Fashion Sense. Going to Colorado

….Though I may not need a wife I certainly could use a woman to dress me. Or at least to tell me I’m dressed ok.

Think of Friday, dressing for class.
A sudden lack of faith.
I’m dressed wrong.

This rich brown of the jacket compliments nicely the light green of the shirt. That’s what I tell myself in the closet. Not even sure if rich brown is a good description. Maybe it’s auburn—what the fuck is auburn? Maybe it’s mauve.

I don’t know, but the way I say it, it sounds right. Rich brown compliments the light green. What is the name for light green? Lime?

It sounds good and I dress accordingly.

In the mirror, I think: Hell yes, that’s a sharp combo.

Five minutes later, in the kitchen, my eyes keep going toward my torso. Caught by something. Maybe something wrong.

This auburn, this brown, this mauve, it’s too rich for that very light green. Lime. Whatever.

That sounds right as well. Too rich.

So I go look in the mirror and now I can’t tell. All I see reflected is what I think. First it was good and now it bad. My perception corrupted.

It’s simple, I tell myself. It either looks good or doesn’t. Ok?

I move out of the doorway and lean against the bedroom wall and breath, focusing on a blue ball in the distance like the guy on the tape that my mother got me when I was a kid to help me fall asleep used to say: just watch the ball, clear your mind, bouncing away…

And then, when I feel half relaxed, I leap back into the doorway and look at myself. Trying to see what I really look like in this outfit. How I’d look to somebody outside my head.

Jesusgod! I’m an absolute stranger! Never mind the outfit. Who is that guy?
Forget about trying to figure out what he’s wearing and how it looks.
Just get used to the face.

Oh, me.

In a jacket that might not go with the shirt.

Flustered, beaten, unfaithful, I wear it anyway.

Friday morning, dressing for class.

…And now I find rather suddenly that it is bringyourdaytoschool day on Wednesday.
In Colorado, of course.
My four year old tells me this.
His mother, she doesn’t tell me. Not trying to be obtrusive, not knowing that he’d even know that was what they were doing that day, thinking, when she read the schedule, that she’d just keep him home.

And when she tells me this, it breaks my heart a little.

And when I tell her that he does indeed know, it breaks her heart a little.

The furthest I’ve ever felt us apart, bonded by the grief of the consequence of divorce for him, but separated by the idea that she didn’t just assume I’d come. That she didn’t at least mention it to me. That she didn’t think we should at least make that choice together.

That she doesn’t know almost no matter what I’d go.
It doesn’t really matter. It all works out.

The airlines give you tickets if you give them credit card numbers.

So I’m going, and it thrills him, and me, and her too, even.

And then I’ll bring him back, to hang out in GA with me for awhile.

The way I feel when he’s here, at ease, and as if nothing bad can happen.

I don’t nightmare when he sleeps in this house. I don’t nightmare when I sleep in a house where he is.

So cheers to the temporary end of nightmares, to quick trips and happy returns…

And the fact that the next time I blog, I’ll be in his company.