Jacob Lawrence, The Lovers (1946)

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August 18, 2006:

Oh god, those phone calls.

Hour after hour after hour after hour. Night after night after night.

I loved her so much then.

At the end of our summer we each went where we'd planned to go. San Francisco State, for her. San Diego, for me. To save the world.

It hurt so much to be apart.

I miss that pain, now. To love someone so totally that the only hours of the day which counted were the ones on the phone.

My mother paid the bills, bless her martyr heart. Hundreds of dollars every month. She worked in a factory so that I could talk on her phone.

I should have gone to San Francisco with her.

I should have broken up with her years earlier.

I should have walked away from her the moment we met.

In time the phone became crippling, for me. It'd originally been about how much we missed each other, but instead it became about me making decisions for her. Hours of back and forth agonizing over the simplest things, every night, night after night, so that it came to eat my life, became debilitating for me. A millstone, a burden, a roadblock.

Eventually I did a dramatic and childish thing. I unplugged the phone for days, to break the addiction.

That's how children deal with problems. Confront the symptom, not the issue. All I did was avoid what needed to be talked about.

And, it was a non-collaborative solution. It was me imposing a solution -- a solution that solved nothing -- on my relationship partner.

To this day I detest the telephone.

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