One Sentence Can Make All the Difference

One sentence can make all the difference. That revelation, which stopped me in my tracks when I was fifteen years old, occurred on the fateful day my boyfriend wrote these six words:

"Please let's don't fight no more."

Struggling with the self-realization that my estimation of a good human being had immediately taken a nose-dive due solely to their (mis)use of the English language was disturbing. What kind of person was I? After all, he was still cute as hell. He still had grease under his fingernails from working on cars, he bought me presents, he adored me and he was polite, obviously. But the moment those crumpled words on 3-holed lined wide-ruled paper hit my eyes, he was gone.

Well, not really gone. He is the star of my reoccurring 'rejection dreams', never seeing me when I approach or in other versions ducking away to avoid me, but I strangely always find myself glad to see him in those dream encounters. I am disappointed at his lack of interest. Funny he has existed in my dreams all these years. He still lives in the town where we grew up, and Dolly runs into him now and again, always telling me how friendly he is and good-looking. Weird, huh? I don't imagine he writes much anymore as he never had much need of it.

Later I married a man simply because he wrote me a poem. Twirl a few clever words around in mid-air and like magic... I'm mesmerized! I believe the verse included these words:

"I love you MJ
I wish you could see
exactly what you mean to me"

Perhaps the high school commencement program on which it was scrawled, dug out from under the seat of my car parked in a cemetery, was what did it. Quality parchment can lend dignity to even the simplest of rhymes. This boy was cute too, but the presents and the adoring part went missing. Well, you can't have everything, now can you?

I was reading Jonathan Lethem last night and came across these words:

"Conspiracies are a version of Tourette's syndrome, the making and tracing of unexpected connections a kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close. Like Tourette's, all conspiracies are ultimately solipsistic, sufferer or conspirator or theorist overrating his centrality and forever rehearsing a traumatic delight in reaction, attachment and causality, in roads out from the Rome of self."

Immediately I was struck down. Head over heels. One never knows what words may appear to move one to deep passion. Go figure.

"Touching touching. Counting counting. Thinking thinking. Mentioning mentioning Tourette's. It's sort of like talking about telephones over the telephone, or mailing letters describing the location of various mailboxes. Or like a tugboater whose favorite anecdote concerns actual tugboats."

Words. How they are strung together. How they mix-and-match, jump, swing, reverse plunge rise scream and die. Move over Haruki Murakami. Any man who has me dreaming of sex with a character with Tourette's has my heart. Totally.

What if my high school suitor had written these words:

Come. Eat Count Chocula with me, for the day is young and you are hungry

Or how about this sentence:

Girl beauty I give
your love back a thousand-fold

Hell, we would probably be raising thirteen children on a dirt-farm littered with cars up on blocks. We would be in heaven.