The day she left Nov. 25, 1985

 

 

One more day.

This feels like the count down to a moon launch knowing that those that go will not return.

Safire goes, just as others have before her, leaving me with the edge of pain and the knowledge of future loneliness.

Yet, strangely, the absence also brings relief, and the idea that I have somehow managed to escape doom.

Safire is too much like Louise, playing the usual manipulative games, and thick with suspicion.

Last night, my mother called while Safire and I were in the middle of making love, and Safire refused to believe it, sulking for a few minutes as if believing another lover had called.

I don’t know if her reaction was real or put on.

She is constantly testing me.

She has been talking about going to Maryland, and then takes it back.

But this time, she is leaving for real, carrying her erratic behavior with her as baggage, resenting the fact that I do not want the relationship she wants, and I do not want to replace her husband, who abuses her.

I am perhaps just a parachute she needs to escape a relationship she hates, but does not want to abandon without having a new relationship to end up in.

This is like a fish jumping from one bowl into another.

I met her for the first time a few years ago at the Rutherford Fotomat, when she complained about management constantly sending new people like me to her to get trained.

She was so enraged; I left the store.

She struck me at the time as tough as a shrill-redheaded drill sergeant, determined to break new recruits rather than break us in.

She suspected everyone of everything, even claiming that the male supervisor was gay, accused her best friend Mary Ann of being “a man stealer.”

She later apparently took a liking to me and insisted that I work with her at the Fotomat in Hackensack. She apparently had fallen for me and was jealous at the possibility that I might take on with Mary Ann – which I eventually did.

How I got involved with Safire is too complicated to go into here.

I will miss her when she’s gone. Yet, I’m glad she is going, too.

 

 

  1985 Menu


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