Tuesday, September 07, 2010
I was talking with Henny after work one day, as the summer days grew milder and one could still stay outside in the daylight and she did not want to go directly home, after instructions from Ali that she was to come directly home from work, since he knew she was probably hanging out with me. Even her mother in law had pleaded with her over the phone, “please just stop spending so much time with the homosexual,” Henny told me, which kind of made me feel bad and I suppose it registered on my face, because at that point she quickly asked if we could change the subject and if the topic could be about anything except her home life.
What else was there to say? It was a quiet summer, I was slowly preparing myself for her leaving and for my life to get even quieter. The country was sleepy. The city was getting spruced up for the September first independence day celebrations and they were taking out some of the trolleybus lanes and expanding the streets. When you turned on CNN it was only talk about a possible war in Iraq. Neighboring Afghanistan and Uzbekistan’s small moment in the public eye had quickly become eclipsed by this.
And there was little in the local news. Nightclubs now closed after 12:00, except for the ones owned by the president’s daughters and the Che Guevara, which was protected by one of the big mob bosses. Billiards were now banned. The president’s older daughter had moved back to town since she now found herself on an Interpol list because she took her children back to Uzbekistan from her estranged husband in New Jersey without showing up to the custody hearing, and had since opened up a pop-music radio station, a fashion magazine, a nightclub, and a beauty salon, and probably many other things. And behind every story there were plenty of fantastic theories and rumours, which we’d talked all through so that there was little left of them to talk about. They were what they were, incomprehensible, immaterial, trivial.
“So tell me about you,” she said.
So I decided to tell her, to speak out loud about the thing that I had mulled over so many times in my head, this summer. I told her about Jason. I said that I thought that I might be in love with him. But I knew I could never have him. He wasn’t interested in me. And yet, he calls me all the time to spend time together. I even thought of telling him how I felt.
Henny said that I should do it. “Tell him how you feel,” she said, just like that. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Everything,” I said. “Everything will suddenly be awkward, since he probably doesn’t feel the same way at all. And he’ll probably stop calling me and that will be the end of it. I’ll never see him again.”
I decided I wouldn’t say anything.
What else was there to say? It was a quiet summer, I was slowly preparing myself for her leaving and for my life to get even quieter. The country was sleepy. The city was getting spruced up for the September first independence day celebrations and they were taking out some of the trolleybus lanes and expanding the streets. When you turned on CNN it was only talk about a possible war in Iraq. Neighboring Afghanistan and Uzbekistan’s small moment in the public eye had quickly become eclipsed by this.
And there was little in the local news. Nightclubs now closed after 12:00, except for the ones owned by the president’s daughters and the Che Guevara, which was protected by one of the big mob bosses. Billiards were now banned. The president’s older daughter had moved back to town since she now found herself on an Interpol list because she took her children back to Uzbekistan from her estranged husband in New Jersey without showing up to the custody hearing, and had since opened up a pop-music radio station, a fashion magazine, a nightclub, and a beauty salon, and probably many other things. And behind every story there were plenty of fantastic theories and rumours, which we’d talked all through so that there was little left of them to talk about. They were what they were, incomprehensible, immaterial, trivial.
“So tell me about you,” she said.
So I decided to tell her, to speak out loud about the thing that I had mulled over so many times in my head, this summer. I told her about Jason. I said that I thought that I might be in love with him. But I knew I could never have him. He wasn’t interested in me. And yet, he calls me all the time to spend time together. I even thought of telling him how I felt.
Henny said that I should do it. “Tell him how you feel,” she said, just like that. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Everything,” I said. “Everything will suddenly be awkward, since he probably doesn’t feel the same way at all. And he’ll probably stop calling me and that will be the end of it. I’ll never see him again.”
I decided I wouldn’t say anything.
Labels: Thinking Out Loud
¶ 7:50 AM
