Spin around with a spinney spinney spin spin

"Tone."
"Tone of voice."
"Bad tone of voice."
"Not getting right tone of voice."
"Maybe someday I'll get the right tone of voice."

Here's how I got to be living across the water from my home. I say things, the things I say are perceived as being bad, Trey loads up all kinds of feelings about her perceptions and has a total skitz out.

She means it: she wants to have a better experience of me than she does. So here's what I do--I avoid her calls when I'm feeling less than 100% happy. This includes feeling a little tired, a little sad, a lot sad, a little hungry, a little distracted, just recently arrived at home, on my way out of the house, when I'm out of the house, when I'm working, when I'm sleeping, when I'm eating, when I'm reading, when I'm petting the cat, when I'm in the garden, when I'm watching the clouds slide across the sky. I feel safe talking with her when I know only a controlled voice will come out of my mouth. Which means Skype goes bong bong and the phone goes buzz buzz and I walk out of the room without thinking twice--it's so not worth risking the untended nasalized inflection, string of single syllable words, downward intonation, over articulated phonemes, or mumbled response. I do the same with email, where tone is much harder to quantify and so easy to embroider.

But even so, this path of careful tending of the interaction garden--so that every conversation is curated for optimal accord, Trey feels neglected and abandoned. Unloved. Het up. So when I do contact her this morning (after she tried the night before to raise me after I had "gone to bed"), she's already wound up about feeling unloved that when I say I'll take care of the thing she was calling to ask me to take care of she has a full-on freak.

"What do I have to do to get you to talk to me like you love me?" she asks as if its a non-provocative, neutral thing to say to your fiance-in-name-only, who she's too afraid to commit to because he might have another suicidal break when he may be unable to keep his shit together after feeling criticized by the woman he loves when she expresses her frustration at all of the things he does that make her feel bad--particularly the things that involve having an ineffably foul tone of voice that is defined by the ear of the behearer through a series of filters that trigger an briared nest of synapses that create the feeling of terror, mistrust, and loss of love and hope and home.

It's so easy for me to break what she keeps at the edge of the table and pushes when she believes the worst. And then we dance barefoot on the shards of family china on the hardwood floor blaming each other for our heavy steps and the blood we spill.

Is anybody reading this and wondering if the people in these stories ever want to kiss?