when change becomes change

Fourth night of Hanukkah.

It's late when I get home from work. The apartment smells like latkes - grease and potatoes and onions. Talking plastic telephones and magnetic drawing boards and scattered Polly Pocket pieces on the floor. Dishes piled in the sink, across the counter. Leftover latke batter covered in black film in a bowl. Scott stretched beneath a down comforter so thick I don't know if he is there. When I lift the corner to check, he jumps, a startled jack-in-the-box.

"Sorry, I'm sorry." I say stepping back. "I didn't know if you were buried under there, or if you fell asleep cuddling one of the girls."

He rubs his face in his hands. Lays his head back down.

I'm picking up wrapping paper and packaging from the floor. Wiping the table. I'm not annoyed in the way I once would have been that he ate dinner with us before watching the girls and didn't even do his own dish. I just want him to go home, now, so I can clean-up this mess, take a bath and write.

He's tired. I get it, after all he's worked for three whole days in two months. Must be exhuasting.

New baby sitting rule: find another babysitter.

He sits up, rubbing his eyes, his face. Sage comforter still covering everything to his goatee. Asks me if I'm mad at him? Tells me about the job offer he got tonight - an IT position working with kids at a Catholic high school.

"Congratulations. I'm happy for you. Did you accept?" Stop circling and collecting, turn to face him, hands full of balled-up Hanukkah wrap.

He's been wanting to get into education, talking about getting a teaching certificate for years. Flip-flopping between that and law school. Still, it's funny, the universe showing off its wicked sense of humor. Scott spent his sophomore year setting a detention/suspension record at his Catholic school. He was a soccer player, recruited to it's state champion team, a notch above expulsion. They just kept letting him clean blackboards after school.

"I didn't do anything really bad," he says of that year, and well, all of his adolescence. "I just didn't do what they wanted. I did what I wanted. They said I had to wear a tie, so I wore it backwards. They didn't say how I had to wear it. That kind of stuff."

Hmmm.

"Remember that psychic I interviewed last Spring?" I ask, lowering myself into the glider so my hands are underneath me. "Remember what she told me?" I remember. Actually, I never forgot. I've been watching for this.

"Rob?" He's smiling now. Comforter around him on the couch and me across the room sitting cross-legged on the glider.

~~~~

It's May. I'm sitting with a clairvoyant who works high profile crime cases, a woman named tops in the Best of Portland poll last year. I'm gathering info to do a short profile for the paper. There's a low wood table between us, and Southwest prints on the wall behind her. Her kids' pictures on the shelves. Comfortable. My recorder's on the table, running.

She says she won't read me if I'm uncomfortable with it, and I consent despite squirming uneasiness. Free reading, right? I don't want to be read, though it's not the idea of someone else seeing into me, it's the horror of having to look myself. Besides, I have clear view down this path path. No narration for me, thanks. Not ready to put words to it. Especially if there coming from someone else's mouth. All I need is a head's-up if sees me falling from the sky in a freak skydiving accident tomorrow. If the parachute isn't going to open, this is information I want.

She reveals little about me, probably reading that I don't want to know. Asks who Robert is in my life. No Roberts, Robs or Bobs, I can think of.

"My stroller is named B.O.B. Bob Stroller."

She's puzzled, sees the name Robert all around me. Mostly she talks about Scott, reads him. Dead on. He's painfully sensitive, acutely intuitive but he keeps it all sealed off because it's too much for him. Absolutely.

"He hasn't figured out who he is yet," Shifts in her chair to stand. "You already know who you are. You know yourself."

I want to ask if he's going to figure it out. Ever. Is there a time frame? I just listen.

"Something good is coming up for him in the fall. A career opportunity. Maybe in education? He should teach, he's a natural teacher. If he went to law school, he'd be doing it for someone else, not for himself. He'll be happier as a teacher. I'd say, keep your eyes open for something happening in the late fall. October or November."

I think: 'We won't be together in November.' See, I can read me all by myself.

Scott laughs when I tell him, thinks it's all a bunch of crap.

~~~~~

"Okay, I still don't know who Robert is. I'll give you that," I can feel the chair pressing a courderoy tattoo into my hands. "Remember what she said about you? About a good career opportunity coming your way in the fall? Education, she said."

"It's not fall anymore," he gloats, smiles.

"It is fall. It's fall for 12 more hours, you can't get much later in the fall than that," I'm laughing. "And, geez, give the poor woman a break. Even if she was off by a month, she pegged it without even meeting you. Not even a picture of you."

Quiet surrounds the laughs. Laughing together. Then silence. Awkwardness.

He stands to leave, lingering. Building up to more words, but I just keep sitting weighed to the chair by confusion. It's the softness in his eyes, an open that lets me see right into his core. It's the tears, rolling over dark circles, a drop at first, then steady running.

It's what I've always seen. Frailty protected. What everyone, everyone else misses knocking into his walls. I see it though, right through the tiniest crack, and I know who's holed-up in that fortress.

Confusion. Confusion.

Maybe it's just the fear of what is real, but I can't stand. If I stand, I will hug him, hold him, hold on to him. With every step I take to disentangle this thing, the gravity of us grips tighter.

I can't stand. I sit in the chair, looking at the futon behind him. If I stand now, I will flatten it into a bed and lay him down on it. Maybe, it's fear. Maybe it's just been too long - July - since I've had sex. Maybe, it's just .... Whatever. I want to be with him right now, an urgency as strong as any I have ever had to leave. As true as anything I've ever felt.

I sit still. The couch behind him.

"This is so hard. And, despite everything I like myself better now than I ever have,"
he says. "I feel horrible and I feel so good. I've changed. I wish you could allow yourself to see that."

Despite everything? No, because of everything. It's because of everything, can't you see that?

There are changes I don't see, I trust what he's saying. Believe he feels something so profound that it's baffling others don't see it too. I believe the truth of his feelings.

And, yet.

He's tells me he loves me. Tells me again how he's changed, just one more chance to prove it.

My favorite professor used to say my characters pissed her off. "They have these have these great cathartic moments, these epiphanies, then they wallow around for pages refusing to change."

"All literature is about the moment of change," she liked to say. "Every story is the story of a change."

The thing is, outward change doesn't come in the moment of realization, it drifts out in the ether - morning fog lacing though the hills, dissipating slowly into blue. There is the realization, the getting there, and finally a moment, long after the spark of revelation, when change becomes change.

The plates in me slid for years, three-years, before anyone recognized.

"I believe in what you feel," I tell him, standing. "The thing is, nothing can be different unless I can see it, too. And, it's not just you. It was us. The two of us not being kind to each other. I hate how I treated you. I hate who I was, that I could hurt you so much. That I still do."

When he leaves, I lower the futon, add sheets, down comforter, and pillows, and climb in alone. Comfortable with confusion. Secure in the truth of uncertainty, and the rising clarity of my voice. Three octaves higher.

Everything is concrete for him.

Intuitive for me.

He needs more than the honesty of my confusion. Yes or no? When? How long? There are no answers, just the time stretching out between here and the place where change becomes change.

For now, honest confusion is the only real thing I can offer.