These are excerpts from the other night’s conversation with my ex from almost 3 decades ago, the career Special Forces guy. He has Mercury in Aries opposite my Mercury Mars in Libra. He’s a Scorpio Moon conjunct Neptune. I’m a packed 8th house.
“Well it was just like lighting a match. And we’d both just be yelling like… like crazy at each other,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And people would just run. They would run away from us. Look at them! We’d have our arms waving and we’d be screaming to beat the band. She… that girl I was talking to ran into the apartment. Let’s get out of here! They’re going to beat each other for sure!”
I laughed.
“But nothing like that ever happened.”
“No. Hell no. Hey. How did we stop? How did we stop fighting, when we got like that? Do you remember?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. We’d just fight. And I guess in the fight, a point would get made or something and that was it. We’d make up and go off together like usual. We always made up, right away. Some of this… I think it’s cultural.”
“Yeah.” (I’m Italian, he grew up in South America… we lived in the desert).
“But we didn’t stay mad long. Maybe 2 hours at the most. That’s the longest I remember being pissed off and usually it was a lot quicker than that. Then we’d make up and be right back doing whatever we were doing.”
“Yeah, well I just think we were just counterparts. I know we were. We’re paired. A matched set and partners in crime, obviously.”
~~
“And do you remember we’d go in the biker bar?” he asked.
“Yeah.” (I’d have been 17 here. He was 19.)
“And we’d say… we’d stand there all cocky, you in your yellow pants on that red bike and we’d announce, “ANYONE WHO KNOWS ANYTHING HAS A KAWASAKI!”
I roared laughing.
“And I’d say, I can kick anyone’s ass in here on the pool table!” he said. “And no one ever… they didn’t mess with us, Elsa. No one ever did. They must have thought we were crazy, I’m sure they did. Don’t mess with them! They’re nuts! There is no way these two are coming in here like this and saying this shit unless they’ve got something… there is something wrong here. Are they hiding a machine gun?”
*snort
“Does she have a machine gun? What’s she got in those yellow pants? She must have a gun or something! What’s she hiding? KAWASAKIS ARE THE BEST BIKES IN THE WORLD! We’d yell it. We were fearless. Both of us. They didn’t know what was going on. Who the hell are these two?”
I laughed.
“And then you made me lose my boots in a pool game, maaan. That was terrible. My boots, man! How could you make me bet my boots on a pool game?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. You were on the bike in your socks. And come to think of it, I guess we’re lucky we didn’t get killed many times. But it didn’t seem like that at the time. We were just having fun, weren’t we?”
~~
“I don’t think we should have done that,” he said.
“Really?”
“We could be in the federal penitentiary for that.”
“What? You gotta be kidding me? No shit? We could have been in that much trouble?” I couldn’t believe it. This is how it is when you grow up in the desert without a TV.
“Yep! They put you in the pen for that for sure.”
“Unbelievable.” (Statute of limitation crossed my mind in a flash and I wondered if it applied.) “I had no idea. I thought… we were just having fun. It was just another adventure.” (Would this be exempt from that? Possibly. No. Surely it must apply…)
“Nope.”
“Okay, then. I believe you. (Makes no difference, the statute. There is no evidence! Further, we’ll never tell and even if we did, we probably wouldn’t be believed.) But we didn’t get caught or even come close so what the heck. I’m very glad I had that experience, aren’t you? It seemed to me we were just having our lives. But I see what you mean. We better not do that again, jeez.”
He just laughed.
“From now on we’ll be good,” I said with a snicker. “We better never pull any crap like again. We won’t! We’ll just be good forever and from now on and they’ll be no harm, no foul. No one was harmed in the making of this movie…”
~~~
“Well I trust you implicitly. And believe me, as you know I don’t trust anyone,” he said. “I don’t trust a soul.”
“I know. And I know you can trust me. I mean, obviously I would never betray you. How would I do that? I wouldn’t even know how to go about it.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
“Well, no. And if I did, I would expect to pay for it for 20 lifetimes so I guess I’m not even going to think about it. But really, I just don’t think that is part of my makeup. It’s not part of my character. I guess you know this. But tell me something. How do you know this? That you can trust me? What makes you know that? Because you always have. From like the first minute we met, so why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know. I have asked myself that many times. Because believe me, I don’t trust anyone. Anyone but you. There is just something in you. You said once, it takes one to know one, and maybe that’s it. But there is definitely something in you. They way you swung that helmet at me/ You swung it, hard. You were swinging to kill or main, all because I danced with a girl. You were going to burn my hut for that!”
I laughed.
“And anyone who’d do that… well, I don’t know, Elsa. To tell you the truth, I just don’t know.”