strike that

Shortz Stories

I didn’t used to do the Sunday Times crossword. Until recently I had only participated in one Sunday crossword completion, with Joshua in Eugene. It felt like such a fluke that it didn’t occur to me to even try again until Jamey folded open the Magazine to the crossword page one afternoon last fall. After that we finished them a bunch of times, either together on the porch or over coffee, or more often by passing the puzzle back and forth through the week. We indulged each other’s crossword quirks and saved each other the good parts. We were kind to each other, in this.

We were not so kind in other things and one day in the winter when I was sad and upset I took the puzzle to his favorite coffee shop and I did it all by myself. I hadn’t meant to, because I didn’t know I could. I finished a second one a couple months later when he went away for the week with hardly a word.

The third Sunday crossword I have ever finished on my own I finished just now. It was, refreshingly, not done out of spite. Housebound and horizontal as I am, I just couldn’t think of what else to do. And while it happens that, sometimes at least, I can finish a Sunday Times crossword puzzle all by myself, it also happens that it’s not much fun. I guess if I discovered that I could play tennis or sing rounds all on my own, that wouldn’t be so appealing either. It kinda misses all the fun.

Jamey just left on a three week trip, hiking somewhere with no internet and no phone, and probably no tent. I thought I would feel relieved once I knew he was gone, but really nothing much changed. We weren’t calling or texting or emailing each other anymore anyway. The only difference is I feel like I can write about him here, without it being inadvertently hurtful.

It turns out I have surprisingly little to write. We never even dated really, so there’s not much to cry about. I imagine that to him, that is the comfort of never calling anything Anything – that when it’s over, nothing’s really lost. But I prefer to call something Something. And then if it ends you can say, That sure didn’t work, and now we know.

As far as I’m concerned the point of dating is to find out if you like someone. The bizarre loss I feel is this: not the loss of someone I surely liked, but more the loss of the opportunity to find out how much I liked him. Because what I knew, from circumstance, was that I liked cooking with him, and talking about the law with him, and lying around with him in the park. And what I wondered, from conjecture, was whether there was more – the more that distinguishes one person from all the other people with whom one enjoys cooking and talking and lying around. But I don’t get to know, yes or no, and I don't get to feel relieved, or even sad. What was lost? Who knows. We rarely got to see the best of each other. Once in a while with the crossword, maybe.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:11 PM