Things George said

"You're too normal to change the world." (black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot)

That was probably the most hurtful, taken singly, out of the context of everything else he said. He said it flippantly at the beginning of the year, as he entered his house. I stopped dead on the step and watched him shut the door.

He apologized later, months later. He couldn't remember saying it.

"No, I'll just find someone else." (So I could never tell where / You put your foot, your root, / I never could talk to you.)

I'd asked, at the end of the year, what he would do without me; I suggested he'd be lost without me to listen, talk, play, stay up late with him. He'd miss my climbing on the number 4 bus in Chengdu with him, flagging down taxis into Dujiangyan, joking about the Messiah Community Covenant. He'd miss my knowing things no one else on the team knew, that he tried to keep to himself: his middle name, his birthdate, what he thought about technological progression versus geography, how he felt when teammates stepped in to correct or augment his halting Chinese.

He'd miss the inventions of a year together, the alternate weekday list that included first and second Saturday, the comfort of knowing he could break out into a swing-dance move and only encounter encouraging laughter. He'd miss the solemn talks about spiritual things and absurd discussions of which movie stars were obsession-worthy. Surely he would miss...well, me.

"No," he said. "I'll just find someone else."

"I only have a year with you" -- (with my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck) -- he said in an end-of-the-year talk, when he'd hurt me (again) by saying I hadn't told him the teacher's party was the coming Tuesday (I had, twice). He'd used the opening (the wound) to get at other things. (I may be a bit of a Jew.)

He lectured on what I refused to see. I was capable of understanding reality, of opening my mind, he said, but wouldn't. (I began to talk like a Jew.) It frustrated him.

I could feel, but didn't know, what he was talking about. He came over and held me when I cried, but my tears stopped instantly, awkwardly, at his touch.

He knew he was hurting me. He did it deliberately -- the way a surgeon does. (I think I may well be a Jew.)

"You're a nurse," he said at mid-year, explaining why I couldn't get at the real problem with my student. (Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.)

He cut things out of people; I bound them up again. We worked at odds with each other. We'd undo each other. We couldn't work together.

"I'm a surgeon," he said. (Marble-heavy, a bag full of God)

He worked on me all year.

I loved him for it.

"He's psycho," my friends said.

("I know," I said.)

"It's like if I said 'my wife says bad things about me, and is always negative, and steal stuff from the store -- but I really respect her for it'," my youth leader said.

("I see what you mean," I said.)

"I don't understand why you care so much," my pastor said.

("That's why I'm here," I said. "Neither do I.")

*****

"Every woman adores a Fascist," Sylvia says.

Huh, I think, mulling it over a bit.

Maybe she's right.