ladybug

I left an emotional voice mail on Eve's phone yesterday morning. I felt bad afterwards, for being such a bitch about it. I guess I was on my "man-rag"... Once a month, I get really irritable and depressed. This time, it was forced into being by Eve's personal crisis-- I was feeling good about my birthday until all of this.

Not that Eve's breakdown tripped me up. But it did confuse me, that's for sure.

Any other girl doing this to me would have me looking at the front door, as Large Prof once put it. But it's always been different with Eve. You have to understand: compared to most other girls, Eve isn't the type to be crying. Getting mad? Sure. Angry? You bet. Livid? A commonplace occurrence. Sad? Occasionally, but she doesn't solicit pity. I, on the other hand, beg for pity at every bipolar opportunity.

For some reason, even though she makes me sad or mad sometimes... I can take it.

I've always been able to take it from her. Yeah, it hurts-- sometimes too much --but I often forget about how much I hurt her unintentionally in return. I can be real insensitive, and she has called me on it more times than I can count.

The only thing that ever cut me deep was the tryst with Sharky, and that was primarily because of the cover-up. I don't bring it up to her anymore-- it's water under the bridge.

We're both massively insecure people. But maybe the reason why people say we're suited for each other is because we're never flipping out on each other at the same time. I flip out on her, she flips out on me... there's a balance.

Who else would tolerate us except for each other?

I was contemplating these thoughts and others when I got home from Purple Paulie's house last night. I thought about my crybaby VM, and her brief e-mail response to the VM ("Don't go assuming it's over," she wrote), and I felt that maybe I've been a little selfish. All she was tripping on was her attachment to me, and maybe she had a point-- I am getting attached as well.

And speaking of attached, when I fumbled for my keys as I stood on my porch I noticed something in the dark. There was a piece of paper stuck to my metal screen door. I thought it may have been a Chinese take-out menu, or perhaps a pizza joint advert.

No, it was something else altogether. It was a drawing of a huge ladybug. And underneath the picture was one word:

"BUG"

I smiled. I knew she left it. And what's more, I instantly grasped the significance of this gesture.


*/*


Let's take a trip in the Wayback Machine, shall we?

1992: My senior year of high school. I was scrambling to get out from under the shadows of past loves, as usual. I hated my friends-- a bunch of hypercritical know-it-alls who knew nothing about real life. They saw me as a rambunctious clown, an uncontrollable force that made them feel uncomfortable because my business was all about jarring people out of their doldrums. They lived vicariously through my self-destructive shenanigans, but snickered behind my back in contempt.

I joined the Theatre Arts class and met some genuinely funny, talented people. They made me laugh and smile. Their sense of humor was just as twisted and warped as mine, if not more. Everything seemed like a game, and around them I felt like a kid instead of a precocious adolescent.

I met Eve in that class, and after she broke up with her boyfriend I started getting to know her. I didn't ask her out or make any moves. I already knew about her parents' insane scheme to keep her from having any friends, so I knew traditional dates were out of the question.

Instead, I talked to her. I listened to her. She had beautiful ideas, a fertile brain, ridiculous talent. She was highly intelligent underneath the exquisite physical layers. In her eyes there was a hunted, searching quality-- she was checking me out, to see if she could predict when the obligatory lewd proposal would emerge.

I made every excuse to be around when she was around. But then when she was near, I would play it cool and act like I didn't care. I would pretend that my heart wasn't beating so quickly, or that making eye contact with her was a natural thing. Inside, I was panicking-- I really really liked her.

One day, the two of us were talking, and one of us-- I can't remember who but it was most likely her --picked up a ladybug off the ground.

We started talking about how cool ladybugs are. We named this particular ladybug, but the name escapes me now. I think it may have been "Rodney" or something like that... a male name for a ladybug? For some reason, "Rodney" sticks out in my mind.

Anyway, that was when we first met. We'd joke about the ladybug every time we saw each other. It was an excuse for the both of us, a means for us to initiate conversation without feeling weird.

Shortly after that, we fell madly in love.

