Bless Your Blind Spot
Maybe it was his horn-rimmed glasses. You could put horned rimmed glasses on a felled tree and I would straddle it. Maybe it was his dark shaggy hair, or that he dared to wear faded jeans on his first day at the office, or his showy David Bowie smile which was sweet but with seductive canines that you try to ignore because you’re happily married.
It could have been his recent return from England, which made him seem exotic. I thought my Irish husband was exotic but he’d been back in Ireland for nine months, practically since our wedding day, and our relationship was now more often deemed bureaucratic.
I invited the new man to join a group of our colleagues and clients at a bistro after work. He was smart, both technologically and artistically, which I think is rare. He was very, very rare. Special. Obviously.
I asked him how he met his girlfriend back in England and he disclosed some vague short story about too many drinks and her in a short skirt. In my mind, I wrote ‘short skirts’ in ballpoint pen on an index card and filed it in my mental card catalog under ‘T’ for ‘Tricks.’One of the clients we chatted with had worked with George Harrison and I was floored and so was the new man. We both like the Beatles, I thought. What are the chances? It must be a sign.
Finding signs are the first signal that you’re rationalizing, justifying, and otherwise excusing yourself from logic. Cognitive dissonance emerges between conflicting thoughts: 1.I am happily married. ~ vs. ~ 2.If I don’t fuck this guy, it will be the end of the world.
How can you balance these two conflicting ideas? Your mind constantly processes, grinding like a hot hard drive it searches the memory and rebuilds your internal files to reduce the divergence between the two ideas. Only then can your mind come to a rest. But it’s a restful delusion where emotions trump logic and everybody wins as long as you’re the only everybody.
I thought about John Lennon, how I’d morally judged him for being with Yoko Ono even though he was still married to another woman. But there was an innocence in Lennon’s voice when he talked about his first time with Yoko, how they stayed up all night and in the morning they made love as the sun came up.
And so did we. As he entered me, he quipped, “Something new for the Mrs.” And I knew I was going to hell but I didn’t care. I had lined up all my mistakes in a neat row in my mind’s blind spot.
I asked him how he could do this if he had a girlfriend and he said they had an arrangement. I didn’t ask for details. I thought the arrangement might mean that their love was elastic, but it wouldn’t stretch so big so as to encompass them both if they were on different continents. In hindsight I can see that the arrangement was that he was a scum and he arranged for her not to find that out. It turns out I had that same arrangement in place and I didn’t even know it.
As weeks passed, I cherished every piece of him I could get, like when it’s your turn to draw a card from the deck and you don’t know what you’ll get but it’s the chance that makes the game and if you could just pull the right card at your turn, well, then the game is yours.
Months later, when he finished his project and was set to return to England, we got out of bed and said our goodbyes. Naturally, I said just, “Have a good flight.” But what I meant to say was, “I’ll love you forever.”
When I didn’t hear from him, I rationalized that I never really loved him anyway. He was just nerdy glasses and crooked teeth with sloppy hair and worn out jeans. Not rare. Not special. And he cheats.
And so do you. With the likes of him. And your hard drive can’t resolve that dissonance and it flames out trying.
