i gar

"We need to talk about yesterday" she said as she looked at me with those cornflower blue eyes whose gaze usually made me melt, and forget any sort of transgressions she may have committed. "Sure" I replied, using that dangerous word that I, despite my best efforts, have been unable to eradicate from my vocabulary.  That set those blue eyes glittering, and I knew that there was a storm front about to pass through what had been a relatively sunny day.  Truth be told, I replied with that one word because yesterday to me was already a 'closed file'. Something that had been marked closed by the librarian of my mind, and filed away in the newly created compartment of my overly compartmentalized mind.

Now, as I scrambled to relocate, open, and scan that file I realized that even if I managed to accomplish that nearly impossible feat in the few seconds allowed to me, that the scant few lines in the file would not provide me a single clue as to why we 'needed to talk'.  Those lines, if I were able to find them, would have merely recorded another day, at least to me. A day of simply co-existing, nothing major had happened, after all what sort of life changing events happen on a Monday?  Of course life changing to me and life changing to her are probably radically different things, and I really suppose I should start paying more attention to her, to life, and to change. That is a great resolution/idea, and one that firmly swore to implement as soon as possible. The problem was that I didn't have that time. This 'we need to talk' moment was happening now, and I seriously doubted that any attempt to reschedule for a time more convenient for me would be looked upon favourably. 

In fact, I suddenly realized that whilst I had been thinking the above mentioned thoughts, she had been talking away without noticing my complete lack of attention. Not a good sign, it is never good to attempt to reconstruct the parts of a woman's soliloquy that you've missed while you were wool gathering. Nodding and smiling sometimes works, but that can be particularly dangerous as you might find yourself agreeing to meeting her parents, or going to the opera on some random Thursday night (the poker night of you and your pals).  Perhaps it would be best to try an non-committal grunt, and hope that the next few sentences she speaks gives you a clue as to the content of the bit that you missed. Also a tricky strategy that women are fairly quick to realize, they sort out quite easily that your 'grunts' mean that you haven't been listening, and the next words you hear might be the prelude to what we have labelled a 'storm off.'  Those are not fun at all, and going after a woman that is storming off is a bit like running the bulls at Pamplona.  The word suicidal springs to mind.

Then came the pause, the moment when she is done with her speech, and it is now my turn to reply. That is what our conversations had developed into. One person talked, and the other person listened, then vice versa. It was lovely, and it was one of the things that attracted me to her the most (no it wasn't the deep auburn of her shoulder length hair, it was her conversation).  But therein lies the rub, our conversations were predicated one the fact that whilst one of us was talking the other one was actually listening. Not sitting there in some blind panic, trying to remember what he/she had done wrong yesterday that needed to be 'talked about' some scant twenty-four hours later.  Well they say that honesty is the best policy a theory that I've never really subscribed to, but one never knows if it will work till one tries. After all it might work, and 'they' (whomever they are) might actually be right for once.

 Therefore, I put on my best sheepish grin, and calmly said 'I'm sorry love, but I was too busy trying to remember what you could have been referring to about yesterday, that I missed what you just said.  Would you mind repeating it just to catch me up to speed?"  Several emotions clearly crossed her face, disbelief, shock, anger, and all the other usual suspects, but when she opened her mouth to reply all I heard was this beep! beep! beep!. Now it was my turn to be puzzled, had she suddenly turned into the bloody Road Runner from Loony Tunes? Why was she just beeping at me like some madwoman that has just escaped from Bedlam?  That was when the hammer of consciousness came down and shattered this dream like a large rock being dropped onto the still surface of a very calm lake.