Four Squared

I tend to think without much introspection that we are not connected by some humanely and subconscious geometry but after yesterday, I don’t know, I have to think, and still not know.

Yesterday saw the end of four relationships which though not related to each other were all related to me and so through me perhaps they were related even as each to all was a stranger. I never spoke to one of the others, nor did I have to, it wasn’t necessary, I am one of those men that think that once there are two people in a room more is just extra. Besides I like to concentrate my intimacy, and have it that way most as it suits me best.

But after yesterday I don’t know if I was just a fifth wheel for a truck carrying four women through their mutual destinies.

Joan, Trish, Alice and Morty, were all the friends I had, for mostly that was enough, they kept me company at random and seemed to enjoy our conversations as much as I enjoyed their company. I couldn’t tell you that I truly enjoyed the conversations, the days that I would find zest in chatting up a convoluted topic were long gone, and most people tended to repeat answers and thoughts, and so quickly I decided that I would talk as much as is mandatory to arrest a few friendships and no more.

Just think that even now I am reluctant to see the repetition of the topics and the thoughts as part of a human symmetry.

Each woman was as different as one could imagine them.

Joan was a student of biology, she was studying fungi, a topic that for some reason fascinated her, me I found it boring; she could talk about this and that fungi and how it was all over my flesh and how it was in my apartment and how it was so successful and populous, and how I couldn’t ignore it, and frankly even with all her data my recognition of fungi as a master imperialist did not seem relevant.

Joan was sweet, she was no intellectual, she would surely, upon graduation, do something other than research fungi; she was just this very excited about life young woman, that wanted to talk to an old man like me because she wanted to feel intimate with the world at large, she was reaching out, I didn’t mind the company, she drank an awful lot of tea and water, but other than that she wasn’t any expense at all.

Trish was something else, an English teacher, I don’t know why; she should not have been teaching she was someone that perfectly fit the description of; “I don’t know that the world has invented a purpose for her, other than to be molested by this and that petty thing, and not really an expansion of herself but rather always confused upon this tiny, insignificant riddle that had only to do with some emotion she was momentarily experiencing, and if a butterfly were to trounce by, something else would pop into her strenuous sentient essence.”

I didn’t enjoy much of my time with Trish, partly because she could not talk about fungi like Joan, she was too self-absorbed and ever so nearer to the abduction and suffocation of her own soul that I was always waiting to watch her choke on the pretzels she would heartily consume. Why she liked pretzels, I don’t know, I don’t like pretzels, they like them in New York because New Yorkers think that if they are eating something that is at an odd angle to their palate that it has some kind of chic personality; why, just the way pretzels twist themselves as if a loose knot that could never be tightened anymore, irks me; it didn’t irk Trish because she was a pseudonym for irk.

But hey I enjoyed Trish because she was very beautiful, a curvy body that contradicted her bumpy personality, but then now that I think of it that contradiction had to be part of the mal adjustment, she was beautiful, she had long almost reddish almost blond hair, and her eyes were tiny little jewels that were somewhat, but handsomely so, overpowered by her eyebrows. We could say I enjoyed her beauty, watching her on the couch, with her unedited list of colorful sweaters, obsessive, but until you figure yourself out it is always better to hide under a sweater, so I enjoyed her beauty and it was also that I was pleased that she came to me, to ask me this and that, and of course my years have not made me any wiser but I do have a lot of answers, and so she often told me, “I respect very much how you have figured out your life.” And I didn’t abdicate from such, as it be fondle me to have her near.

Alice, who was Alice? A rainy person perhaps, but someone that has this very antidepressant type character, I never saw her have herself a delusion of the world, she thrived at anything she did, her bosses always loved her work and handsomely rewarded her with promotions and money, she could however live on no more than an egg a day, she used her money to bring me pleasing years of vine, and to help her brothers and friends out. I never saw her buy anything for herself, of course I cant prove that since I didn’t go shopping with the girls, but Alice wore always the same boring clothes it didn’t matter to her what it was, the same white bra, she probably went to the woman’s underwear section, looked at a white bra and bought ten of them, she was that practical.

Her taste in food was sober too, she ate a lot of rice and salads, didn’t eat much meat, preferred chicken when she did, and didn’t really give a hoot that some times I would spend hours making her a delicious lasagna with precious imported sausages, flavor! Flavor! Oh I would enjoy the dinner mostly, watching her barely eat.

Sometimes this would make me ponder how scientists would have categorize her, none aggressive grazer, passive carnivore, atmospheric feeder. Anyway they were silly thoughts, but Alice was not silly and her company was gracious and always welcomed. She had this very slim use of sentences, nothing was flowered for the ear, but it was always so precise when she would make her point that there was nothing else to fit in it, not even a loosely fitting pretzel. And so remarkably we had very long and joyful conversations, it was as if our talking decibels colluded with a floating piano and we were enjoying the concert.

I don’t know what to tell you about Morty, never did figure her out, she surely had a dark side, I could see her stabbing somebody someday. She was always in discord with my points of view, which weren’t many anyways, I think it bothered her to sit next to me, she was always moving as if trying to find a comfortable spot and distance from me, we certainly did not have chemistry, I could sense that I would never have her as a lover, even as I had given up lovers long ago, but I wouldn’t ever have made love to her, though that was mutual, and I was ok with that.

I think I better clear that, it is something in the senses, particularly the smell that tells you who you will and who you wont. I could tell just from watching her somewhat chubby body, that she had too much smell, I didn’t like women with too much smell, and so I was happy when Morty would stop moving so that her natural resonance would quiet a bit.

I think we both wanted to get to know each other, it was like going to another planet, you meet an alien, everything they say doesn’t make any sense, and you want to talk to them simply because they are aliens and we all have a difficult time understanding things that are not like us, and so Morty and I wanted to see if, by some strange gravitational curiosity we could form a friendship, even bond with a person that perhaps we didn’t like.

I say like because I didn’t think she much enjoyed the conversation, it was always a cacophony of ricocheting dissonance, and we were both put off by it, and yet kept on working on the acquaintance. Oh and how we became inseparable acquaintances is also interesting. There was a fire, I happened to be hurriedly exiting the building, when I caught sight of this poor woman suffering from smoke inhalation, I stopped trying to save myself, and went and picked her up, I still have a bad back from that, and so I rushed her out of the building, and dropped her on the grass, which must have hurt, but that was enough, I’d say.

And so from the police report, she found out who I was, and came to thank me, my surprise. Morty, Morty, she owes me her life, we have nothing else in common, we don’t need anything in common, but the day I rescued her, I tattooed her to my life.

Fortunately she didn’t come to often, and when she did come she had this or that to say about Jesus, a fervent follower of the man, and she would often speak of her trials as a good person trying to tolerate a generally bad world, and I sat and listened, and wondered if I did wrong a destiny by saving her.

Joan, Trish, Alice and Morty those were my closest friends in the whole world, I used the word were because for some strange reason they were all on the metro yesterday, same train, same exact train, at an off commute hour of the same day, when a terrorist bomb struck, and blew and cindered a hellish tube of lives; and them with it.

Last night I had a dream with Alice, she said to me, “I didn’t want to know you better because I was fading.” And closed her eyes.

I didn’t suffer if you think I did, I didn’t, I am an old man, I live in one of those personal islands that has been wrecked by tragedy before and often; floods come in and kill hundreds, over and over again, nature doesn’t seem to learn, and one of this days it will take me, for now it seems it needs a witness.

But one thing did startled me, the symmetry of their death.

Four squared.

RC