[you don't get bob dylan & you don't get me]

if you see me, say hello

you said you thought the big bang theory was promoting a negative view of physicists. i asked you why it mattered to you, given that you aren’t a physicist. besides, i thought, you’re missing the point about why i like it.

with enormous effort i have condensed the core issue into an opening statement: proton meets proton. you may not like it, you may not understand it. i did not expect you to do either. protons rarely understand the behaviour of their encompassing molecules. besides, predicting the actions of others is a meaningless sport and the betting is never very good. in any case i am bad at it and the only things which i am bad at and still do are physics&love, at least to the degree that you’d like to separate those entities. with enormous effort i have made the following statement: the entirety of writing in the english language, at least the sentences, can be reduced to subject/verb/object. it will no doubt be refuted. you have no objects, you do not move, it’s one subject after another. i am reduced to endless anecdotes about my childhood just to hear someone talk. i play radiohead on my earbuds and don’t offer you one, like i need to have something that belongs to me entirely, like i need someone there to understand.

the manner in which information is conveyed is occasionally more important than the information you share. in your case, i cannot imagine the information being important enough to justify its butchery. my grandmother knows the baker. my grandmother knows the butcher. my grandmother knows men with callused hands who feed other men and women. the manner in which information is conveyed is more important than the information itself if you’ve got a sense of style, but calluses from pens and pencils do not confer a sense of style on you. i am correct and you do not like my expression, at least when it is not sufficiently adulatory, i am incorrect and you envy my style. for a moment the things i say are so beautiful you wish they were true. truth is a beauty-preserving operation and conversation follows no such rule. you hover over my shoulder and stare my few pen strokes, in my faulty rendition of symmetries you are looking for the sense of style i have applied and which you seek to render in your own image. i cannot finish the question. you cannot reproduce my lines. my hand stills, then turns black-and-white. i remember the buildings across from your apartment still carried snow.

here is my song which was briefly shared and which now belongs to me again. i think it is ironic that she’s an artist, she don’t look back and she’s nobody’s child were lost on you; i have told you since the beginning, i have not lied about what i am. i think you don’t get bob dylan and his painful harmonica solos and his half-jaded love for women in the interstitial space of cities. is it white noise, is it rock and roll? i can explain the basic principles of electromagnetism and the significance of pnin’s name and a great many details about television but i could not tell you how you were supposed to feel about blood on the tracks, only that i found your observations stilted and fragmentary. only that the one time i ever heard your voice light up was in some amount of text on changing of the guards and then never again. even the titles are glittering letters to me; to you i assume they are cast in small back type along the backs of vinyls that you have no mechanism by which to play.

being a wife is like getting handcuffed to the oven door is like subject verb object is like being a vinyl in a music collector’s closet. being a girlfriend is a trial period. i think these words are ugly. i don’t think these words belong in my work.

she was torn between jupiter and apollo, i whisper to the children, but he was only mortal. they nod back. a patch of lightning. they is an impersonal pronoun for the children who would chase and tug at the sides of my coat, is redundant when describing a little girl who came up to me at the playground and flung herself into my arms. a perfect sphere; a bullseye. you as an addressee implies a level of intimacy i only ever felt with an image. you, a malleable, amorphous substance, has now turned to granite in my hands, as distanced from truth as the mess of white convolution at the harbour distances the lake from the shore.

you like the parts of the city where it’s impossible to get your feet wet and i like the parts of the city where it’s impossible not to. you shirk and button your shirts high and close your doors; you sit in the park when it’s too late at night or too late in winter for anyone else to be around. you’re always so concerned with other people seeing you. i asked, once, how you ever expected to get bob dylan. you didn’t understand, but you told me you didn’t know what you wanted. which was almost an answer.

it should be of no surprise by now that i didn’t expect you to know what i meant.

i imagine futures, glittering and gleaming on the table between containers of chinese takeout. choices in golden ropes, and me with my silver thread to wind around, and a set of chopsticks i don’t know how to use. under the chicken is the one where i never leave and we marry and i comment idly to my friend that i made the wrong choice, we shouldn’t have gotten general tso’s. i talk about marriage she tells me i sound unconvinced. on the back of the bok choy is an expiration date several months out. when i added rice to our order we got six containers and each of them has OCEAN printed in little black letters at the bottom of the plastic. i imagine a future with a big window by the water and a desk at the lab and a collection of geodes in the kitchen. i dream, and i set one place at the table, i halve figs on blue-and-white china and place it by an old copy of fitzgerald. i never spoke of fitzgerald to you. the frying pan is just the right size.

those visions were of one city laid on top of each other; crowded subways and refracted light. those visions were of orange-and-yellow windows in the evening. a vainly attained, carefully guarded solitude which admitted motel guests, not permanent residents. i want lipstick stains on overfilled coffee mugs, torn van gogh prints in first dance apartments. i want laundry and taxes in a place i’ve never seen before, all my ties invisible, while the ink dries on MSc.

i am unmoved by self-flagellation, unconvinced by pleas, certain as a wave crashing onto shore. memorable as a film photograph. i have a collection of stock phrases and skirt pockets filled with poems. i know the names of my friends and i say them very carefully. i know the names of my lovers because they are gravity&her consorts. you told me how you felt, i told you i wanted to own a vinyl player. after all this my closet is still crammed and a thousand other people in this city, to say less of all the others, all own the same scarf.

besides, i never got why you thought the freewheelin’ bob dylan was second-rate.