Julia’s Little Dreams
From: Julia
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 1:12 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: ok, you.
Okay.
It’s raining here too. Hard. Also there seems to be something on fire a few blocks north, because there is thick brown smoke going up into the low gray sky. I don’t smell anything yet.
I don’t want to break your heart and I’m trying to navigate this flood the best way I can so as not to do that. But there are so many slippery rocks around that it takes care and attention to detail to not step on one and fall down and get swooshed away in all this. And to tell you the truth, I ain’t all that hot at the whole attention to detail thing. It makes me a kind of lousy proofreader. But you know, it pays the bills and all. Sort of.
Your dreams are nice dreams, and I have dreams like that too. Inappropriately. For a married woman to think of these things is supposed to be wrong, I know. But, I don’t feel too badly about it in one way because I’m not acting on those dreams. If I were to do that, everything I’ve done to try to have a somewhat sort of normal life where the only bad things that happen are things I can handle, will all go away. I need this kind of stability because even inside this, I think about killing myself an awful lot, and I get depressed with a degree of frequency that I know is not so good. I know that if I stepped outside this stability and outside of pretty much knowing what each day will be like aside from the small pitfalls of burst tires and overdrawn checking accounts and breaking up dogfights, then, I don’t think I can really handle that. It took me a real long time to figure it out but what I need is routine because I can’t really handle changes. Like it might look like I can handle them, but I really can’t.
The reason I *do* feel badly about it is that you know about it. You know that I have those little dreams. Which, as it were, I ought not to have mentioned. Because it hurt you. Which I hate.
See, you are Six, and you excel at shaking up the status quo, because you *do* things. Maybe you are afraid of change too but sometimes I think, you feel you have to go attack change and fuck it up before it fucks you up. Or maybe not. I don’t really know. I just know that you’re not like anyone else I’ve ever, ever known, and in addition to caring about *you* as *you*, I also have all these enormous, nebulous ideas in my head about what you represent to me. Which complicates matters.
Also it surprises me that you like me. I don’t mean surprises me as in, oh, I didn’t know that, I mean surprises me as in, why on earth would someone as wildly creative and imaginative and intelligent as you are like someone like me, because to me, I’m just the taste inside my mouth when there’s nothing in it. I’m nothing special. I do some creative stuff but it’s nothing special, I mostly think, nothing outside what your average B art student would do. I am not wildly good at anything. I know in my head that being wildly good at something is not a requirement for someone to be liked, but, I still think that way and feel that way.
I have thought before about what it could be like if I left M___ and went to you. Which, I never should have let on to you that I thought about that, because it is making things complicated between you and I. But I hate it when I can sense that you’re really unhappy and I can’t do *shit* about it, so I try to make you feel better by letting you know that even if you’re unhappy you got somebody far away who cares so much about you (which you know, I thought, it would make you feel better to let you know that because so many people don’t got that and even if they do they don’t always know it). I shouldn’t tell you how much I care about you because it opens up these cans of worms and you get upset and I get upset and all I really needed was this simplicity of being married to someone and loving him but also loving you too, in my secret head and heart, without ever really, truly intending to destroy what I have in favor of what could be. I don’t want to jerk you around. I like you a whole whole lot and I daydream sometimes about being with you but I can’t do it and so I’m just going to say that so there’s no jerking around. You don’t deserve to be jerked around by a married chick who only daydreams about things and won’t ever do them. That is not fair to you.
There’s reasons I won’t act on my secret dreams of bein with Six, and one of them is that even though M___ and I have our problems, I love him a whole lot. If you want to know the other reasons I can tell you but they’re probably pretty mundane. But if you want to know, I can tell you.
In an ideal world, stuff would be different. But it’s not an ideal world. It’s the real one I have to live in.
As for the subject of What I Want From You: I want something utterly impossible. I want you to stop hurting, always. I know that is a silly impossible thing to want but we don’t want the people we care about to be hurtin’ now do we. I can’t make that happen though. From you, I want nothing. If it makes you happier to quit sending me stories and funny emails because talking to me hurts you and makes you sad, then you should stop. I would be very sad about it but if it made you happier then that’s what I want.
What I really want is for stuff to just go back to the way it was where we had the feelings and the dreams and such but we just wrote and lived and everything over top of them. Without them coming out. But with each of us just consciously knowing now that they are there but not to be acted on. That’s what I want.
Is that possible, do you think? I feel that all this is unfair to you. And I’m sorry.
Six Sheep 