44 Whenever I see him, I say I love him but he’s a bit much. Big personalities are meant to come in smallish packages. A person who uses their whole arm to gesture should not have arms that could break passing windows. Men taller than me need not shout. Their voices carry easily enough as they float above our heads. They also tend to have the deep sonorous voices that I pretend I have as I chant along to pop songs way too high for my range. By all accounts, he doesn’t need to be loud, or gesticulate the way he does. His biceps do the talking for him. He walks into a room and already has all the attention on him. He doesn’t need to fight for it, need not raise his voice to make sure all are listening. Do men like him practice their smiles or do they just drop into the natural gleam of their own white teeth? I know him because of his girlfriend. She makes sense to me. She’s shorter than mom but taller than my first girlfriend, which puts her around 5’3” or 5’4”. She has plenty of energy. I can never quite tell if she’s drumming it up or holding it back. It’s very controlled, like a well-trained border collie that rushes to greet new people but never jumps and immediately runs back to its owner when called. He’s like the dog I knew that was four feet tall and at least 150 lbs but thought it was also a border collie and therefore had a nasty habit of knocking down people and tables. When I told her I loved her boyfriend but thought he was a bit much, she agreed and we had a good laugh at his expense. Because we’re Christians and that’s how we love each other. But when I see them in Chick-fil-a, I see through her eyes for just a second. He’s mansplaining. She wouldn’t call it that though. Mansplaining implies she has no interest in what he has to say and her extensive memory of his interests and the width of her smile when she recalls them implies some level of interest. She might call it “passionately educating” or “being excited about his knowledge” rather than mansplaining. I haven’t asked so I don’t know. But I do know that she doesn’t technically care what he’s saying. He could drop the conversation and start talking about why middle aged adults became obsessed with beanie babies in the mid-2000s or start ranking his favorite textures of jello. But that fact that he cares, that his passion for his subject matter consumes his full physical being, glues her to his gaze while I sit on the other side of the restaurant, contemplating interrupting their piece of eternity. SECOND LONG ETERNITY Evan Ellis
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