No moment was so destined to turn into a night of infamy
than that one in that bar in mid-May.
In a matter of hours, I got regulated to her worst
nightmare, and managed to transformer would-be love into raging hate.
I did everything wrong from the first moment we met at the
bar to the final moment when I decided to go home, abandoning her to a room
full of strangers.
I’m still not sure what I expected or which of her many personalities
I would encounter when she greeted me.
I brought a card and a box of candy to give her as if it was
her birthday instead of mine in a mistaken attempt to apologize for previous
slights, little aware until that moment how much she hated that sort of
romantic clap trap. She mocked me a little for the gift, though not seriously,
since she was in a flirtatious mood -- flirtatious as it turned out with
everybody else except me.
I had come to rekindle what we’d had at the marina; she was
in the mood to play, if not with me, then with anybody else in the bar.
After a few days of reflection, I have concluded that her
behavior was innocent enough, typical of what I had seen a thousand times in
all of those bars where I had worked with bands when I was younger.
I simply reacted wrong and let her flirtations with the German
couple and the bartender get under my skin. The longer I sat there and the more
I drank, the more it bothered me.
I concluded that my coming had been a mistake and I decided
to go home, telling her as much. She seemed perfectly content without me, one
more mistake I failed to realize until I got back to my car, and she called
screaming at me over the phone.
“You shouldn’t have left me at the bar!” she screeched. “What
the fuck is wrong with you?”
I could not explain over her screaming, could not explain
even later at home, where I got a texted photo of her hanging off the roof of
her apartment building.
It didn’t end there.
The vitriol of the poem she posted the next morning stunned
me, a poem full of pure rage and hatred.
With a few dozen brilliant but deadly lines, she not only dissected
that moment at the bar, but all of the moments prior to it that I had thought
of as sacred, accusing me (possibly accurately) of abusing myself and blaming
it on her, from figuratively jabbing myself with a butter knife at the diner
earlier in the spring to figuratively falling on my face during the walk that
followed it.
This was a poem designed to savagely hurt me as much as she
believed I had hurt her, and it worked.
The genius of her cadence felt like repeated knife blows to
my chest as I read the poem (and still does when I re-read it now), blow after
blow after blow looking for the center of my heart, struck without mercy by a hand
shaking with rage, each blow heavy with an undeniable truth I could not dispute,
extenuating circumstances helpless to ward off her attack, she telling me in
the final lines how I as a friend had gas lighted and abandoned her, while I
sat in a double pool of my own blood – alone.
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