her, me, and young me him
 oaxaca city graffiti - foto by smith lady’s reading my private journals. 1968 - 1974 so far. i was 22 thru 28 years old then. she’s 35 now. sounds like The Time Traveler’s Wife (a good book). lately there’s three of us in the room - her, me, and young-me. kinda kinky. lady’s mining them for excerpts we can include in our badman manuscript. a lot happened those years - i was kicked out of the u.s. naval academy february 1968 for smoking grass, and two weeks later was living in a drug house in baltimore dropping acid and shooting speed. my journals document it all - including the year before, the 5 years of, and the year after my first marriage to robin red-breast. lady knows more about my past than i do those 7 years. which is odd since the first journal entry was 4 years before she was conceived.. i don’t like my younger me. he was sneaky, sly, shallow, selfish. lady calls him “duplicitous.” but he did know how to suffer. here’s a heavy excerpt i wrote a month after he married. June 15, 1969 I trust a person completely until something shakes me and then I’m never sure… after our first year together I trusted Robin completely – never once did ever doubt her… never once until after we were engaged and I called her, found her gone and half an hour later found her at Joe’s, caught her just as she was going up to his apartment. She said he only wanted to talk about his problems – she finally convinced me that it was on the up and up which is a lousy cliché and I drove home after she said she’d be about 15 minutes… she was up there over an hour and a half finally coming out and convincing me that for 90 minutes she sat and listened and he never touched her… I finally dropped the whole thing and actually forgot about it – until… until… wonder how many more untils… until on our honeymoon I got in bed after she was asleep whereupon in her sleep she snuggles up to my warm body and sighs “Joe, Joe” which sent me through hell… finally drop that only to come back and hear her say “Joe this…” and “Joe that…” everyday – I would call from Hershey sometimes and she would be out or she would promise to wash her hair on my night out of town only to come back to find she hadn’t done anything, nothing except maybe my mind thinks seeing Joe… and now today she says Joe calls and needs to talk with her about his problems – it doesn’t hit me until later this is sposed to be my night out of town… I wonder if I’m upsetting her little schedule by staying in town tonight… perhaps my mind is working a little over actively in filling in the blanks – yet, I do know she has called him often before we were married and he has called her as well. I do know that on one of my out of town nights she went riding with him until way after midnight – I do know she kissed him one night – I do know I caught her at Joe’s apartment one night when I wasn’t sposed to know she was there and I do know she was up in his apartment from a little before midnight until one thirty and it was just the two of them… I also know that ofttimes the most guilty circumstances arise out of the most innocent occasions and I know a suspicious mind finds always more to be suspicious about and that if my doubts continue I could finish us – I know also that I keep forgetting about Joe and my suspicions but somehow she keeps bringing up his name in such a way as to inflame my doubts all over again… while I’m sitting here writing she keeps saying how wonderful it is that I’m home tonight and I don’t believe her… I will later though because I want to – I want to believe she’s faithful even if she isn’t – what I don’t know can’t hurt me and what I do know can’t hurt me but what I suspect may destroy me… soon I’m going to tell her I’m staying overnight in Hershey and am coming back instead and telling her I finished up by chance – and I hope I catch Joe up here or her down there because I will beat Joe almost to death and don’t know what I will do with her.  oaxaca city graffiti - foto by smith |
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