Hardly enough Oct. 20, 1985

  

I really am a stubborn bastard; but I’m not stupid.

The end with Safire has been coming for weeks, and it strangely reflects the way things ended with Suzanne five years ago.

I suppose I’ve been cruel, too, using Safire as a sexual partner while her life fell apart.

Yet, she’s not stupid either and has kept her bridges afloat, so materialistically desperate as to not want to give up her possessions without a fight.

She’s not mean about it. Or dishonest. Yet the whole affair has something of a bad taste on account of it.

She wants that house in Baltimore; she needs to own something.

“How can I let all that money go?” she asked me.

I don’t have an answer for her and nothing like it to offer her in return.

I’m also attached to this place, to a crazy uncle with whom we split expenses, while I keep him from suicide.

Possessions possess the people who possess them. So last night’s blow up was inevitable.

It wasn’t over Safire’s materialism; but because I wanted the thing to end, it has been undergoing a slow death for weeks, and it was time to put it, and us, out of our misery.

We want different things. I want to be a writer, which means dancing on the edge of financial disaster for years if not for the rest of my life.

She wants a home and security, to be a housewife, even a mother.

The always reliable to be blunt Michael has also told me it won’t work.

“You need someone who is into what you’re into,” he said.

“You mean someone who is willing to starve along side me?” I asked.

“Someone who can inspire you, another poet or writer.”

“You mean competition?”

“You do your best work when you’re trying to prove something,” he said, and he’s right.

But I’m scared to move in that direction as well. I’m not against three square meals and a roof over my head. And frankly, I’m scared of someone I might lock horns with, living in a constant state of conflict, intense emotional, spiritual, sexual and artistic highs followed by lows of equal proportions.

Yet, I agree with Michael that a relationship with Safire would be wrong, a cage I would pace like a frustrated tiger. We differ in every respect except for the sex.

She is like a rule book, insisting that every word be followed, every T crossed, every I dotted, whereas I tend to believe most rules are meant to be broken, or at least, stretched.

In the end, even if I could convince Safire to abandon Baltimore and stay with me, she would come to hate me – I could not give her what she wanted, and she would keep me from what I need, and all we would have together is the sex, and that’s hardly enough.


1985 Menu 



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