A Conversation with Elizabeth
1998
Pink Flawed

From:          Elizabeth
To:            mixsonl@acm.org
Date:          3/13/98 3:51pm
Subject:       Pink Flawed
 
What is your new job anyway? This morning in my lost letter I asked you many questions about it and your work. You haven't said much. Are you involved at all in any of the year 2000 conversion projects?
I think I read in Sexual Politics that the "rules" of a relationship are often laid down very quickly in the very initial stages of people coming together. I think the example was a husband coming home and dropping his socks and shoes in the middle of the floor and leaving them there. The wife (who doesn't like shoes and socks in the middle of the floor) has several options, each of which will be determinative and formative of the relationship. Whose responsibility do you think it would be to change? If he changes, but keeps forgetting, and she keeps reminding him, then she becomes (he puts her in ) the position of being a nag and the functional equivalent of a "mother" to him. If she eases up and says "don't sweat the small stuff," then she starts slowly creating an environment for herself which is not to her liking.
 
Maybe I broke a "rule" that might have been implicit between us, perhaps it is, continuing our metaphors, "don't cross the wall", or "remember it's there" or possibly as you wrote "lean across, but don't even imagine moving across." I don't think I "forgot," the wall, most certainly, that is why I said "imagining" when I spoke of you being single. Perhaps I was testing you or myself. Perhaps not. Honesty and artifice are both resident within me. I think I wanted most of all to be "free" to express my thoughts and feelings without repercussion, but I feel perhaps as if I got one. My counselor would probably say I chose someone with a wall, or I was led to someone with a wall, so I could work out "wall issues." I did have wild fantasies about you at first, when we recontacted—but I still see you in your jeans and that old blue sweatshirt, age 22.
 
I think I'll go home and play Pink Floyd.

If she crossed some imaginary wall that was ok with me, I enjoyed the honesty and the raw feelings she was expressing.
 
Ha, ha, ha, Pink Flawed, that was cute.

I think I will smoke some weed and put on some Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, one of those 800 records I have.

Time
Pink Floyd

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown

And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you

Hanging on in quiet desperation
Is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say

 

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