Sunday, September 4, 2022

A breech of etiquette Sept. 9, 2012

  

He describes her as being full of pain. Perhaps this is true; though he adores her so much he seems blind to anything but what he wants to see. He just can’t help but feel sorry for her.

He was in the office when she went ape shit on Wednesday after I called her about some aspect about work, believing I could since she’d talked to me about removing something from my column a day or two earlier – otherwise the first breech after more than a month of silence.

The whole thing seemed way over the top, an act maybe, yet maybe not. She may be as frail as he believes she is.

It is impossible to read her and what mood she’s in day to day, a regular mine field through which I have to tread extremely carefully to avoid setting her off.

Is all this an act? If so, for whom?

Or perhaps she is as crazy as her poem implied I am.

She told me once she’d once came close to a mental breakdown a year or so before she started at our office. And she had several freakouts in May and June, after I left her at the bar, after I talked to him about her, and after I posted her photo from the roof of her building.

But why over a work-related phone call?

Earlier this week, I suspected something else is going on in her life, something unrelated to me, but something I somehow make worse when I do something stupid or even insignificant like this, as if I’m a match lighting a fuse to an emotional bomb not of my making.

One of the people who texted me after my birthday wish claimed she is not alone, as if she needed to emphasize that point.

I suspect she is more alone than she would like to admit, and it is this sense of isolation that makes me think her panic is real, even though I also think she uses it to her advantage, another tool to allow her to trickle up as she puts it.

He takes it to heart, the screeching voice, her trembling shoulders, her intense panic, the locking and unlocking as she put it in one poem.

I sort of understand these reactions last summer, but why did she go off over an innocent phone call this week?

I feel sorry for him. He had to be there to hear it all, helpless to help her.

 

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