THAT DAY

I go see ABOUT LAST NIGHT starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. A couple has a fight. Then their best friends (both dedicated singles) encourage them to break up... Watching this, I feel lonely and sad. Not just that I'm single... I keep thinking "Even my dreams have abandoned me; ever since The Circus Human's Desertion I've been a visionary without visions. What a pathetic Donald Duck of a man!"

But it's a lie! I may not have had any dates, but I've got inner friends--I've had a dozen major dreams since then. Loud, insistent messages urging me to change. I'm the one ignoring and forgetting THEM.

I'm no victim here. I'm... moping?

THAT NIGHT

Gitana has been saying rotten things about me. Because I backed out of a date with her, exactly once, she's claiming I'm incapable of ANY relationship, saying I can't love! Sure I'm scared--of dating, and of Gitana in particular (her drop-dead beauty, and adult sophistication, and her drinking), but I wanted to try again... till she started calling me names.

I go over and say "Gitana, it's time to talk." We walk up the hill, arguing all the way. "Gitana, what's really wrong? A couple of nights ago I dreamed you were complaining men were always coming on to you, while you lay right in the middle of a busy street in a glitter-covered swimsuit, stopping traffic like a dog in heat. You're not a passive victim here, you're doing things. Like going around saying shit about me. Why?"

It's like pulling teeth, but at last she admits I'm not the first. A pattern, and I was just the most recent. First guys chase her, then back away like she's poison. "Men," she says, "are jerks."

I tell her, "I also dreamed of a single woman who wanted to learn to ride. She went to a stable and climbs on a horse just as one of the hands was creeping up to brand that horse with a hot iron. The wrong horse at the wrong time! You know what the brand said? "VICIOUS--DO NOT RIDE!" Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies! I mean, branding all men jerks, or branding yourself unable to love... that just guarantees it!"

We argue about it on the second floor of a building with a courtyard. I'm pleased she's even listening--admitting the pattern exists is a big concession for Gitana... but I can feel her tension building till it's unbearable. Logic's pushing her farther than her feelings allow. I'm afraid her fear may manifest physically...

Outside I hear car horns and screaming. Uh-oh. Here it comes.

Over the Burger King looms a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Down come the Golden Arches! Rex chews on them idly, just to taste, but they're as bland as the burgers, I guess. Ptooey! Golden shards rain down on car roofs. Rex marches on.

Marches toward us! We run around the partly-curtained hall circling the upper floor, trying to stay on the far side of the building from the monster, peering out to keep track of it. Rex circles the place, glaring in the second-floor windows--stalking us. I snap at Gitana "I expected something, but this is a bit much."

Why doesn't it make its move? It could easily break in. With horror, I notice an open window ahead, and the monster is getting close.

But as the huge head leans in to glare at Gitana and me...

...the monster changes from scales to skin. A human monster, who I fear even more--Kit, my housemate's ex-boyfriend! Kit the unreliable, the moochy, the passive, sorry for himself, Kit, twenty feet tall, stalks around the building now, howling up angrily "Why are you shutting me ooouuut? What did I doooooo?" The Tyrannosaurus may be Gitana's fears about men, but Kit is mine--all I dread in men. All I dread in me.

And the moment I leave this refuge, to date Gitana or anyone else... there he'll be, in all his whining glory: Kit. What my mom taught me men really were.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

Well. Only three choices I see. Either...

1. Prove to myself I'm not like Kit,
2. Accept that I AM like Kit and learn to LIVE with it, or...
3. Change.

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