Space = + or -

Space = + or -
---- Big Frank Dickinson

"In general, separability is a technical hypothesis on a space which is quite useful and -- among the classes of spaces studied in geometry and classical analysis -- generally considered to be quite mild."
---- Wikipedia "Separable Space"

1.
Ron was unloading a new shipment of mattesses that had come in that morning, but his mind was not on this work, which was pretty mindless, it was elsewhere. He was thinking about his old girlfriend - Patty. Why had she broken up with him? He still did not understand. Everything had been going well; they had been seeing each other for over two years, and then - out of the blue she tells him that she doesn't want to see him anymore. Well, she hadn't exactly said it in those words. What had she said? She said something like: "This isn't working for me", or "We should probably stop seeing each other for a while and spend sometime figuring things out." Figuring things out? He didn't need to figure anything out - what was there to figure out? He loved Patty and she had told him that she loved him, the sex was good, they never fought, they spent a lot of time together. He used to hang out at her place a lot. In fact, he was even thinking about suggesting that they consider moving in together. Why not? It seemed like the logical thing to him, what with the savings on the living expenses and all. He just didn't get it. Out of the blue it happened. He even had suggested, when she was talking about moving to Seattle for that new job and all, that he would move down there with her. That would have been an easy move, there was even a Mattress Heaven down there and they were always looking for salesmen - lots of turnover. Come to think of it, why hadn't she taken that new job she had been talking about for months? It just didn't make sense. Was she seeing someone else? He was going to have to call her; maybe she had figured things out by now. That was probably it: she had some kind of mid-life crisis. He had heard about women like that. Everybody always talked about men going through that, but women who no longer had kids at home, and were single sometimes did some crazy things. This might be just one of those temporary crazy things, and now that she saw that not being with him was not helping her at all, in fact, she was probably missing him as much as he was missing her. He would call her tonight, and then it would probably all get straightened out. He thought about what his buddy had told him he had going in his favor, and it was, not doubt true: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder."

2.
Patty was on her way to her third appointment of the day, her third physician. Celebrex, lipitor, and viagra - that was her mantra: celebrex, lipitor and viagra. It was like an annoying jingle that wouldn't leave her head (celebrex, lipitor and viagra), but those were her mainstays and those were the pharmaceuticals that Pfizer, her employer, told her to push, push and push. There was never a problem with the renewed orders coming in (well, viagra had taken a small dip due to generic competition) but getting appointments with the new doctors, that was a challenge. Challenges - not something that she shied away from though, she thought to herself. Just look at how she had taken charge of her life lately. It had been a challenge - just figuring out what it was that was dragging her down. That had taken months; thank god she had gone to see Freeman - he had made all the difference. It was like she had been walking in a fog for the past year or more. Blind to the numbing nothingness that her relationship with Ron had amounted to. He had been convenient, pleasant, and always there. She could always count on Ron, . . . but for what, other than his presence. He was the most uninterested person she had ever met; a man of such numbing routine and regularity that she had eventually gotten into lock step with his TV watching, routine dinners at the same restaurants, and even his friends . . . Was it possible, she thought, that there were people who just continually replayed the same tape in conversations: just substitue a different sports team - "Hey, how about those ______ (insert team name here)", "Did you watch _______ (insert TV program here); "We ate at ________ (insert restaurant's name here), great food, etc. etc. Patty had finally discovered that she didn't want to fill those blanks she wanted to create her own blanks, and she wanted to be around other people who had surprising blanks that she had never heard of. Ron, poor Ron. He just didn't understand. It was funny, she hadn't thought of him in weeks. What was the old saying . . . "Out of sight, out of mind."