open letter to Maude, the drama queen

07Oct08

I got a letter from Maude (pronounced “mode”) the other day, forbidding me to write about her in my blog. How she found out about it in the first place is beyond me. To my knowledge, this site is banned in China, where she is presently in circus school.

From her letter:
You were always a selfish, self-absorbed and self-indulgent son-of-a-bitch (Do you like the alliteration? Just because I’m an acrobat, doesn’t mean I don’t know how to write, cocksucker). You always had delusions of grandeur and you always thought your life was interesting to other people. You’re a braggart, with no idea how to be discreet, and I refuse to allow you to hang my dirty laundry out on the Internet for everyone to see.

Here’s the rub, however. If I know Maude (and after our 4-month tryst in Brussels, I believe I do), the subtext of the letter was that she does, in fact, want me to write about her. She’s been waiting for me to write about her since she learned that I, on occasion, wrote—just so she could get indignant about the whole thing. Maude always preferred being angry over being right. But she couldn’t wait for me to actually ‘betray’ her.

Frankly, I hadn’t really planned on writing about Maude. Not that she didn’t break my heart when she stole off for Quebec with that bastard tightrope walker. It just felt cliché – fiery romance, colored by intense lovemaking and equally intense arguments, destroyed by booze and infidelity. Whatever lessons I learned from Maude were sublimated long ago and if her letter hadn’t unearthed them, they might have stayed in the recesses of my memory.

But then again, how could I have forgotten the woman who both loathed and craved attention at the same time? Who shattered my sense of self, all because she could? And thus, Maude, my message to you is this: I’m sorry I didn’t write about you before, and I’m sorry I’m writing about you now. See? I never could win with you.

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