When Snooping Gets Out Of Control

"Or your privacy?" Now comes the salted tongue. "Oh, let me apologize for disrespecting your privacy!" Look how little certain words become when there are Big Words nearby. Words like disrespect and privacy are about as meaningful as wilted lettuce on a sandwich: You know it must be there for a reason, but the sandwich would surely be better without it. F*ck his privacy. Where's my privacy? I don't see any f*cking privacy. Isn't that the point? Not to have privacy? Not to have secrets? I think about how many things are really between us—not just the eight-year age difference, or the ghosts of our pasts. Now even the three feet of air between our bodies feels like a canyon that only a superhero could cross. And I'm certainly not leaping first.

"I mean, if I found something you wrote, I wouldn't even dream of reading it," he says. "Even if I wanted to, I'd restrain myself."

I stare at his shoulders and try to find a new meaning for the dandruff on his shirt—something worse than just dead skin. I search desperately for anything to help me hate him. Even the shirt itself has the potential to become hateful, I tell myself. I just need to find that something that's really gonna do it for me, that'll make it easy to get up out of this chair and leave.

"Writing—and especially writing in a journal—is about, it's about ... experimenting with language and feelings. It's about, well, it's not about writing for a reader."

OK, so he's handing me the hateful thing on a silver platter. Like I don't know what writing is. Then I notice a spot of throbbing flesh on his neck. Nervous pulse? Guilty conscience? Fear?

I tell myself I'm looking for the hateful thing, but the loving thing is really what I seek.

I can't decide which of the Big Words is the most upsetting. I don't know if it's that he f*cked this girl or that girl, or that he actually used that word to describe it. Or if it's simply that he was with a girl named Tina. I know it's not that he thinks I'm lazy. I know I'm lazy: that's no secret. It might be the sentence about his not believing I have what it takes to be a successful writer—a real artist like, oh, I don't know, him.