“It was physically real. I could even smell the perfume of it.”
“What did it smell like?”
“There was a sweetness to it. There was a honey and almond quality to it.”
“Was the car moving through it, too?”
“The car went away. It was just my body being carried forward on the current of it.”
“Sometimes when you talk about these things, I want to believe you, and I want to understand, because I do believe you, but it is very hard to believe you, and it is very hard to try to know how to understand.”
“Because you aren’t yet seeing with the eyes of the Spirit.”
“Because I haven’t had experiences like this, and I’ve never known anyone else who has. There is a certain light that gets in your eyes when you talk about them, and it is a little bit frightening to me.”
“That’s something you have to let go of.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t know how.”
“You do it by doing it.”
“That’s easy to say, but if it were easy to do, wouldn’t many other people do it? If nothing else, to speak the tongues of angels and harvest the gold dust and sell it at market rate?”
“When you speak of it that way, it makes me angry.”
“I don’t mean to make you angry, and I am not making fun. I like you and possibly want to love you. I’m just trying to look at what you’re saying from all different directions and turn it over in my mind that way.”
“That’s not letting go. That’s holding onto control.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Maybe it would be better not to say anything else for a while.”
“Okay. All right. Okay.”
•
“Rise and shine.”
“I’m so tired.”
“It’s morning.”
“It’s dark.”
“The idea is to hit the slopes early.”
“Really, I’m wiped. I’m sorry.”
“I’m turning on the light.”
“Please don’t. Really. I don’t know if it’s the altitude or the nonstop going or just maybe general emotional exhaustion. I’m not trying to bail out on you. I’m still willing to ski. But my body doesn’t want to get up so early right now, and I feel like I should listen to it so I don’t get sick.”
“It smells like sickness in here. Your breath has a sinus quality to it.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.”
“The only way out is through. Please, get up. Let’s ski.”
“You know people there. Why don’t you go on without me, and let me catch up with you this afternoon.”
“Really?”
“Please understand.”
“Really? This is really the choice you are making?”
“Please?”
•
“There are many ways in which I feel more like your mother than like a person with whom you might be falling in love.”
“This is because I didn’t go skiing this morning.”
“It’s so many things. You are, I have come to believe, a fundamentally passive person.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like it was me who drove all the way here from Colorado Springs.”
“I can’t drive a stick shift.”
“I offered to teach you.”
“Don’t you think it would be horrible to try to learn while driving up the steepest mountains in the whole country?”
“Those are in Alaska.”
“Those drop-offs, though.”
“But that’s a spirit of fear.”
“That’s a spirit of safety. I want to be safe. I want you to be safe. I don’t mind learning to drive a stick, but I want to learn in a parking lot.”
“I have to ask you to clean up after I make dinner, or to do the dishes.”
“We’re staying in all these houses where friends of yours are out of town for the winter. I don’t know what I should and shouldn’t be touching or when it is an imposition to take the initiative. It’s a situation where I feel like you’re in the driver’s seat and I’m mostly taking my cues from you.”
“I’m thinking about gender roles here. It seems to me like the man should be taking the leadership roles in a relationship. But you are always taking your cues from me. I am the de facto leader, even though I am a woman.”
“There have been many instances where I have tried to take the lead, but you have made it clear that you don’t like the choice I make.”
“That’s what I mean by passive. You just concede the high ground to me.”
“I don’t think you would respond well to being strong-armed.”
“With love you have to do it. With love.”
“To me the more loving thing would be more of a give and take. More of a partnering kind of thing.”
“I feel like because you are so passive that one day the anger is going to come spilling out. I feel like you don’t tell me when you are really angry.”
“I have only one time been angry, but I knew it wasn’t right to be angry, so I didn’t say anything about it to you.”
“When?”
“When you were still living in Florida and you went to visit that guy in North Carolina and you rode on the back of his motorcycle and you called me and told me what a good time you were having there on the back of his motorcycle.”
“That’s true. That was fun. Really, truly fun. I loved visiting him, and I loved going for a ride on his motorcycle.”
“That made me angry, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t feel like I had the right to say anything because I don’t own you, we aren’t committed, you have the right to make your own choices.”
“So why get angry?”
“Because I wanted you to be having fun with me and not that guy on that motorcycle.”
“You don’t own a motorcycle.”
“I don’t even like motorcycles. People I knew kept getting killed on motorcycles.”
“So you were worried about me getting killed?”
“No, I was mostly worried about you having fun. And one other thing.”
“What?”
“I know some women who had orgasms from riding motorcycles. I had a picture of you with your arms around his waist, riding those mountain roads, holding onto him, having an orgasm.”
“So you weren’t concerned about whether I was going to get killed?”
“Did you have an orgasm?”
“Of all of the questions you should never have asked, this is the number one question you never should have asked.”
•
“Your flight leaves in six hours, so I think we ought to leave in three. That gives us an hour to get to the airport and an hour for security and baggage and another hour cushion in case we hit bad traffic.”
“Let me finish packing my things and then do you want to have dinner together before I leave?”
“You can have dinner at the airport, and it’s too early anyway, don’t you think? I don’t think I’ll be hungry until much later.”
“The reason I was thinking dinner was I have a feeling that after today we may not keep seeing each other anymore.”
“I haven’t decided about that yet.”
“If that is what happens, I want to spend one last nice time with you and let you know that I cared about you and that I care about you.”
“That’s something I want, too. I’m going into the bedroom and lie down while you finish packing. I’m tired, and I know you’re tired. When you’re done packing, why don’t you come into the bedroom and lie down and rest?”
•
“I love holding you.”
“Shh.”
“I mean it. This is something I will take with me when I leave.”
“Shh.”
•
“The reason I can’t let you kiss me is the same reason as always. Even though right now I want you to kiss me. Do you understand?”