Dissecting the scientist; of the Oregon chronicles & meeting Nigel

"This is too soon for me, Nigel...." I tell him and feel myself shrinking before him.

"Is it really so deep?" His tone disarms me. Again. I try to pull back.

But his touch.... is like both father and mother.... to me. 

It is a strange notion and not one I understand at all but like the curious cat one has to know; maybe because I’ve never known it and....

There is such a strangeness

the odd way he looks at me, and how he calls me his ‘mon fē’ from his childhood realm;

Only some moments I find I feel I am like —what is it, exactly? like I am his lab animal that he studies....looking under some microscope?

and something else that is sort of twisted that, at present, I am too shy to write about ....and I start to fear that —
I don't know, this thought occurs to me—this apprehension.... that we are —like ....only sinking further kind of into each other's madness

or is this what all civilizations begin like?

He seems to see me—

unlike Chris—

who would look right at me and not notice me there. So how is it that Nigel knew I was an artist from just one glimpse at my hands.... that day at the Ashland library....?

That day he looked so.... proper Englishman in his neat oxford collar and wearing a fedora.... like some scientist from the 1940’s.... and did I write this already? He isn’t just a professor and a doctor of psychiatry, he’s also an archeologist—he was some kid prodigy and finished his first set of degrees by the time he was twenty..... but should I be flattered then that the way he looks at me actually makes me feel like ....some kind of artifact found in a bog—

isn’t that a strange thing to feel? He has the oddest stare....

To illustrate between the lines
.....my hat fetishes (which for me goes back to when I first started being aware of style and old Greta Garbo movies) After Garbo the Daisy hat from the Great Gatsby that Mia Farrow wore, and I would love that bowler from Unbearable Lightness of Being but, truth told, I am most partial to the newsboy

so about Nigel.... he likes to shop for clothes with me and go into the dressing rooms
—is that weird?


Our fetishes.... I think that is behind the kinky edge of our sexual attraction

I have glossed over this about him. About us. It confuses me. You see. Switching roles; role reversals and I suppose I am not ready to write about this

but he can make the simplest motion erotic in a strange coquettish way that ..... disturbs me

It is like a shattered mirror