The ladybug is a symbol of that time for us. I haven't thought about Rodney, or whatever its name was, for years. Not even in those moments when I missed her so much and I would think over and over about the things we used to share, I never managed to remember the ladybug. It never came into my mind once in the 14 years since.

But as soon as I saw the picture left on my screen door, I knew immediately what it meant and where it came from.

I think that's why I take her shit-- she knows me very well.


*/*


When I entered my apartment, the first thing I did was go to my closet and pull out a manila folder. Inside the folder were the remnants of our high school courtship: some drawings (including a portrait she drew of me), a few watercolors, a poem, and the only letter of hers that I kept, a 14-page hand-written account of her Fourth of July family vacation.

I leafed through the letter, wondering if she had made any mention of the ladybug's name. And, of course, I started reading it.

Certain parts stood out for me...


"The warm breeze is carrying a comfortable feeling through my hair. The silhouetted trees, all aligned and leaning to the left, sway so gently my eyes strain to spy the slightest sign of life. Having crashed by now the clouds took on an incredible similarity to the sea's waves. Tonight's sky embodies the phrase "dusk". An array of colours begins with the dark navy and scattered pearls. It blends then from azure to teal, aquamarine, misty ivory and finishes a dusty, pale sienna. It's killing me to know you're so close but so out of reach..."


She quoted from a book titled Knots, by RD Laing:


Narcissus fell in love w/ his image, taking it to be another.

Jack falls in love with Jill's image of Jack, taking it to be himself.
She must not die because then he would lose himself.

He is jealous in case anyone else's image is reflected in her mirror.

Jill is a disturbing mirror to herself.
Jill has to distort herself to appear undistorted to herself.

To undistort herself, she finds Jack to distort her distorted image in his distorting mirror.
She hopes that his distortion of her distortion may undistort her image without her having to distort herself.


She made mention of our "telepathy thing" and quoted more RD Laing and jotted down hilarious details from her family vacation, but no mention of the ladybug's name.

No matter, I thought. The picture of the ladybug did its job.


*/*


I might have to keep a copy of this letter with me at all times, to remind me of how deep our bond has always been. For although she and I are different people and have grown and experienced much respectively since that year we met, at the same time she and I remain unchanged in many ways.

The both of us still view the world through the eyes of wounded intelligence. We both feel like we are cursed, or that we jinx those around us. Even as people approach us and beg to bask in our glow, we are reluctant to accept their praise, because she and I both feel like we could die tomorrow and the world would not stop for us.

When we found each other, there was an immediate attraction. Neither of us could believe we'd found a kindred spirit. Personally, I was wary of labeling anyone else after Amy Coates as my "soul mate". But Eve made me reconsider that notion, because she and I just click. I have joked to her that, if we were to switch sexes, she would be me and I would be her. She doesn't quite see it that way, but she knows what I mean by it.

Something she added in her e-mail yesterday gave me hope:


"We'll always be friends. After all these years, I'm still here."


Yes, but it took a lot to get this far. And for much of the time we were not friends. But she was always in my mind, and she has admitted as much to me. She even told me that once she accidentally called Dick by my name, and he never got over that. I think that explains why he hates me so much, even though we don't know each other at all.

She doesn't play the victim, but if anyone ever had the right to play one, it's Eve. I think what I need to do is just have faith, and stay patient, and try to be strong for the both of us when she is feeling weak. When I feel bad, she does it for me, so how much will it hurt me to carry the burden for a bit while she gets her head together?

No one said it would be easy, that's for sure. And I don't want anyone else. I can't take the demands of other women. Eve makes demands too, but like I said-- I can take it. They don't seem so much like demands as they are expectations. I do the same thing, and I guess it's disconcerting to see someone else doing to me the things that I do to others.


*/*


I took the picture of the ladybug and hung it on the wall next to my front door. I looked at it and laughed. There's a bad pun there, one that she deliberately placed there because she knows how much I love bad puns. Just the one word, "BUG"-- you know, as in "I just wanted to bug you"?

You had to be there, I guess. But it's exactly the type of joke that she knew I would get.