I just feel uncomfortable driving along toward some fake totem poles in Alaska. After that night when people asked me what I did that afternoon and I told them, they all said, “Why did he take you out there? Those are fake totem poles,” and I have no answer for them as I had none for the man’s love life.
I could not afford the luxury of a complicated love life. I had a simple love life and often when I have a simple love life, I don’t have any love life at all. I sort of miss it, but the complications all return soon enough, and I find myself occupying sleepless nights, wondering how I lost control of the heart’s basic events again.
We had to walk through some woods to get to the fake totem poles.
The man didn’t talk about his love life in the woods. Instead he gave the local names of the vegetation that we walked through to get to the fake totem poles. As we walked along, it was as if he were reading from a living list, which I would forget as fast as he would check it off.
After a while I wished that he would go back to talking about his love life. At least then I wouldn’t feel guilty if I should forget something.
I’ve never really been very interested in remembering things that did not immediately catch my attention. I think this is a character weakness, but it’s a little late to do anything about it now.
I’ve just turned 47 and I can’t go back into the past and realign my priorities in such a way as to create another personality out of them. I’m just going to have to make do with the almost five decades sum of me.
It may not add up to the total I had envisioned for myself when I was younger and not as warped as I am now, but I just can’t copy a list of plants down that I saw briefly in my mind on the way to some fake totem poles.
The totem poles were very, very fake.
When we drove back to Ketchikan, it started raining. A cold bleak December rain fell out of the sky, and the man went back to talking about his love life, and I felt as if I were slowly shrinking in the car, getting smaller, almost childlike.
The windshield wipers kept even with the rain, but the man’s endless and complicated love life was a losing battle for me. As we drove back into Ketchikan, my feet were no longer touching the floor and my clothes hung about me like a tent.
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