Excerpt: Borrowing the Bailout

Every woman I have ever spoken with seemed to have an edge over me, a hardly imperceptible difference in relational aptitude, I could never read their faces, could never decipher their strange inflections, it is as if women operate in colors, and I work in plain words. They always spoke to me, seeming to share my language, both of us uttering English words and phrases, both of us taking dictionary meaning from the other, but they seemed to pull vivid colors out of the nothingness between the words, filling the pauses with warm pinks and vibrant blues, radiating some, absorbing and receiving others. The conversations fell upon my ears, and made their way to my thoughts, from there they could flow freely through my body, paralyzing me, energizing me, or just plain confusing me. With women the words pass through the filter of their hearts, twisting them into a rainbow of context and subtext, emotion and empathy, only then do they make way to conscious thought, brilliant and insightful, emotional and sensational. I cannot see much, but for all my limited experience, all the deep conversations I have had with the many “just friends” in my life, all of the delayed heartache and missed opportunities have shown me, when it comes to women, I am just colorblind.