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Show Moon -130 again. I try, for his sake, to explain. "I've been terribly sad lately, and it doesn't make much sense. I think I've lost something back there. I think I need to go back into my past for a while, go underneath my life. I don't like myself anymore." He brushes my shoulder with his fingers, so lightly it's as if he isn't sure he should be touching me, says with a smile, "I like you." Would he say that if I told him how I've been bleeding too much and might need my mother's operation? How I've been obsessed with suicide? What if told him about James, and then told him I have this crazy idea of finding the gray-haired man who rises in my dreams like a lost god? There's too much I can't tell him, and it isn't fair. "You don't know me," I say. "Even I don't know me. I think about dying. Isn't that silly?" He cups his hand around my shoulder and pulls me to him with a sudden urgency, as if he's both afraid and attracted by what I've said. "Is it me? Have I hurt you?" Already I've begun to pull him under with my moon-talk. I'm filled with sadness that he should feel responsible. I search for the words to help him, take both his hands in mine, hold them tightly as I feel him want to draw away. "You must never think those things. You are the most wonderful man in the world." "What have I done?" he says, not able to hear. He stares in the direction of the Three Sisters, pulls his hands away, fitfully strokes the arm of the swing, runs his hand down the mission-style rungs so like the bars of a prison. His earnest love rattles at me like a fistful of jailor's keys. It occurs to me that he wants it to be his fault so he can feel there's something in his power he might do to change my mind. He isn't ready to see |
