These days, I spend more and more time with the entrepreneur. Despite it not always going well between us, he has nonetheless granted generous asylum to certain aspects of me —aspects that are paramount to a heightened existence — and in so doing, forged a previously unknown trust.

One year down and I now know that I could hide out in him, in the exacting maneuvers of his complicated mind, for undetected months. Behind his cover, I could re-imagine and re-create everything, if that were what I wanted.

Or perhaps whether I wanted it or not. Because, very candidly, isn’t that what is slowly happening anyway?

“Come here. I want to show you something,” he tells me tonight. I’m in the middle of writing, he is late for a dinner. I don’t think so very much about it. I put up a fuss because I enjoy the display, then follow him down the long hall.

Downstairs the entrepreneur has a room that houses nothing but a single chair and a pair of very large speakers on a plush fur rug. It’s the kind of room I think of as off-limits.

And yet he conducts me, with a brusque sweep of his arm, to the chair.

“That’s your chair,” I say.

“Sit,” he tells me, looking only mildly piqued.

I sit in his chair and stare out, beyond the wall of windows, at a great expanse of winter’s dead landscape. I have the strange impression, as I so often do, that my life is now doubling back on itself.

The entrepreneur puts on some music and then blocks my view with his black-clad form. Stands in front of me and evaluates my positioning in his chair while somehow simultaneously ignoring me altogether. He repositions my legs, stands, evaluates again.

“Lift up your arms,” he directs.

It says a lot about our relationship, I suppose, that I simply do as I’m told.

Sometimes, when he is studying me, I am now in turn studying him. He is forever to me, no matter how much we share, this elusive, Atilla-the-Hun-faced stranger. I feel I will never be in any way certain of who he really is, nor what he really wants.

But meanwhile, paradoxically, he not only intuits but fulfills these powerful and intrinsic needs in me that were somehow, before his arrival, completely latent.

Either that, or we are so well-paired that he is just following his own selfish instincts, and their effect on me is second-hand providence.

“I’m learning a new skill,” he told me, a couple of weeks ago, by phone. “You won’t get to see it for a while, but I’m working on it fairly diligently.”

“I already know what it is,” I told him.

“No, you don’t.”

“I definitely do.”

He laughed. “You sound so confident, I almost believe you. I like that in you. You’re fearless.”

Skip a beat.

“But usually not with me.”

My arms now raised, he circles me, twining a cotton rope around my torso.

Did life warn him of my approach? Did he see me coming?

Because here he is, at the ready.

Please understand, I want beauty in my life. More than most, I think. I want beauty in the most extreme forms it can take.

He cinches tighter.

At some point, your life will just stop.

We are each of us, so uniquely bound to this outcome.

~