I need, and begin.

“Eithne? - Would you like to be in a relationship with me?”
She’s not a simple woman, and I love her for not saying yes. “What would that look like?” She says instead.
I describe. The specifics of last time are turned over but left as they are. She’s shifted but not as far as changing anything. It feels good to just say where I am in relation to all this. She doesn’t want to be facebook official. I explain I don’t like feeling hidden. She tells the story about telling a mutual mentor of ours - and my heart fills. That is enough.

I explain the weird power dynamics of the last polyamorous ordeal, and she explains that she doesn’t want anyone else right now. That it stands open as an emblem, and I cede her this as important. Somehow the power in this too seems lessened now.

And then I move to what really is important. “I need you to let me love you in the way that I love.”
“Yes,” she says, “I’ll try.”
“I need to know that I won’t be destroyed in exactly the same way next time.”
“I’ve learned my lesson,” she promises. “I’ll destroy you differently next time.”
“I need you to let me hold you,” I say. This is the hardest iron band to break. Her eyes grow shiny with tears not yet sent free. This thing that she wants so much, but fights so desperately against.
“I’ll try,” she says, and it is enough.

“Is there anything else needs saying?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Eithne will you be in a relationship with me?”
“Yes.”
“May I kiss you?”

To which there is no answer, because she has begun kissing me.

---

Saturday 10/07/17 (23)

Papa has just purchased a Eulers disk that sits on the table on its low friction mirror. Once spun it keeps spinning an absurdly long time, hindered only by air resistance and the friction it cannot help but encounter. There are magnetic arrows you can attach to this scientific marvel to make it a tool for common divination.

Eithne is here for dinner for the first time since her exile. This is the night she will tell me she hates story problems, the night I will tell her the numbers that draw me on. We show her the disk, spinning ever onward. I explain the physics of it.

I give her the first physics experiment I ever witnessed, the one that made me fall in love with the world as containing more than I could have imagined. You have 2 identical steel balls and you put them in a frame that holds them at the same height. 1 just drops when released, and the other has a spring that propels it sideways.

We are asked to determine which ball is going to hit the ground first. Obviously everyone points out that the 1 that was just dropped will. Then we are asked what we will hear when that happens - 2 taps as each ball hits at a different time.

The teacher releases them with a showman’s flourish, and the whole class echoes with the unified tap of both balls hitting the floor at the exact same moment. The teacher explains that force at right angles to each other have no impact on one another. That you could shoot a bullet and drop a bullet and they would hit the ground at the exact same moment because gravity pulls them in exactly the same way.

So it is with this. Angular momentum - the spin that you give the top - keeps it spinning regardless of the pull of gravity. This disk has a perfect ratio of momentum to air resistance, the twin of its imperfect ratio of circumference to diameter. The spin at continual right angles to the ground keeps spinning.

I tell her all this, and perhaps she understands. Then I add on the arrow and ask her to take it for a spin. She sets it in motion, and only then do I ask her to pick a side, designate a direction for yes, and another for no.

“What’s the question?” She asks. I shrug, meet her eyes.
“Yes or no?”
Right is “yes” she decides. She watches expectantly as the arrow trails between possibilities, cringing as it trails slower over the no, holding her breath as it edges across the yes. Finally it comes to a stop, dead center pointing right.

“Yes!” she exhults.

We’re talking when I pick it up and spin it again. She watches with worried eyes when it begins to slow. The disk slows for a long time before gravity eventually finds itself at something less than 90 degrees and begins to drag it down. The disk slows with a resounding buzz and thwap, pointing right again. Yes.

Absently as the dinner is coming to a close she picks the disk up again, and sets it spinning. Once begun she cannot stop it, only watch. The disk twists, and perhaps her held breath makes a difference in the subtleties of this spin, half a rotation finding the subtle difference between yes and no, a binary set to break her heart even as she does not know the meaning of it.

I watch her face more than the prophet she’s topped off. I don’t know what yes or no mean, but I know the meaning in her assumption that yes is the choice she’s betting on. I know the meaning of the excitement in her eyes, I am just a prize, I watch her hopeful face as for the 3rd time it comes up - Yes.