Repeating Lyrics

So we’re at the fountain again (yes—again) when, somewhere between my ramblings and your interjections, I get distracted by the shiny blues, the cracked concrete, the streams of water. Really I’m searching for words, but you’ll think the dripping and swirling has pulled my focus from you. And maybe it has. Or maybe it hasn’t. Or, rather, your rationalizations of who I am and what I’m saying have driven me to stare (seemingly mindlessly) at this thing.

You’ll keep trying to pin me down – to classify or categorize – but it’s a fruitless exercise. Trust me.

So we’ll keep talking, strolling around the fountain, and you’ll continue to counter my serious chatter with digressions about your high-school friends or the wonders of Europe (you’re going to live there someday, after all). I, of course, won’t be satisfied. And we’ll keep strolling, circling.

Looping.

I’ll probably say something unintentionally (or – more to the point – something intentional with the appearance of the opposite) and you’ll stop me. You’ll say something close to, “Wait, Dave, what do you mean by ________?” Though I did want to explain at one point, even before I uttered the unintentional intentional phrase, I no longer do. But you’ll get upset, keep hounding me about it, and the side-stories about Germany or past boyfriends will disappear.

I tell you, “It’s nothing I need to say, and nothing you need to hear.”

But you won’t let it go, making it an impossibility to finish our (serious?) conversation. We’ll go back and forth: you’ll tell me you want to know, that I promised to be forthright, that you won’t let me say what I want to say until I divulge; I’ll tell you I don’t want to talk about it, that it’s not important.

“But it’s important to me, Dave, and aren’t I important to you?”

I’ll want to say, “No. Not anymore.” But I won’t.

Instead I’ll think up some sort of pseudo definition of the (un)intentional utterance and tentatively explain. It won’t be a lie. There are parts of the truth interwoven. But it will not have been “forthright”. It will not have been what I truly meant at that moment.

We’ll continue our pace on the concrete until we pass the point at which we started. It will be familiar to me; it will not be familiar to you. And we’ll walk around again.

I’ll get annoyed at your (false) generalizations about me, or at your tendency to live in the past or the distant future. I’ll try to sober the conversation, and we’ll be stuck in another loop. We’ll end up back where we started.

We’ll go again.