- I am not here to exaggerate these kinds
of things. I am not here to make this stuff up. Truth happens. Reality
pinches, rides up, makes you start and shiver in utter amazement.
- Sometimes the differences are razor sharp
and dazzling. Sometimes the sexes can only look at each other across our
vast chasms of insanity and mind-set and unique psycho-emotional temperament,
and laugh. And then cry. And then have sex. And then carry on as if nothing
fantastically bizarre is happening here.
-
- What you are about to read is exactly
as I remember it, though it is possible my memory is slightly hazy, tainted
from the snifter of Havana Club and the daylong shopping and the morning
sex and the earlier argument about proper cleanup of parrot poop from my
fabulous couch. Plus the fact that it all took place while wearing sweatpants
and bras and underwear, in various combinations, depending on who you're
looking at.
-
- Nevertheless, I stand by every word.
Except for the part about the screaming. That may be slightly exaggerated.
But not by much.
-
- It took place, as most epiphanies do,
in the bedroom. It was evening, one of those weird warm balmy ones that
San Francisco gets about as frequently as a politician gets a conscience,
with a hint of spring rain in the air and a breath of new life in the world,
a time when you have the windows open just a little and the air smells
like a trademark urban admixture of fresh growth and divine hope and SUV
exhaust. You know the kind.
-
- We were, as mentioned, mostly dressed.
We were moving normally, putting fresh sheets on the bed, chatting about
something random, a friend's wedding or the nature of a benign universe
or if Mary Magdalene was bisexual or I don't know what. It does not matter.
It was somewhere around 8 o'clock. I do not know if the time matters. How
do you mark moments of lucid transcendence?
- Suddenly, it happened. It happened so
fast I can barely piece it together. I was mid-sentence, uttering something
that I'm sure was terribly profound and famously quotable, when my girl
suddenly let out this startled squeal, loud and jarring and quick, and
instantly dropped to the floor, where she began exclaiming, over and over
in a fast rapid breath, "Oh my God it's OK, I got you, I got you,
I got you I got you I got you it's OK don't worry I got you shhh."
-
- I had no idea what was happening. Was
it a seizure? A weird epileptic fit? A divine visitation inspired by the
giant lintballs with which she was now face to face just under my bed?
I could only pause all movements, and wait.
-
- She stood up. She had something cupped
in her hands. Aha! The window behind her, by the side of the bed, was open
less than a foot. She spun around and made the universal gesture of tossing-an-insect-out-the-window,
all while still muttering, "It's OK there you go now you're OK,"
in a fast, soothing voice. She then quickly closed the window so whatever
it was could not get back in and get stuck somewhere in the house and die
without, presumably, ever tasting freedom and fresh air and SUV exhaust
again.
-
- Suddenly, she screamed. No time had passed.
As soon as the window slammed down, she let out a fast panicky noise so
high and so piercing my eyeballs spun backward and my skin leaped into
the next day and her hands flew to her face and she looked horribly stricken,
as if she had just seen Bambi murdered with a chain saw, as if she had
just discovered she had three arms and one of them was making scary shadow
puppets on the wall.
-
- "Oh my God did I kill it did I kill
it?" she exclaimed over and over again as she stared at the windowsill,
looking for, I presume, smashed insect parts, because maybe she had been
too hasty with the window closing and had accidentally crushed the thing
before it had properly fluttered off. But then she peered out into the
dusky light and said, "OK whew, no no, it's OK, there he goes, it's
OK."
-
- She turned back around. She didn't even
look up. She resumed smoothing the sheets and picked up the conversation
exactly where we had left off, chatting about I have no idea what because
my mind had suddenly been rendered blank, blasted clean by the bizarre
and cyclonic phenomenon I had just witnessed. My mouth was still half open
from the sentence I hadn't even finished from before. I hadn't moved an
inch.
-
- Let me make one thing clear. This scene,
this whole manic life-and-death drama, it took place in roughly nine seconds.
Maybe eight. There was no break, no pause between normal conversation and
gasp and lunge and sigh and scream, no shift or signal of any kind. It
was like a bizarre and wonderful dance, a theatrical flourish at a play
in an insane asylum in a land of happy munchkins. My beautiful girl had
been momentarily and completely, utterly subsumed in another world, of
which I had seen many pictures and heard many amazing tales but had never
actually visited.
- It was all there, compressed in that
nine seconds like fruit juice in a Skittles. The whole gamut of human emotion,
the entire spectacle of existence: joy and discovery and hope, trauma and
horror and fear of death, rebirth and continuity and merciful liberation.
All directed toward and centered around ... a small gray moth.
-
- What's more, she vocalized the entire
thing, narrated the emotional ride from start to finish, and not at all
for my benefit (I might as well have been in China for how aware she was
of me while this took place). The full splay of female emotions were out,
dancing like elves on a pin. The instruments were faintly familiar, but
the music was fabulously strange.
-
- Yes, it is a wonder humans manage to
communicate at all. It is a wonder the sexes make some sort of adorably
vain attempt to bridge that rainbow chasm between us just long enough to
remain wildly attracted to one another and still have sex and eat together
at restaurants and laugh at each other's jokes and pretend we understand
what the hell is going on. We do not. This is the great cosmic joke. And
the punch line is being delivered every day, in a million scenarios exactly
like the one I describe above.
-
- My girl smoothed the sheets. When I didn't
move or say anything for a moment, she finally looked up, curious as to
my silence, and caught my odd stare. She looked innocent as pie, like she
had no idea what she'd done, no clue as to the tiny massive spectacle that
had just played out. For my part, I might was well have been looking at
a sexy blue-tinted 10-legged reptile alien creature from the planet Zorkon
9. The chasm was as vast and wide as my warped and baffled grin.
- "What?" she said.
-
-
- http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archiv
e/2006/05/26/notes052606.DTL&nl=fix
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