Equations: Dialectic Form (2021)

#51
When Jena and I officially break-up, I’m left with confusion, perplexity,
and a sense of being powerless. But there’s a semester on, classes to go
to, papers to write, and I continue writing creatively on the side. It’s
easy to smush into whatever with Cara, who also works at the North
Halls Dining Commons with me, because the deeper levels of toppling
a marriage are not ones I’m prepared to confront or assimilate yet.
After several weeks of hanging out, marked by Cara’s teasing games
(there are guys she grew up with and who she’s still attached to not far
from State College), I finally bust through her reverses one night, and
we make love. It’s to the point, fast, and over. It hits me in the guts that
that’s it. We’d now both achieved our goal. In another words, another
marriage, after my marriage to Jena, will not follow hard on the heels of
it. When I realize that the physical relationship is to be that brief, I
enter into more confusion. Now, the equation has changed into a kind
of hyper-cringe. There’s something at hand, that Cara and Jena both
know more than me about, and I’m being kept in the dark. Jena has
disappeared completely. There’s no sign of her in Leete Hall or
anywhere else. Cara withdraws at least part of the way into a shell. The
momentum of the semester pushes me forward, but part of me is flipflopping,
in a stagnant fashion, a fish out of water, trying to reconcile
the surface of my life with what’s in the depths. After all these years,
Cara’s equation is still a mystery to me; what she was doing there, in
Leete Hall, to me and to Jena. And if, for some reason, anyone sent
her. The further, important equation to understand is that relationships
and relationship equations do not and cannot happen in a vacuum. The
human world is only too happy to take the organicism of purity
equations like the ones I had with Jena and force them to compromise
themselves into fakeries, or ambiguities, or both.
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