Post Panic

The French Blonde has calmed down, seemingly without therapy sessions, prescription drugs, diabetic-inducing amounts of chocolate, or emergency "talk me down from the ledge" calls with her friends.

She is not sure how this happened, as only last week she was in quite a panic, blithely tossing out predictions of impending leaps from planes. (Hmm. The FB finds she is being over-arch, even for herself. To paraphrase an author she recently read, who cleverly remarked that the word incongruous is incongruous, the FB would like to point out that the word arch is arch.)

So now, amazingly enough, the FB is actually allowing herself to enjoy the HD. And the HD is quite attentive. In fact, the FB isn't quite sure she's ever met a man so attentive, which explains part of her distress last week. What if she got used to the affection, the flowers, the dinners, the terms of endearment, the sweet text messages, the phone calls, the hand holding, the kissing in the car? Why, mightn't she just explode? Or wither away and die if it all came to a sudden halt? What if the HD turned out to be a serial seducer? Or a two-faced character in a Lifetime Movie with a deadly split personality? Yes, go ahead and laugh (please), but the FB's brain was working overtime to find a reason to push the HD away, and even the flimsiest of excuses was entertained before being booted out of the manor. All because the HD's sweetness was causing the FB to panic, and as panic is a feeling the FB prefers to avoid, she kept trying to find a way -- ANY way -- out of it. But somehow, she stayed put, and the panic disappeared.

Fancy that.

Weirdly enough, the FB, who is a verbal creature, is also finding that she enjoys actually not saying anything with the HD. This is perhaps the strangest phenomenon of all, as the FB has never been one to let a silent moment alone. But she finds she often has absolutely nothing to say...AND IT DOES NOT BOTHER HER. She simply stares at the HD with googly eyes and smiles as he does the same. Then the HD says something sweet and she is even more googly. It's disgusting.




The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean -- indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.
--John Fowles,  The Enigma

 


 
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