The Gemini: Emancipation

7 - Rope

September 19, 1996

Time is a trick. It's irrelevant and conducive to nothing but restraints. To ignore it means to be unbound.

Unbound and potentially foolish.

Time is yesterdays mistake. Time is the futures nemesis. Two statements that couldn't be truer concerning Roger's current predicament.

He often debated the truth of the saying, time heals all wounds. Does it really, or is stating so just a coping mechanism? Time to a wound is scar tissue. His wife's current predicament supported that reasoning.

"You talked to her?"

Halfway lost in a yard long stare, Roger's confirmation to Morris's question is a slow nod.

"How'd it go?"

It pissed him off. It forced him to look at something that he habitually turned a blind eye to: the past. It annoyed every fiber of his being that everyone and everything couldn't be fixed like himself.

"I came down here, didn't I?"

He isn't being snide, only stating a fact. He felt that his being here should be an indicator of how the conversation went.

He and Morris haven't been on this topic for long. Roger came here to chat, and that they did for a little while. He talked on about this and that as though everything were fine. It would've stayed that way if he hadn't have wondered out loud. If his filter had stayed put instead of giving way to his inner battle.

"Is anything worth it?" He had asked, not necessarily wanting an answer.

Morris returned one anyway. Sharing his own personal principal, he'd said, "If you catch yourself thinking about it more than once, it might be."

Roger offered up nothing after that. Morris assumed Jody to be the reason for his boss's mood dip. He didn't know the detailed ins and outs on the truth of their situation, but a person would have to be a dummy not to know that there's a problem there somewhere.

"I'm just sayin' man, your talking and her talking mighta been a little different."

Irked eyes switched briefly to the other man, "That's the problem. It's too much of the same."

He and Jody hailed from the same planet. Though they handle certain things differently, it was done ultimately with the same frame of mind. Roger learned that the hard way.

"Might be that's another sign of it being worth it to at least try again."

"Or maybe it's just a pain in the ass."

When Jody got into a mood there's no getting through to her. It used to be that Roger knew all the right methods to pick her locks. Even then he knew that he got through not because he wore her down, but because she let him. Five years of marriage and she's still the stubbornest woman he's ever known.

Just like him Jody can tell a lie and make it sound like the gospel truth. She can ignore your very existence without breaking a sweat, same as he. She can shut down and turn cold if given the right reason. And, yeah, Roger can do that too. Sometimes he'd swear that he married the female version of himself.

Which means I should've seen at least half of this coming.

Still his own stubbornness refused to accept Jody's words as truth; that he made her this way. Or maybe it isn't stubbornness, maybe it's his heart that insisted on denial. It hurt to acknowledge the truth and he's tired of pain. Roger's more than ready to move on from that emotion.

"So whatcha gon' do?" Morris questioned and after a second or two he added, "I know what I'd do."

"What's that?"