Rodin's caress

Two people are sitting in the sunshine outside of a coffee shop. The man is asking the woman a question.

Q: If you could have a pet, what would it be and what would it be like?

A: A giraffe, because they are very tall, and have exotic coloring, but they are very gentle, they don't eat other animals. I think their coat must be very smooth and it would be fun to snuggle with them.

The heat has returned to San Francisco. Our nights are cool, but warm enough the women can wear skirts and light sweaters. The days are hot.

The Giants lost again, that's 11 times in 12 games and their fans have to endure this lurid spectacle, old men, their bodies breaking down, very tired, trying to play the game of young men. They just can't quite pull it off any more.

Better to be a writer than a player. Better to aspire to be like winegrapes than like the dried plums wilting on my parched backyard soil. Prunes, as it were. Water gathers gently around the edges of our pumpkin plant today; we again inspected it at dawn, before most neighbors awoke. Many yellow blooms now appear along its thick, corded shaft.

Yellow has always been my favorite color, although several others have come along to compete with this preference -- orange, purple and black. But as a child, I insisted my room be painted bright yellow. I suspect I knew even then that the dark side of my nature would need lots of outside nurturing if I were thrive in life. As a child, I held onto the most profound sense of loneliness.

A bottomless pit of loneliness.

As always my experience of life is of people coming and going; at the end, it is always me, alone on my perch, balancing this machine, pecking at the keyboard. Will anyone ever be able to truly handle my intensity?

My last three partners, each in her own way, told me she couldn't. After a while, I simply was too much, and they felt overwhelmed. One by one, they drifted away from me. Now, this writing has overtaken me to the point, I'm not sure any woman will want to become a main character in my narrative. Its intensity, the narrative's, may drive them all away. Consider my poor ex, down in Biloxi, being so moaned over, missed, adored, honored, yet ultimately reconstructed by me, never representing her own self in her own eyes.

Rodin sculpted models by repeatedly running his hands over their naked bodies, a constant caress that helped him transfer the essence of the human form to some of the most astonishing representative art on the planet.

***

I want to create as much distance here from Rodin as I can, consciously, because I will in no way try to compare myself to a great artist. I'm a simple, lonely blogger trying desperately to find his voice. Rather, it is Rodin's methodology I admire and also that I copy. When I love a woman, I run my hands over every part of her body over and over and over, slowly, establishing a memory map.

It is that behavior -- not photographs or letters or objects -- that allows the visual imagery inside my brain that later triggers the need to write about her when she is gone. I have touched her in every way possible and with an attention to the detail. By doing so, I have trained myself, palpably, to recreate her when she leaves me to be alone again.

"You're silly. Every woman has a soft arm like that," I have been told, after stroking the long, soft limb of my partner. Every woman.

A common view expressed by many of my female friends is that, to most men, any woman is really what they want. Any woman. "They just want to get laid." I hear these things over and over, and I hear the bitterness from women after men leave them.

Then, sometimes, I meet women who sense something inside me and respond to it. We have what we have for as long as we can. Then, inevitably, they leave me, but when they do, they tell me they love me and I can feel that it is true.

When she drove away the last time at the very end of April, J hugged me and kissed me and her eyes filled with tears. I now see that is the right way for every relationship to reach its ending, with love, not anger. It is so sad when people are left only with bitterness and anger.

I much prefer the pain of a long lasting longing for lost love. It is more painful, it is a much slower way to let somebody go, and it retains much more ambiguity. But it allows a sweetness to linger in my heart. I continue to love everyone I have ever loved.

***

The kids danced down the sidewalks to a sleepover last night, mesmerized by the prospect of an overnight with older kids, young teens -- just enough older that they are objects of the greatest possible value to my little ones. For they represent the immediate future.

I, by contrast, represent an unimaginable stage; to those in the very early spring of their lives, I am late in autumn, when all the colors change, a chill is in the air, and the four seasons of life finally achieve their terrible clarity. Times feels so short to me, and so long to them.

***

Two people sit in the sun outside a coffee shop. The woman asks the man a question.

Q: Describe your vision of the perfect pet.
A: It might sound weird.
Q: Go ahead. Do it.
A: Okay. Mine would be a tiny little woman I could carry around in my pocket. Whenever I was lonely I could take her out and she would dance in the palm of my hand. I would always have somebody to touch.