Me, you and, um, how’s that again?

I met with a good friend for dinner tonight in North Beach at Vicoletto’s – a small intimate Italian restaurant where I had broccolini and house made papardelle and chanterelle mushrooms and well, there we were in North Beach, her in the window, me in the chair looking out the window, and the lights went out and it was 91 degrees outside and we were drinking Planeta Syrah, and talking about life.

She meets a man, he is older, reluctant to have intimacy but then he comes very close, closer than others have been, and then he pulls back. A friend of hers says – “He has range” and she thinks to herself, I need range, I don’t need a man who is needy and I don’t need a man who is aloof – but this man who is both offers range.

I tell her intimacy is the thing that you think you are having all the time you are having sex and fantasies and togetherness only to find out that intimacy is the thing that has been the white elephant in the room because when you are too much you and they are too much them, running for the hills sounds better than being in that cramped room.

So I tell her that my program is that I want to be bigger than I am and I want to believe T can be bigger than she is and I want to believe that who I came into the relationship in and who she came into the relationship in are capable of exponential growth because we don’t have that much time left on the planet to explore the magic of intimacy and togetherness and we have all the reasons to do so – we love each other, we have a child together, and we really don’t have much reason not to try to make this expand beyond the seemingly limited roles we have played thus far.

In the dark of the restaurant who had no emergency candles, and the din of the night with people still eating their way through ravioli and tagliatelle and papardelle and wine and bread and olive oil and the lilt of Italian spoken all around the periphery, I ask you, you are here with me why? I grant you this audience and now I must perform and you must perform and if this is daunting, step down, because I don’t want it any other way.

It’s you and me and the rest of the chorus and it’s showtime.

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