Story: More than counseling, please!!

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As they wandered thru the weird office complex, looking for their new marriage counselor’s office, Body and Soul argued like emblems in a medieval debate poem, sometimes even exchanging positions in their fight to be vindicated and made to feel somehow all right once again.

So one of them was talking: You complain that I lead you astray, that I’m sensual. You say I make you eat too much and drink too much. But how can you play the victim with such constancy? You’re the one who lifts the bottle to your mouth, you’re certainly helping with the lifting. Over and over, I might add. The point is that I’m not the one doing it. I’m just sitting there suffering all the stuff that you do without being able to stop *any* of it.

And the the other party snapped back with an angry response. I get so tired of that passivity of yours and that obsession with playing the role of victim. If you think I’m going off balance, why don’t you advise me instead of just watching with that smirk on your face? You know I’m always trying to better myself. Why not help instead of always rushing to prepare some new critique?

On it went for block after block.

And then Body said: You are always oozing thru my sinews like a poison and yet I can never *find* you, you’re so gaseous and ethereal. It’s like an illness.

And then Soul said: But look at you, you’re so heavy, you’re like a suit of rusted armor! I try to walk on the path that leads to God, but you won’t even move.

On and on the dispute continuted, moving always over the same ground like a child’s toy train – a repetition for which Soul blamed Body and Body blamed Soul. Then they passed a suite of Law Offices and Soul stopped in his “tracks”. That’s it, he said. We don’t need counseling, we need a divorce. I’m ready to float off into space without you.

That’s when Body got down on her knees, right on the hot pavement, making a scene as she so often did. Please don’t even consider divorce, she begged. And she began to cry most noisily.

Of course she knew full well that she was nothing wihtout her partner. But the same was true in reverse for him. And he, poor thing, he didn’t seem to know.

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