Paaaaaaaahp

We survived the weekend pretty well.

I was worried for a while, though... Melody gets worked up very rapidly over things that seem to be pretty small for me, but seem large for her. And more than anything else, we've figured out that only one of us is permitted to over-react at any given time. If one person is going apeshit over something and ranting, the other person almost has to under-react to counterbalance it. This occurred Friday afternoon, as we were getting ready to go meet a bunch of my friends, and Melody had apparently been undergoing a classical-music withdrawal and got upset and wanted to go home.

I sat there and looked at her while she ranted for a couple of minutes and cried.

"Have you been with anyone in recent years who reacted to this sort of outburst well?" I finally asked her. "I mean, if they reacted the way you wanted, you would keep doing it, right? And if they didn't, presumably you would stop doing it? So, has anyone actually reacted well to your going off the deep end and crying and stuff?"

She couldn't name anyone. I got up and took a shower, and by the time I got out and dried off, we were fine.

There's a logic to all this. I am continuing to learn what it is.

But more than anything else, I have learned I just have to let her fly for a while, and not to react. She'll come back down, and then I won't have the urge to say, "well, fuck you, too."

That helps nothing.

Anyway, I showed Melody around the layout of an earlier portion of my life. We visited with people I knew years ago, she saw the place where my mother was killed and where she rests now. She visited my parents' house. She met cows and people who say "pop" instead of "soda," experienced proper pizza and wings for the first time in her life, and saw Niagara Falls.

All in all, a good weekend.

And we didn't kill each other.